Since the beginning of 2024, Jolyon Maugham KC and his Good Law Project have been busy holding people and organisations they don’t like to account, standing against hate, and bringing hope. Or something. And, to support this transformational activity, they have launched no fewer than 34 crowdfunders (an average of 1.9 per month, or one every two weeks). Well, holding power to account doesn’t come cheap.
So much for legal action being the remedy of last resort, eh?
Those 34 crowdfunders have (so far) raised a combined total of £1,358,434. Of which a stonking £880,560 (65%) has been raised via the 11 crowdfunders in support of Maugham’s ‘Angry Dad’ lawfare on Transgenderism. One of those 11 crowdfunders – that in support of the GLP’s doomed legal challenge to the EHRC’s April 2025 Interim Update, dismissed by the High Court in February this year – has raised a mahoosive £489,487, making it the GLP’s most lucrative crowdfunder … EVER! And it’s still open and still accepting new donations. Ker-ching!
Whether or not the so-called ‘trans community’ and its allies consider themselves to be getting value for money from Maugham and the GLP is now an open question, but their remarkable generosity in handing over their spare cash is plain to see from the following chart. Since 1 January 2024, the average donation to the GLP’s crowfunders in support of lawfare to ‘hold power to account’ or ‘fight the far right’ has rarely been more than £19. But, with a few exceptions – such as the GLP’s trivial claim against the US law firm Morrison Foerster, and their latest crowdfunder in support of malevolent legal action against Ofcom – the average donation to the GLP’s crowdfunders on transgenderism is generally nearer to twice that amount.
Note that the average donation to the short-lived GLP crowdfunder in support of their attempt to intervene in the case of the EHRC office protest ban in June 2025 was not £50, as the chart suggests, but £833, as there were only ever 19 donations and one of them – made by the professional activist Patsy Stevenson – was for some £15,000. Ker-ching!
So, whatever happens in court over the next few months – and the GLP’s crowdfunded application to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal the kicking they were given by the High Court in February is currently with a Lord/Lady Justice for a judicial decision on the papers – it seems likely that Maugham and the GLP will continue to beg money from the so-called ‘trans community’ and its allies.
Last week, a column by the liberal, pro-European journalist Hugo Rifkind about the 2016 Referendum reminded me that, of the two charlatan-led political parties currently hoovering up votes from the Labour Party on account of its ostrich-like stance on Brexit – Reform UK from the right, and the Green Party from the left – only one actually voted in Parliament to hold the stupendously stupid plebiscite. And it wasn’t Reform UK.
In his column in the Times, Rifkind noted that the mind-bogglingly stupid 2016 Referendum has since “bound successive governments to a mandate they don’t believe in”:
When Andy Burnham becomes our seventh [prime minister] since the Brexit vote, he will be the fifth one of them who didn’t vote for it. This has not been some Establishment stitch-up. Rather, it has been the direct consequence of divorcing our choice of action from our choice of actor; of demanding economics opposed by economists, diplomacy opposed by diplomats, and ultimately governance opposed by anyone we might actually choose to govern.
Voters aren’t to blame for this. Offer them a stark choice between A and B, as David Cameron did, and they will reasonably, if wrongly, infer the existence of unseen mechanisms capable of delivering [either A or B]. Mainstream politicians, no matter that they didn’t want this mandate in the first place, are now doomed if they ever say so out loud, and so by default begin to talk absolute transparent bollocks.
As a result, honesty appears to become the preserve of a wholly new breed of politicians – basically activists – utterly unconstrained by the dull, practical compromises required to actually deliver anything.
This is where that Referendum left us. Not just with Reform UK, but with the Greens too. And with shrieking promises from politicians who are fully aware that the moment they actually win [an election], their first task will be to figure out how to break them.
