Everything you always wanted to know about the Good Law Project (but were afraid to ask)

Posted on April 10, 2026 by wonkypolicywonk

What has the Good Law Project (GLP) ever done for us? How much has that cost us? Why should we care? Shouldn’t we just ignore them?

Well, yes, we could just ignore them, not least because they would hate that. More than “fighting hate and spreading hope”, what the cool kids at the GLP really, really want is to be seen fighting hate and spreading hope. But ignoring them would be a mistake that various regulators, supposed investigative journalists and other allegedly smart people have been making for almost a decade, since free speech and suicide prevention champion Jolyon Maugham KC founded the GLP in early 2017.

Because it is arguable that what Maugham and the GLP actually do, through their undemocratic lawfare and idiosyncratic campaigning against organisations that Maugham doesn’t like, is spread hate and misinformation, mis-sell false hope, and erode public respect for elected politicians and the judiciary, to the detriment of public policy, the rule of law and the functioning of our parliamentary democracy.

2017-21: The Glory Years

Maugham founded the GLP after becoming wealthy from – but seemingly bored by – his practice as a tax (avoidance) barrister. Or, as one lawyer has put it, due to a “toxically narcissistic midlife crisis”. Over the next three years, funded largely by crowdfunders, the then volunteer-only GLP focussed on using creative lawfare to frustrate the Brexit that followed from the Green Party campaigning and voting with David Cameron’s terrible Tories to hold a stupid EU referendum in June 2016. And it was two big court ‘wins’ on Brexit – the Wightman case in December 2018, about whether the Article 50 notification was unilaterally revocable, and then the Prorogation of Parliament case in September 2019 – that made Maugham famous for 15 minutes, and led to him abandoning his lucrative tax law practice to devote himself to the GLP full-time (while modestly paying himself the salary of an MP).

However, those two big court ‘wins’ achieved … nothing. Zilch, nada, rien. As Josh Glancy noted in The Times in April 2023, they “were ultimately irrelevant, mostly methadone for Remainers”.

Outside Maugham’s head, in the real world, there was never any doubt that, politically if not legally, the Article 50 notification was unilaterally revocable. Indeed, the author of Article 50, Lord Kerr, was more than happy to tell anyone with the will and ability to listen that it was designed to be unilaterally revocable. So the European Court of Justice ruling in Wightman simply confirmed what pretty much everyone already assumed to be the case. And, in any event, the UK later left the EU, without any attempt to revoke the Article 50 notification. Yet, eight years on, Maugham still cites the Wightman case as his “intellectual brainchild” and proudest moment.

Similarly, the Supreme Court’s ruling in September 2019 that Boris Johnson’s five-week Prorogation of Parliament was unlawful, null and void did not stop Johnson comfortably winning a general election just three months later. Nor did it stop the UK leaving the EU in January 2020.

Were it not for the arrival of Covid19 a few weeks later, the story of the GLP might well have ended there – much like the life of the fox that Maugham battered with a baseball bat in his garden on Boxing Day 2019, before firing up Twitter to gloat about it. But, thanks to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock, between April 2020 and the lifting of Covid19 restrictions in February 2022 the GLP raised some £2.5 million from 18 crowdfunders in support of Covid19-related legal challenges.

Yet, while five of the 18 crowdfunders raised more than £200,000, and two of them more than £400,000, not one of the legal challenges resulted in a clear court win, and only two had any significant positive outcome for the GLP. In February 2021, their ‘Transparency’ case concluded with the High Court issuing a near-meaningless ‘declaration’ that the Government had not fully complied with transparency rules on the publishing of PPE contracts.

Similarly, in January 2022, their ‘VIP Lane’ case concluded with the High Court ruling that the operation of the High Priority Lane for the awarding of PPE contracts was “in breach of the obligation of equal treatment”. However, having concluded that all the contracts in question were “highly likely” to have been awarded in any event, the Court refused to grant a declaration (sought by the GLP) that the High Priority Lane was unlawful per se (see paragraph 518 of the judgment), and ordered the GLP to pay £250,000 of the Government’s legal costs.

