Thread by @JolyonMaugham

What Boris Johnson's premiership has shown is how those who rule us - VIP Tory donors, politicians, newspaper proprietors, and the rest of the entitled Establishment - hate being held to the same rules as normal people.

And if you seek to disrupt their ugly status quo they really, really don't like it. Several days after, yes, that Boxing Day I was messaged by a sympathetic Tory insider thus:

This was after I had been monstered for killing a single fox which was caught in netting attacking my chickens on the front page of the Mail. Yes, the Mail whose proprietor's wife boasts in the society pages about her love of hunting - the routine killing animals for fun.

I talked some months later about how - but for having a loving family around me - it might well have killed me, that onslaught. I am tougher now - nothing builds scar tissue like surviving a crisis - but it remains so, so hard to do the work I do.

I don't do it for money - my family can no longer afford the lifestyle we once had. And it's certainly not fun - I work extremely long hours and most weeks I work every day of the week. And, tough as I am, it's not easy to be lied about every day in the newspapers.

I do it because it is important. The tens of thousands of people who give @GoodLawProject money every month tell me that. As do the very many communities we work for. Today we are litigating: to improve the plight of looked-after children who are made more vulnerable to...

sex trafficking and the drugs trade by local authorities who wrench them from their communities and dump them in parts of the country where care is cheaper; for Kristina O'Connor who reported an offence to the Met and found herself harassed by a senior officer who wanted...

to have sex with her; for a mother in County Durham whose son killed himself after relentless racial bullying; for the trans community whose treatment (as international organisations have observed) is a moral blight on the nation; in a case about the routine dumping of sewage...

in the nations' rivers by tax avoiding and asset stripping water companies; to expose how Government's 'strategy' for meeting the target Parliament set for tackling climate change is a politically convenient fiction. That's litigation we have enabled that is *presently* ongoing.

And that's just a small sub-set of our present body of work - the litigation happening today.

We also bring litigation to highlight and expose how this Government lies and cheats and steals. How it takes money that should go to those who need it and gives it to its friends.

In the past we have, sometimes with others, fought and won the prorogation case - the PM's direct attack on democracy by unlawfully suspended Parliament; the Article 50 case which said Parliament needed to decide what to do with a referendum Parliament had said was advisory;...

the Wightman case which said Parliament should have the right to choose whether to continue with Brexit; the Benn Act case which led to a PM who said he would rather die in a ditch than follow Parliament's instructions to request an extension (but then did).

In the course of the pandemic, we have following litigation or threats of litigation extracted promises to provide hundreds of thousands of laptops to disadvantaged children; goodlawproject.org/update/access-…

Delivered a u-turn on the Government's appalling A Levels algorithm which advantaged lower achieving children at good schools and disadvantaged higher achieving children at poor schools; goodlawproject.org/update/update-…

and helped force a U-turn on the Government's refusal to provide free-school meals to the children of the poorest families in the country. goodlawproject.org/news/children-…

Correlation isn't always causation. Our litigation may or may not have been the operative cause behind these policy changes. We can't know. But the correlation is undeniable.

We have also tackled the appalling corruption that has dominated the Government's response to the pandemic. In October 2020 we exposed the shocking institutionalisation of special treatment for associates of Ministers in the PPE procurement VIP lane goodlawproject.org/news/special-p…

And we then exposed a similar VIP lane for Test & Trace contracts. goodlawproject.org/news/vip-lane-…

Earlier this year the High Court found (bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…) that the PPE VIP lane breached the principle of equal treatment and was illegal. We bought that case, with EveryDoctor.

Another characteristic of this Government is a hatred of transparency. They are to transparency as a vampire is to sunlight. In 2021 in a case we brought with three MPs the High Court found Government had unlawfully failed to publish pandemic contracts. bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…

Earlier this week, in a case Good Law Project brought with the Runnymede Trust, we established that Dido Harding and Mike Coupe's appointments had breached the public sector equality duty (bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…).

We also challenged, and at first instance won, a declaration that Michael Gove had acted with apparent bias in awarding a contract to associates of his and Dominic Cummings (bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…).

That decision was overturned on appeal in the Court of Appeal, we think wrongly, and we are seeking permission to appeal to the Supreme Court. We have published our grounds here. It remains the only case we have lost since 2019. goodlawproject.org/update/we-plan…

(And of course we may yet overturn it in the Supreme Court. Plainly the case was a sensible one to bring because we won it in the High Court.)

If you don't know quite how staggeringly difficult it is to win cases in judicial review proceedings take a look at this chart.

https://twitter.com/RobertThomas223/status/1446463883594567681?t=tw8un5KGS1ZtDd8pGTYwFQ&s=19

And if you knew - as every lawyer does - how much judges *hate* having to decide legal points that arise in political territory you would see even more clearly what an extraordinary record ours is. We have this record because we are very conservative about what points to take.

So, belatedly to the Mail on Sunday's latest (it's far from the first) attack piece on me. We litigate with co-claimants (the MPs, EveryDoctor, Runnymede I have mentioned but there are others) primarily because we want to be sure someone will have 'standing'.

What the legal idea of 'standing' expresses is that you have to have a real interest in an issue before you can litigate about it in the Courts. In modern times Courts have been pretty liberal when it comes to standing but the Runnymede decision may mark a pivot point.

We litigate with co-claimants - indeed sometimes we litigate entirely through others - because our interest is in having the underlying issue resolved. And we don't really care in whose name it is resolved because the resolution is the same.

In last week's case, @GoodLawProject identified the right solicitors and Counsel, it raised all the money, it indemnified Runnymede against all legal costs, and it was largely responsible for deciding on the legal strategy.

Runnymede brought its considerable expertise in racial equality and of course it was properly asked for its views on all matters by the legal team it shared with @GoodLawProject (and by us). But there was a perfect community of interest between the two organisations.

Both organisations - @RunnymedeTrust and @GoodLawProject - were concerned to see better and fairer recruitment processes, including those that did not disadvantage racial minorities and disabled people. We wanted Government to comply with the law that Parliament had made.

What I said when the decision broke you can see here (

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1493526139930918918?t=hwWXnGAeTDU7AcdbpcLlHg&s=19

) and what @GoodLawProject said in its blog you can see here (goodlawproject.org/update/dido-ha…).

Those statements are absolutely true. But we communicate across a lot of channels, including email, and the email channel inadvertently contained a subject line that had not been signed off internally.

I had decided we would not say "We won" because at a narrow technical level it was not true. The Court decided we did not have standing - only Runnymede did - so the declaration the Court made if breach of the Public Sector Equality Duty had only been made in Runnymede's favour.

In fact, in substance we had won. The case @GoodLawProject organized, paid for and promoted had succeeded. The litigation established breach of the public sector equality duty. It made no difference the declaration was only made in Runnymede's favour. The outcome was the same.

But I try to take a conservative view.

Immediately I saw the subject line - seven minutes later - I publicly apologised to my 350k followers. The subject line could be justified and the text was right but we always want to do and be better.

Boris Johnson routinely lies. My organisation inadvertently, albeit justifiably, went too far in a headline to an accurate article on a single channel and I immediately and publicly apologized. That's the difference between them and us. And it always will be.

I am not, for the moment, going to say more about the Mail on Sunday's article. Suffice to say you should treat the assertions in it with considerable scepticism.

If you like the work we do - and there is no better advertisement for its success than that all the right people attack us - you can support us here. goodlawproject.fundraise.tech