All of which is absolutely spot-on. And, of course, the only reason Reform UK didn’t vote in Parliament for the EU Referendum in 2015 is that they didn’t yet exist – and so didn’t have any MPs or peers in Parliament at the time. But the Green Party did. And they – the supposedly cerebral Caroline Lucas MP and the certainly less cerebral (and at that point pro-Brexit) Baroness Jenny Jones – not only actively campaigned to have a stupendously stupid EU Referendum, but voted with their supposed arch-enemies – the Tories – to pass the latter’s stupendously stupid European Union Referendum Act 2015.
As early as October 2011, at which point she’d been an MP for all of 18 months, Caroline Lucas actively supported and then voted for a Commons motion tabled by the rabidly anti-EU Tory MP David Nuttall, calling for a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. And she did so because … “I am pro-democracy”.
The pro-democracy David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband, Dominic Grieve, Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry, Jo Swinson and even Michael Gove all voted against the nutty Nuttall’s nutty motion. But Lucas happily waltzed through the ‘yes’ lobby with avowed Brexiteers Steve Baker, Andrew Bridgen, Douglas Carswell, Bill Cash, Nadine Dorries, Kate Hoey, Andrea Leadsom, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Gisela Stuart. Cerebral? I think not.
Green Party press release, October 2011
Then, ahead of the General Election in May 2015, the Green Party campaigned on a manifesto pledge to “prioritise local self-reliance rather than the EU’s unsustainable economics of free trade and growth”. Which I think means ‘we’ll make you grow your own turnips’. And, one month later, the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas abstained on an SNP motion to deny the new Tory Government’s stupendously stupid European Union Referendum Bill its Second Reading (not least because “the Bill does not give the right to vote to 16 and 17 year olds or most EU nationals living in the UK”).
The SNP motion was defeated by 338 votes to 59. Evidently, the ‘pro-democracy’ and comfortably off Lucas was more interested in having a Brexit referendum than she was in enfranchising the 16 and 17 year olds who – unlike her – would have to live with the economic and social consequences of the result for the entirety of their adult lives.
Then, in September that year, the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas once again waltzed through the ‘yes’ lobby with the lovely Baker, Bridgen, Cash, Leadsom and Rees-Mogg – as well as Liam Fox, Mark Francois and Liz Truss – to give the Cameron-led Government’s EU Referendum Bill its Third Reading and send it on to the House of Lords, through which it sailed without a single vote. Well done, Caroline Lucas, Baroness Jenny Jones and the Green Party!
However, as you may recall, the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas didn’t like the result of the stupendously stupid EU Referendum she had stupidly campaigned for and voted to hold without the participation of 16 and 17 year olds. So in April 2018 she teamed up with Chuka Umunna (Labour), Anna Soubry (Tory) and Layla Moran (Fib Dem) to launch the People’s Vote campaign, with a view to having a second go at getting ‘the people’ to vote the way she wanted. However, as I noted on this blog at the time, the Fab Four were never able to say what options would actually be on any ‘People’s Vote’ ballot paper, and in any case there simply wasn’t time for a re-run of the 2016 fiasco.
By August 2019, with the stupendously stupid People’s Vote campaign having inevitably hit the buffers, the supposedly inclusive Lucas moved on to proposing an all-white Cabinet of women – including Nicola Sturgeon, whose then husband has just been convicted of embezzling £400K from the SNP – to somehow sort Brexit. Unsurprisingly, that batshit crazy idea didn’t fly, so the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas doubled-down by admitting she wouldn’t accept the result of any People’s Vote/second referendum if ‘the people’ didn’t vote the way she wanted. Democracy the Green way, innit.
Fast forward to 2026 and, needless to say, the Green Party would like everyone to forget its stupendously stupid encouragement and facilitation of arguably the most damaging political decision in modern British history. As the Green Party’s new, populist leader David Paulden/Zack Polanski now says, Brexit was “one of the most catastrophic decisions this country has ever made”. It’s almost as if Paulden/Polanski is as cerebral as Caroline Lucas.
