If you wanted to use the pandemic as cover for passing money to your dodgy friends and donors who didn’t actually have anything to sell you would set up procurement exactly as the Conservative Party did in the pandemic.🧵 You would identify the PPE you wanted and then, instead of buying it from the Chinese manufacturer, you would buy it from a UK intermediary. And then choose who the intermediary was.

Every mother who has sent her children to bed hungry, or victim who has watched her rapist go untried, or domestic violence victim who cannot leave because there is no emergency shelter, or mum who can't work because of childcare costs, knows exactly which party hates women. And in a couple of days, when the polls with fieldwork after JK Rowling's attacks on Labour drop, we'll know her actual impact. And it will be, despite the best efforts of our noble fourth estate, exactly none.

On Wednesday evening I spoke to a prominent journalist about a mind-blowing PPE case that will soon emerge - it looks like a small group of senior civil servants created false evidence trails to try and cover up the fact that valuable PPE contracts were diverted to Tory VIPs. Our conversation followed a meeting we had with the lawyer - in a well known firm - acting in the case. The lawyer spoke of how it had taken him a long time to believe the evidence. He had it, but it cut so violently across his own understanding of what the State in England is.

I have now seen further evidence that, since the Bell decision in the High Court (1 December 2020), there has been a huge increase in deaths of young trans people on the NHS waiting list - and that NHS management has sought to suppress that evidence.

CW: Suicide 🧵 When the High Court handed down its decision in Bell, the NHS immediately pulled down the shutters on healthcare for young trans people.

But when the Court of Appeal overturned that decision - on multiple grounds - the NHS unaccountably left those shutters in place.

This is a thread for trans families struggling to negotiate the emergency regulations introduced by Victoria Atkins on what is and isn't lawful. It draws on formal written advice from a top, specialist KC. 🧵 When Ministers make the law they do so because Parliament has given them power to do so. The power to make these regulations (2024 No. 727) is in section 62 of the Medicines Act 1968.

Lots of trans people believe that puberty blockers are a sop to a world that sees trans-ness as less desirable than cis-ness. 🧵

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1796480807713870062

A society that embraced the state of being trans, runs the argument, would give cross-sex hormones to those of Gillick competence earlier: no other medical treatment imposes upon those able to make informed decisions an obligation to 'think' before making choices. Why this one?

Yesterday, in an act she describes as "bold" Victoria Atkins decided to ban puberty blockers, which give young people questioning their gender identity time to think before they take partially irreversible cross-sex hormones. 🧵 The case for puberty blockers is that, in a world (and a nation) that is increasingly transphobic, they prevent the irreversible development of physical characteristics associated with the sex you were 'assigned at birth', that mean you will always find it difficult to 'pass'.

Amazingly, the Daily Mail says that handing over my data, including data the Tories have shared with it, would breach its human rights. So we plan to sue it. goodlaw.social/2a13 The very same Daily Mail that wrote this 👇🏻 in an editorial leader column is seeking to rely on Article 10 of the ECHR to undermine the sovereignty of Parliament and ignore a piece of law that both Houses have approved.

The biggest VIP lane winner of the pandemic was a company called Innova. Good Law Project has seen a cache of documents from US courts about its 🤯 affairs. 🧵 We have identified forty five separate payments made to Innova by the Department of Health averaging over £100m EACH: a total of more than £4.5 billion paid by us to Innova. The court documents suggest those transactions generated profits of between $750m and $2bn for Innova.

So dense he creates his own gravitational field, is Dan Hodges. Let me explain why in words so simple even he can understand them. 🧵

https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1778459890664513603

First, I am not a Government MP. This matters because the Government has also sorts of powers to bully and coerce that normal citizens do not. That's why its conduct is subject to special safeguards and scrutiny - not that Hodges' bottom rag would know anything about that.

