Months of work. Multiple leakers. Johnson's inner circle. Falsehoods from civil servants. Vast sums of public cash. WTF facts. And, when all is said and done, a smell amply bad enough, I think, to spark a criminal investigation. goodlawproject.org/patel-mirza-an…
There is so much dirt in this story that it's hard to arrange it in tidy little narrative piles. So what I'm going to do over the course of the next few hours and days is just highlight some remarkable elements of in a tweet thread.
Why did Ms Mirza, Johnson's political adviser, who had nothing to do with procurement, push the case of Samir Jassal a man with no obvious ability to supply PPE but with close connections to three Tory PMs? Why did she speak repeatedly to his associates and go "above and beyond"?
Why did a civil servant tell x we had enough Meixin 2016v facemasks on 2 July but Cabinet Office push for Jassal's associates to get a £103m contract (at a price £50m more than the average) for Meixin 2016vs facemasks on 6 July because there was a "desperate shortage".
Why was the Accounting Officer - who was asked to sign off the £102.6m contract - not told that x was offering to supply the same facemasks in the same quantities at the same time? Why did Cabinet Office not go to x and ask him to beat the price Jassal's associate was charging?
Shergill, who worked for Pharmaceuticals Direct and (notionally) engaged Jassal, had two companies. Why did the first bill £16.37m to Pharmaceuticals Direct for services in 2020? How did the second come to have £10m in Feb 2021 having been worth nothing in March 2020?
Why did both companies change names and immediately wind themselves up? Was it to create a smokescreen and/or justify not keeping accounting records? What happened to the vast sums of money? Did those pushing for Pharmaceuticals Direct to win contracts have a financial interest?
PDL says its deal with Shergill was 'no contract no fee'. What could Shergill (and Jassal) offer to justify these enormous fees? What leverage did they have to persuade Munira Mirza and Priti Patel (and others) to intercede on PDL's behalf? Why did Mirza and Patel intercede?
Important to say clearly, we have no evidence that Mirza, Patel or other Cabinet Ministers had any financial interest in the PDL contracts.
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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...