With barrister Sarah Phillimore having this week served her defamation claim on noted turd polisher Jolyon Maugham KC, in respect of allegations set out in an article published by the Good Law Project in August last year, and in social media posts by Maugham, now seems a good moment to update my Table of Failure and Futility (ToFF).
[Shurely ‘table of legal victories and exercise of sage judgment’? Ed]
Maugham and the GLP have now crowdfunded an impressive total of £3,389,487 since 1 January 2021. But, somewhat less impressively, all that they have achieved with this moolah (to date) is:
two now irrelevant court wins on Net Zero, in 2022 and early 2024, that did not lead to any significant change in the then Tory government’s policies before the change of government in July 2024;
the overturning of a Shrewsbury Town Council planning decision, in 2023;
the funding of one of law firm Bindmans’ defamation cases, in 2023; and
a £25K settlement with a US law firm, in a trivial case about transgenderism, in 2025.
Of that £3.4 million, a stonking £722,533 has been crowdfunded from the so-called ‘trans community’ and its allies to support the GLP’s ongoing efforts to undo the Supreme Court’s momentous April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland (which clarified that references to ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 mean biological sex). But all that they have achieved (so far) is a proper drubbing in the High Court in February, and a £300,000 bill from the EHRC for legal costs. Well, if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law.
While the GLP say that Maugham will “vigorously defend Ms Phillimore’s claim”, at the time of writing there is no sign of any associated crowdfunder. Maybe, on this occasion, the opinionated Maugham will be putting hisownmoney where his mouth is. I guess there’s a first time for everything.
Whatever, you can donate to Sarah Phillimore’s crowdfunder here.
So, Labour MP Lauren Edwards – who, as noted on this blog last month, came second in the recent Private Members’ Bill (PMB) ballot – has opted to re-introduce Kim Leadbeater’s deeply flawed and defeated NHS-assisted suicide Bill in the House of Commons. Announcing her somewhat surprising decision on her website yesterday, Edwards said “this is a rare opportunity to present legislation that can make a real difference not just to my constituents in Rochester and Strood, but also for the country.”
We don’t know whether Edwards has been infected by the reported frenzy inside Downing Street to somehow secure Sir Keir ‘you’re fired!’ Starmer a ‘legacy’ before he makes way for Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting, or has simply seized a flukey opportunity to make herself better known beyond her constituency (a low bar). But, either way, her bold if not hubristic move seems destined to end in disappointment.
Despite Kim Leadbeater having ‘won’ the coveted top slot in the 2024 PMB Ballot, her flawed and therefore divisive NHS-assisted suicide Bill would most likely have died the lonely and painful death suffered by almost all PMBs (other than those handed out by ministers), had Starmer’s personal commitment to the NHS bumping off a few grannies not ensured his Government’s supposed ‘neutrality’. This chicanery enabled the Bill to stagger on to the House of Lords, where in April it was belatedly put out of our misery by the admirable Tanni Grey-Thompson and others.
Unfortunately for Edwards, the integrity-challenged Starmer may well not be Prime Minister by the time her Bill comes up for its Second Reading, in September or October, and is even less likely to be Prime Minister by the time it reaches its final stages in the Commons, in early 2027. So, as Wes Streeting is opposed to NHS-assisted suicide, and Andy Burnham is characteristically ambivalent on the matter, it seems unlikely her PMB will benefit, as Leadbeater’s PMB unquestionably did, from government ‘neutrality’.
Indeed, it seems much more likely that, come late 2026 or early 2027, Prime Minister Andy Burnham or Prime Minister Wes Streeting will (sensibly) decree that spending hundreds of millions of pounds on establishing an NHS service to bump off a few grannies is simply not a priority for his new government.
As another Labour MP (and former health minister), Ashley Dalton, said to the Guardian yesterday: “We have debated this deeply divisive and flawed Bill for over a year, and supporters have refused to listen or to make the necessary changes. We should not be using more of our limited time and political capital on something that simply isn’t safe or a priority for the people who put us in power.”
