Thread by @JolyonMaugham

So, we've had some questions in from The Times and so I thought I'd share our responses here.🧵

The first suite of questions is about standing. And the effect of the Divisional Court's decision on how we work.

To that first suite of questions we have said:

Sometimes, as with the Runnymede case, we’ve worked with partners who clearly have standing. Sometimes we have standing ourselves, as the Courts have repeatedly confirmed. Sometimes we have achieved the outcomes we want by backing cases brought by others.

The decision handed down last Tuesday may or may not change the balance between those approaches, but it won't make any real difference to the outcomes we achieve.

The next questions are about @GoodLawProject's success rate.

To those questions we say as follows:

Prior to 2020, Good Law Project won a series of landmark wins in the Supreme Court and European Court of Justice including the Prorogation case.

Since 2020, there has only been one case we have lost at a substantive hearing - Public First - which we won in the High Court and are looking to appeal to the Supreme Court.

We have no financial interest in the litigation we undertake; we are interested only in the principles the cases establish.

Sometimes changes in underlying facts render litigation academic. By that metric too, we have been extraordinarily successful.

In the last couple of months, the Met reversed its refusal to investigate Boris Johnson following our judicial review and Boris’ Johnson’s friend Martin Thomas was removed as Charity Commission Chair following our challenge to the process which led to his appointment.

Another way of assessing success is to look at permission decisions. Since 2010, only 17% of all judicial reviews have been granted 'permission' (gov.uk/government/col…). The equivalent figure for @GoodLawProject is 75%.

We're also asked about the money @GoodLawProject has raised since its inception.

To that we say:

We publish a full Annual Report on our website for everyone to see, including details of where our funding comes from and how we spend that money. That's more than the law requires us to do, and we do it because we believe in transparency.

Finally, we are asked about criticism on social media last week.

To that we say:

Social media is what it is - there are critics and supporters - but the facts are that the week to midnight on Sunday has seen a net increase in the number of people with recurring donations in favour of Good Law Project.

But we’re never complacent. We know that when you are operating at speed, in a complex environment, mistakes happen. We always want to do better, and we always put our hands up when we get something wrong.

I think that's what people want - including from Ministers - and our record shows they get it from us.

(In a better world the newspapers would hold the Government, with limitless resources, to higher standards than they hold small not-for-profits. But the reality is that most of our media has little interest in holding power to account.

Its real interest is in buttressing power. It wants to sustain the status quo from which its extraordinarily wealthy, unaccountable, tax avoiding proprietors benefit.)