How has The Times responded to the Government's grotesque denial of the existence of institutional racism? With a call for measures to improve black lives? By speaking truth to the power that delivered that report?
No, of course not.
This is The Times we are talking about: a newspaper so transphobic @GoodLawProject refuses to talk to it on any subject. It has responded with a hatchet job on the country's leading voice for racial equality, @RunnymedeTrust.
That piece takes particular issue with @RunnymedeTrust joining forces with @GoodLawProject to tackle this Government’s cronyism which is bringing international shame to the United Kingdom.
And it quotes a Government adviser - unnamed of course as these people tend to be - asking what the 'Jobs for the Boys' Judicial Review has got to do with tackling racial equality and asserting the answer is "nothing".
Well, here is a list of all the appointees that judicial review challenges. See if you can spot what the anonymous Government adviser and the punching down Times cannot: the racial equality implications of cronyism.
First up, Baroness Dido Harding, a Conservative peer, was appointed Chair of NHS Test and Trace programme on 7 May 2020 and appointed as the Interim Head of the new National Institute for Health Protection on 18 August 2020.
Next up.
Kate Bingham appointed Head of the United Kingdom’s Vaccine Task Force on 16 May 2020.
Then.
Mike Coupe - appointed to the role of Director of Testing at NHS Test and Trace on 29 September 2020.
Those are the three appointments the claim focuses on but my witness statement gives three further examples.
Lord Andrew Feldman, Baron Feldman of Elstree, was appointed as an adviser to Health Minister Lord Bethell
Former political editor of The Sun newspaper, George Pascoe-Watson, appointed as an adviser to health minister Lord Bethell from 9 April to 7 October 2020.
And Baron James O'Shaughnessy - another Tory peer and consultant for Portland Communications - was appointed as an adviser from early in the pandemic until August 2020.
None of these roles were appointed following open competition. But see if you can work out that which The Times and the Government denies. See if you can identify why having white people give jobs to their pals is inimical to racial equality?
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The Minister who introduced the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords in 2003 made it clear that "a transsexual person would have protection under the Sex Discrimination Act [the predecessor to the Equality Act] as a person of the acquired sex or gender."
This was reflected in the Explanatory Notes to the Gender Recognition Act when it was published.
The Supreme Court dismissed the explanatory notes as not indicating Parliament's intention.
But it seems entirely unaware of the speech of the Minister introducing the Bill, who made it perfectly clear that it was intended to extend the protections beyond biological sex.
I've been reflecting some more overnight on the For Some Women Scotland case. 🧵
In this piece, which I am proud of and I stand by every word, I make two serious criticisms of the procedure that the Supreme Court adopted. goodlawproject.org/the-supreme-co…
The first is that in a case which is fundamentally about the rights of trans people with gender recognition certificates the Supreme Court excluded all trans voices and added in the voices of those opposed to the right and dignities of trans people.
Good Law Project holds a copy of new NHS Guidance published yesterday and it is clear that Wes Streeting is continuing his war on trans people.
Remarkably the national health service is now directing GPs to cause harm to the community. 🧵
Background: the UK is a serious international outlier in how it approaches healthcare for young trans people. All over the world Governments are declining to follow the policy based evidence making of the Cass report. I believe we now have the most hostile regime anywhere.
Families in the UK who want to follow best medical practice - rather than pleasing Wes Streeting's true electorate (right wing media barons) - obtain puberty blockers (criminalised in the UK) from regulated prescribers in eg France or Netherlands or Switzerland.
One or both were marked “private and confidential - not for publication”.
We have long (👇) deplored the practice of making threats which you say are confidential to try and stop your critics from telling the world you are trying to silence them. goodlawproject.org/they-want-to-s…
Neither letter pretends to be a formal letter under the pre-action protocol for defamation claims - a necessary precondition to suing. Yet each is pregnant with threat.
To intimate you have a legal claim which you don’t actually have also feels to us like a misuse of the law.
New article in the New England Journal of Medicine, founded in 1812 and amongst the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals. Its 2023 impact factor was 96.2, ranking it 2nd out of 168 journals in the category "Medicine, General & Internal".
I will share some extracts from it but tl;dr it is highly critical. It "transgresses medical law, policy and practice... deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the UK. And if it had been published in the United States... it would have violated federal law."
It calls for "evidentiary standards... that are not applied elsewhere in pediatric medicine... [and] are not applied to cisgender young people receiving gender-affirming care."
Labour caving to some of the richest people in the country - whilst raising the tax burden on employing the low paid - has been described as the "lobbying coup of the decade."
But how bad is it? 🧵
Well, we know that Labour promised to raise £565m per annum from taxing private equity properly. But, after lobbying, agreed only to raise 14% of that or £80m.
But in fact, it's worse that that (or better, if you are amongst that mega rich class).
For a particular type of carried interest Labour actually proposes to *cut* tax rates...