Furthermore, as noted on this blog in April, unlike Leadbeater, who benefited from a two-year parliamentary session, Edwards will have only one year to get her PMB through Parliament. And there is little if any reason to think opponents of her PMB in the House of Lords will be cowed by her legally illiterate assertion that “it is a fundamental democratic principle that the elected chamber, the House of Commons, should decide what does and does not become law in this country.”
Whatever, Edwards and the 19 other lucky ‘winners’ of the PMB Ballot will present their Bills to the House of Commons on Wednesday.
Update, 18 June: Lauren Edwards ‘presented’ the title – but not the text – of her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in the House of Commons yesterday, and the Bill’s Second Reading is now scheduled for 11 September, the last sitting Friday before the three-week party conference recess.
As if crowdfunding and blowing almost £720,000 on trying and – so far – failing to undo the Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling in the case of For Women Scotland isn’t bonkers enough – because, if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law – this week the Good Law Project, led by infamous turd polisher Jolyon Maugham KC, announced they are going to take on the funding of what an NHS Patient Safety Investigation has concluded is the “inappropriate prescription of medications to children and young people” by a GP practice in the Brighton area.
Yesterday, the GLP announced they plan to spend “a big five-figure sum” on funding “access to gender affirming private [sic] healthcare for at least ten trans minor patients of [Brighton] WellBN whose treatment has been withdrawn and whose financial need is greatest for three years or until those children turn 18 (whichever is the sooner).” And they launched a crowdfunder (without a specified target) to ensure “we can support even more [sic] trans kids to receive the medical care they urgently need. With your help, we’ll do everything in our power to protect them.”
What the GLP fails to mention, however, is that the decision by NHS England and the local NHS Trust to instruct the Brighton WellBN GP Practice to “stop prescribing hormonal medications to children under 18 years outside of NHS policy and guidance”, to “not resume offering specialist gender care to children under 18 years” and ensure that “the Practice’s public facing materials make this clear with immediate effect” follows the conclusion of a Patient Safety Investigation that Brighton WellBN Practice was “inappropriately prescribing medications to children and young people for the clinical indication of gender dysphoria”, and that “potential harm has been caused to the 78 children and young people who are within the scope of the Investigation”.
The Investigation’s key findings are quite astonishing:
As for the children and young people in question, the Investigation report states:
Gender dysphoria and incongruence require specialist care. Therefore, to receive NHS care and support, an individual needs to be under the care of one of the nationally commissioned specialist services.
If not already receiving care from specialist gender services, those in scope of the Investigation will have up to the 31 July 2026 to consider whether to accept being referred to these services, or not.
So, no one is being denied appropriate NHS care and support – rather, they are being protected from harm by professionally incompetent doctors. And potential donors to the GLP’s crowdfunder have not been given the material information they would need to make an informed decision about whether or not to donate (and, if so, how much).
Yet for Maugham and the GLP, the Patient Safety Investigation is simply part of “the ideological crusade that this Government has embarked upon against trans people”.
As noted on this blog in April, supporters of NHS-assisted suicide reacted to the long, slow death of Kim Leadbeater’s inadequately scrutinised Private Members’ Bill (PMB) in the House of Lords by revealing a somewhat undemocratic plan to “table an identical PMB in the next parliamentary session”.
And yesterday, with the new parliamentary session having kicked off last week with the ludicrously anachronistic pomp of the King’s Speech, the embarrassment that is British parliamentary democracy in the 21st Century cranked into action to select the 20 MPs who will have the best chance of their chosen PMB progressing through Parliament, as they will get priority for the limited amount of debating time made available over the session.
Some 500 backbench MPs had entered the PMB ballot, but of the 20 who had their numbered wooden ball drawn from a glass bowl in reverse order by two white-gloved flunkies, only those who randomly secured one of the top seven slots stand any real chance of repeating/bettering Kim Leadbeater’s admittedly impressive feat of almost getting her PMB into the Statute Book.