A few points on the so-called tax gap, the difference between the tax HMRC actually collects and its estimate of the total tax due. 🧵 First, it does not even purport to calculate sums lost through what tax wonks call Base Erosion and Profit Shifting - broadly speaking, tax dodging by multinationals.

Eighteen months ago, with a group of MPs, we wrote to the @ChtyCommission about the so-called 'Global Warming Policy Foundation', a pro global heating organisation you are forced to match fund with tax subsidies because it is treated as a charity. 🧵goodlawproject.org/mps-call-for-i… GWPF has been described by the London School of Economics as "the UK’s main club for climate change deniers" which accused it of "peddling false claims." lse.ac.uk/granthaminstit…

If you want to know how power works in the UK contrast the press interest in (1) the £1,500 of capital gains tax Angela Rayner is said to have evaded with (2) the tens of millions Lord Ashcroft denies having evaded. 🧵 Lord Ashcroft set up the Bermuda based Punta Gordon trust. A financial statement in the leaked Paradise Papers reported it as holding assets of $450m. But the Paradise papers didn't just reveal the value of the trust.

The Charity Commission has, with extraordinary haste, dismissed our complaint about the Institute for Economic Affairs. It said: "the Commission... will rarely intervene when allegations of political bias are made, from whatever angle" - a troubling gloss on Charity law which we are considering with our lawyers. Imo, the Charity Commission cannot properly be understood as a regulator. Its purposes include the channelling of public money to organisations friendly to the Tory party. And the regulatory harassment of those whose activities are inconvenient to the Tory Party.

Found myself debating @benhabib6 on BBC on whether Reform is Far Right. He didn't repeat @TiceRichard's threat to sue those who said so. But he did intimate I might hear from Farage's lawyers for saying I thought he was anti-semitic (cited by me as a reason Reform is Far Right). The other reasons I gave: Reform's desire that the UK join Russia and Greece after a military coup in becoming only the third country ever to find intolerable the international human rights norms in the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

In April the United Nations described the Public Order Bill as "deeply troubling legislation that is incompatible with the UK’s international human rights obligations regarding people’s rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association." shar.es/agpsHs Last month, the UN Rapporteur said the crackdown on environmental protest in Britain with “draconian” new laws, excessive restrictions on courtroom evidence and the use of civil injunctions is having a chilling impact on fundamental freedoms. theguardian.com/environment/20…

The Katharine Birbalsingh case is a great case study in the racism and hypocrisy of the right wing press.

Whilst it goes off the rails about a ban on *optional* prayers for Muslim schools...



Local Authority grant maintained schools remain formally *obliged* to hold daily acts of religious worship with a wholly or mainly Christian character...

"Posturing MPs are suddenly passionate about the Post Office" says The Times. And indeed they are - but not just MPs.

So what is the record of that self-appointed moral high-water of the Fourth Estate, The Times? 🧵 Well, it has been very quick to point the finger at senior Opposition figures. There are multiple articles about a junior Minister in the Coalition Government over ten years ago, Ed Davey.

On the last working day before Christmas - a good time to meet your legal obligations to publish things you don't want anyone to read - the Government published the contract award from the NHS to Palantir. 🧵

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1743587086177878130

The contract was, of course, heavily redacted to defeat the public interest in scrutinising a deal with Palantir, whose libertarian billionaire founder Peter Thiel once attacked the NHS as making people sick. theguardian.com/society/2023/n…

When James Cleverly claimed to Mishal Husain his colleagues "know his focus" on protecting women and girls I wonder what this colleague would say?

Via @AvaSantina. If anyone else would like to contact us with their experiences of the Home Secretary they can do so, confidentially, here. We always stand behind the stories we publish. goodlawproject.org/about/contact/

Back in 2017 @GoodLawProject forced @ElectoralCommUK to investigate Vote Leave for overspending in the Brexit Referendum. on.ft.com/3vmbu9C Vote Leave had broken the law exactly as this email, from Steve Baker MP, had said it would but still @ElectoralCommUK wouldn't investigate - until we sued.