Actual footage of British democracy in action, 21 May 2026
Unfortunately for those in favour of Leadbeater’s deeply flawed model of NHS-assisted suicide, the top slot was ‘won’ by Sir Desmond Swayne (Conservative), a vocal opponent. But two vocal supporters, Lauren Edwards (Labour) and Andrew George (Liberal Democrat), ‘won’ the second and fourth slots, while two other MPs who voted in favour of Leadbeater’s PMB, Luke Evans (Conservative) and Jessica Toale (Labour), ‘won’ the fifth and seventh slots.
The 20 MPs drawn in the ballot now have until 17 June to choose a PMB from the many that will be offered to them by Dignity in Dying and other noisy campaign groups, and at the time of writing none of the top seven have revealed their intentions, with Andrew George telling the Guardian he will consult his constituents over the next fortnight before making his decision:
This is a great opportunity for West Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. That’s why I want to take a little time to listen to what constituents say before finally making my decision about which option would be best.
However, Jess Asato, a Labour MP who strongly opposed Leadbeater’s PMB, told the Guardian it would be a distraction to bring it back:
We know the assisted dying Bill is flawed and unsafe because the experts like the royal medical colleges and the Equality and Human Rights Commission have told us. The last thing our Party should be focusing on right now is continuing to debate this deeply divisive, flawed and risky Bill, rather than delivering on the priorities of voters.
Amen to that. As noted on this blog earlier this month, it is increasingly clear that ordinary people have had more than enough of the woke mélange of ‘trans rights’; the roll-out and rigid enforcement of 20 mph speed limits; the prioritisation of overly rigid, self-harming Net Zero targets (that will make negligible difference to overall climate change); the introduction of NHS-assisted suicide; the reforestation of Uganda; and other progressive-badged policies pushed on out-of-touch, technocratic politicians by obsessive campaign groups and their lobbyists.
[Update, 8 June: Indeed, a recent MRP poll conducted for think tank The Other Half suggests there is no public mandate in any of the 632 parliamentary constituencies in Great Britain for reviving Leadbeater’s NHS-assisted suicide PMB and then using the Parliament Acts to bypass the House of Lords and push the flawed Bill into law.
So, if Lauren Edwards, Andrew George, Luke Evans and Jessica Toale have any sense, they will decide to secure their footnote in history by opting for a PMB providing for some worthy but relatively minor and non-contentious legal reform.]
So, with Bridget ‘moral midget’ Phillipson, allegedly the Minister for Women & Equalities, having finally laid before Parliament the revised EHRC code of practice for services, public functions and associations that the EHRC submitted to her almost nine months ago, it is time for a traffic update from the Road to Nowhere.
Following the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling on 16 April 2025 in the case of For Women Scotland, four transactivist groups – the Good Law Project, TransLucent, Liberty and the Trans Legal Clinic – jumped into their clown cars to race down the Road to Nowhere, where they hoped to undo the ruling by scuppering the EHRC’s consultation on the draft code of practice, and otherwise making a legal nuisance of themselves. But, despite crowdfunding a combined total of some £800,000 from the so-called ‘trans community’ and its allies to fund their road trips, they haven’t got very far.
The Good Law Project, led by rape survivor and free speech champion Jolyon Maugham KC, have so far raised almost £714,000 from no fewer than four crowdfunders in support of their road trip, and three of those crowdfunders – including the most recent, launched in February – remain open to new donations. But all that they have achieved with that moolah is a proper drubbing in the High Court in February, and a £300,000 bill from the EHRC for legal costs. No wonder, then, that all three open crowdfunders are flatlining.
Last summer, Liberty didn’t even get to Junction 2 on the Road to Nowhere before their road trip was brought to an end by the High Court and Court of Appeal, and they were ordered to hand all but £638 of the £20,638 they had crowdfunded to the EHRC. And, 13 months on from the Supreme Court ruling, TransLucent are still yet to do anything at all with the £36,467 they have so far raised from the ‘trans community’.
Literally no one has donated to the first of TransLucent’s two crowfunders since July last year, and pretty much the only person still donating to the second – launched that month in support of an attempt to intervene in legal action brought by Sex Matters that is now set to be heard by the High Court later this year – is Simona Berry, a trans-identifying business owner. Simona take a bow, and boot the grime of this world in the crotch, dear.
Lastly, having so far crowdfunded £28,952, fashion icon Olivia Campbell-Cavendish, instagram celebrity Oscar ‘dying swan‘ Davies and the rest of the Trans Legal Clinic’s stellar legal team are still marooned in the gateway services, waiting to hear whether their clown car has permission from the European Court of Human Rights to even set out on the Road to Nowhere.
In total, then, the Good Law Project, TransLucent, Liberty and the Trans Legal Clinic have so far crowdfunded almost £800,000 from the ‘trans community’ and its allies to fund their no doubt thrilling but so far utterly pointless road race.
Since late 2024, my wife Joanna and I have received a combined total of five speeding tickets from the Metropolitan Police. And, in each case, the strategically-placed automatic camera had caught us driving at … 24 mph. Most recently, the strategically-placed automatic camera caught me driving at 24 mph in the most dystopian part of the Wandsworth one-way system, where – as well as there being no oncoming traffic and no houses, shops or pedestrians – the road is four lanes wide. I am pretty certain there wasn’t another human being within 50 metres of me at the time.
Yet, previously, over a combined total of some 70 years of driving, Joanna and I had only ever received one speeding ticket each (both issued in Wales, as it happens). And so , over the past 18 months, as the £100 fines and penalty points have mounted up, I have – for reasons I will come to – repeatedly ranted to my friends and anyone else who might listen about how, to my mind, the rollout and fascistically rigid enforcement of a default 20 mph speed limit in London (and elsewhere) is one significant cause of ordinary people’s increasingly evident loss of faith in politics and our political classes.
So, today, my eye was drawn to the Guardian‘s brief report of a comment made by Jo Stevens, the Cardiff East MP and Secretary of State for Wales in Sir Keir ‘you’re fired!’ Starmer KC’s cabinet of the walking dead, in an article for WalesOnline about the outcome of last week’s Senedd election:
People are rightly cross about the rollout of 20 mph speed restrictions and public money being spent on tree planting in Uganda when we weren’t getting the basics right. The NHS. Education. Cost of living. Any time spent away from those key priorities was time wasted.
Yes, it was news to me that, since 2009, the Welsh Government has spent £4 million (including £500,000 in 2024/25) on a programme to plant trees in Uganda, but needless to say it’s been an absolute gift to Reform UK in Wales. And you really don’t have to be a highly-qualified psychologist to realise that literally nobody in Wales (or anywhere else) enjoys receiving a letter informing them that they have to pay a £100 fine for driving at 24 mph. So Jo Stevens is absolutely right to suggest that the woke policy agenda of the Welsh Government was a factor in Labour’s crushing defeat in Wales last week.
Because it was not the ordinary people of Wales who clamoured for the 20 mph default speed limit in residential/built-up areas introduced by the Mark Drakeford-led Welsh Government in September 2023, at a direct cost of some £33 million, just as it was not the ordinary people of Wales who clamoured for the Welsh Government to splash out on the reforestation of Uganda. Similarly, it was not the ordinary people of London who clamoured for Sir Sadiq Khan’s 54-page Vision Zero action plan to “reduce road traffic injury inequalities” by making 20 mph the default speed limit “in central London and all inner London”, just as it was not the ordinary people of London who clamoured for Sir Sadiq to make London a ‘safe space’ and ‘beacon‘ for Trans, Queer/Questioning, Intersex and Asexual/Aromantic people.
Yet that is not because the ordinary people of Wales and London are racist, transphobic bigots who do not care about the number of black trans-identifying children killed on Britain’s roads. It’s simply because Britain’s roads are considerably safer than they were 40 years ago, and have consistently been among the very safest in the world for decades now. And literally no ordinary person in Wales or London wakes up in the morning and thinks “But our roads must be made safer than Switzerland’s!”
In short, thanks to the economic impact of globalisation and the rise of China, the financial crisis of 2008 and the implosion of neoliberalism, the insane self-harm of Brexit, the nightmare of Covid19, and the drunken orgy of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, the ordinary people of Wales and London have many greater priorities than spending millions of pounds on the impossible goals of reducing the number of deaths on their local roads to zero and making trans-identifying students feel happy.
Yet the lefty political class of Mark Drakeford (so ‘clever’ that he studied Latin at two universities), Sir Sadiq Khan, Sir Ed Davey and Sir Keir ‘you’re fired!’ Starmer KC have arrogantly and complacently assumed that what the ordinary people of Britain really, really want is to be told that they must not drive their car faster than 20 mph, and that it is only the majority of women who don’t have a penis. And, in acting on those ludicrously woke assumptions, they have recklessly opened the political door to pernicious populists such as Nigel Farage and David Paulden/Zack Polanski, neither of whom have a ****ing clue how to solve the challenges faced by ordinary people in 2026.
Indeed, Farage clearly doesn’t give a flying **** about ordinary people full stop, while the houseboat-dwelling, former boob-enlarging hypnotist and self-appointed Red Cross spokesperson Paulden/Polanski appears not to understand that ordinary people have to pay Council Tax.
Whatever, if you’d like a job walking in front of my car carrying a red flag, I’m offering a zero-hours contract on the minimum wage. Because I really, really don’t want another three points.
“We asked the voting public ‘What would make you vote Labour again?’ You said: ‘Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman’ If it’s up there I’ll give you the money myself.“
So, having publicly defended the right of murderous armed nutjobs to be arrested ever so gently by police officers, former boob-enlarging hypnotist David Paulden (aka Zack Polanski) and his Watermelon Party have now gone big on the rights of workers.
In what the Financial Timesidentifies as “an attempt to outflank Labour from the left [and] court trade unions”, the Workers’ Charter 2026 would take us back to the UK’s economic glory days of the 1970s and 1980s, by “scrapping all anti-union and anti-strike laws introduced since 1979” and introducing “strong legal rights to strike, picket and protest, including solidarity action and action for political and social causes”. Yep, it’s what voters are calling out for right now: the return of secondary picketing and beer and sandwiches in Number 10. You might want to stock up on candles and bin liners.
Source: ONS Labour Market Statistics Time Series
The Charter also promises a “full ban on zero-hours contracts”, but does not say how such a ban might actually work – as I’ve noted previously, banning such contracts is not as easy as it sounds, because not all of them are unwanted, let alone ‘exploitative’. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people work perfectly happily on a zero-hours contract. And the Charter promises both “more statutory holiday” and “more and fairer parental leave”, without saying how much more statutory holiday, or what kind of parental leave and how it would be ‘fairer’.
Indeed, as with many if not most Watermelon Party policies, the 420-word Charter has plenty of ambition, but is extremely short on specifics. The principal exception is a commitment to a “£15 per hour minimum wage for all workers regardless of age by April 2027”. But, while this would represent a a 38% increase for 18 to 20-year-olds, for whom the current rate is £10.85 per hour, the headline figure of £15 is not exactly radical: as long ago as August 2022, the TUC called for a £15 minimum wage “as soon as possible”.
Furthermore, there’s nothing in the Charter that explains why Paulden/Polanski and his Party think the minimum wage should be £15 per hour – rather than £14 or £16 per hour, say – in 2027. As the Resolution Foundation noted before the last general election, “[minimum wage rate] targets set as cash figures – preferably nice round ones – are always favoured by party campaigners. But they trouble policy experts who rightly point out that whether they are met or not is determined by what happens to inflation and nominal wages, rather than by improvements in the plight of the lowest earners relative to other workers.” Beyond April 2027, would a Watermelon Party government further increase what economists and policy makers call ‘the bite’ of the minimum wage, and if so by how much? The Charter simply doesn’t say.
It’s also unclear whether a £15 per hour minimum wage would increase the Watermelon Party’s promised universal basic income from some £1,600 per month, to £2,275 per month, at an additional cost to the Treasury of some £450 billion per year. All we know is that Paulden/Polanski believes his Party’s universal basic income should “broadly align with the minimum wage”. So, increase the minimum wage, increase the universal basic income (and its humongous cost). Maths, innit.
But hey, voters are embracing hope, apparently. So let workers and their families eat hope!
Leicester Square, London in February 1979, during the Winter of Discontent, when public sector strikes led to uncollected rubbish piling up on the streets. Photo: PA News
So, having run out of time in the House of Lords, Kim Leadbeater’s well-intentioned but deeply flawed Assisted Suicide Bill is finally dead. Apparently, Leadbeater regards the attempt by the House of Lords to address the Bill’s flaws as “undemocratic”. And Esther Rantzen – who was given less than six months to live some three years ago – is gutted.
However, it seems peers did not apply quite enough garlic when driving a stake through the Bill’s heart, because – according to a report in the rabidly pro-assisted suicide Guardian – Leadbeater and her fellow ideologues plan to “table an identical [Private Members’] Bill in the next parliamentary session, which would prevent peers blocking it again, as the Lords cannot stop the same Bill twice.”
In fact, simply tabling an identical PMB in the next parliamentary session would not necessarily prevent the House of Lords ‘blocking it again’. For that to be the case, as the Hansard Society has explained, the House of Commons would first have to pass the new but identical PMB without amending it. Which would require the Commons Second Reading, Committee Stage, Report Stage and Third Reading of the new but identical PMB to be blatant charades. Which doesn’t sound terribly democratic to me.
Furthermore, in contrast to the current, 2024-26 post-general election session, the next parliamentary session is likely to last just the normal one year, not two. Which means the House of Lords would not have to spend very long trying to address the new but identical PMB’s flaws for the Bill to run out of time once again.
To my mind, this is the kind of public policy swamp that awaits unprincipled campaigners who, rather than do the hard work of persuading an electable political party to make a manifesto commitment to implement their chosen policy in office, try to shoehorn the policy into the Statute Book via the undemocratic ‘back door’ that is the grossly anachronistic PMB process.
Evidently, it is possible to navigate such a putrid swamp when the political party in question is led by someone as devoid of integrity as Sir Keir ‘you’re fired!’ Starmer KC. But there’s plenty of reason to think that Starmer will not be Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister when any new but identical Assisted Suicide Bill gets voted on in the House of Commons, six to nine months from now.
Indeed, there is good reason to think that, by then, the Labour Party will be led by one of Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and Andy Burnham. And Rayner, Streeting and Mahmood are all strongly opposed not just to Leadbeater’s PMB, but to the very idea of NHS-assisted suicide. Unlike most of their Cabinet colleagues, all three voted against Leadbeater’s PMB at Third Reading in June last year.
Somewhat characteristically, Andy Burnham appears to have fluctuating and flexible views on the matter. But, given that he has yet to find a route to becoming an MP, he currently seems unlikely to be Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister in late 2026, when – subject to Leadbeater or an ally having their numbered wooden ball picked out of a glass bowl by a white-gloved Bridgerton extra – the new but identical Assisted Suicide Bill would be making its not very democratic progress through the House of Commons.
Or maybe we will have three years of chaos and a new but identical Assisted Suicide Bill with Ed Miliband, who voted for Leadbeater’s PMB in June 2025. Beam me up, Scotty.
Actual footage of British democracy in action, September 2024
Labour Pains 