Furthermore, these meagre legal achievements were obtained at considerable cost to taxpayers. According to the minister’s answer to a written parliamentary question, by October 2023 the Department of Health and Social Care alone had spent £3.88 million (plus VAT) on defending the GLP’s various legal challenges, of which only £337K had been recovered from the GLP as legal costs awards.

Yet, despite this woeful lack of ‘success’ in changing public policy, 2017-21 were the GLP’s ‘glory years’, during which total annual income – mostly from direct/regular donations – mushroomed to more than £6 million, and their payroll grew steadily, from zero in late 2019, to 12 in January 2021 and 22 in January 2022. And, ever since, the GLP has sat comfortably on financial reserves of some £4 million.

2022: Jolyon can’t stand up for falling down

However, 2022 was the GLP’s annus horribilis, with a string of existential legal defeats in the High Court and Court of Appeal in Covid19-related cases, in which the judges not only ordered the GLP to pay a total of some £750,000 of legal costs to the government, but ruled that the GLP has no standing to bring such legal claims.

Most famously, in February of that year, in the GLP’s ‘cronyism’ case (also known as the GLP & Runnymede case), for which they crowdfunded a stonking £388,635, the High Court ruled (see paragraph 126) that “the claim brought by the GLP fails in its entirety”, and ordered the GLP to pay 80% of the Government’s legal costs. Yet Maugham and the GLP claimed this as a ‘win’. As barrister Adam King noted in April 2023, when reviewing Maugham’s autohagiography, Bringing Down Goliath:

When the High Court rules that your claim “fails in its entirety”, and orders you to pay 80% of the other side’s costs, is it really ethical to spin that outcome to donors as an unalloyed victory – as having won “at every substantive level”? Yes, all right, the GLP’s co-claimant [the Runnymede Trust] got part of what they wanted (a limited ‘declaration’), but both of them failed to persuade the Court of the headline allegation of “cronyism”. Never – ever – to be deterred, Maugham insists that this failure was only at “a deeply technical level”, now a droll euphemism for a forensic spanking.

Then, a few months later, in the GLP’s Abingdon Health case, for which they had crowdfunded £160,789, the High Court not only once again dismissed the GLP’s claim in its entirety, but went on to rule that the GLP lacked standing to bring such legal challenges.

In the summer of 2025, Maugham confessed that, following the end of the Covid19 pandemic in late 2021 – and, by implication, the above existential legal defeats – he and the GLP spent several years “blundering around trying to find the next thing that we should focus on”. In June 2022 they launched their own independent law firm, the Good Law Practice, to “foster legal structures that help people respond to the world around them”, but the firm ceased trading in October 2024. A much-vaunted office in Scotland somehow failed to materialise. And, in 2023, Maugham’s aforementioned booky-wook was taken apart in scathing reviews in the Times and elsewhere:

[Maugham’s book] is worth taking seriously, not because it has any scholarly, literary, or other value, but rather because, beneath the many, many layers of accumulated idiocy, Bringing Down Goliath represents an ideological attack on the foundations of the rule of law. Its rhetoric would be dangerous in the hands of a competent author, but even allowing for Maugham’s fumbling fingers, the ideas espoused in this book should worry anyone who cares to maintain the rule of law in the United Kingdom … A good judge, to Maugham, is a judge who will implement Maugham’s preferred political outcomes.

Maugham’s view of the judiciary resembles that advanced (with similar bloviating and tedium) by Chinese president Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party is eager to tout its commitment to the ‘rule of law’, by which they really mean rule by law. The purpose of the judiciary is to achieve the end goals of the Party, and the idea of judicial independence is a trap.

It is fortunate that the book is so incompetently written that it is likely to turn readers against Maugham’s philosophy, but that is no reason for complacency. It may not be quite coherent enough to be a threat to the rule of law, but it is a dangerous watershed in the mainstreaming of an ideology utterly inimical to our present legal system.

Meanwhile, the GLP’s income from crowdfunders plummeted, from some £450,000 per quarter in late 2021, to some £200,000 per quarter in late 2022, and just £40,000 per quarter in late 2024, after the demise of their Tory cash cow. And the GLP’s woeful record of ‘success’ in actually changing public policy continued.

Of the 64 discrete crowdfunders launched by the GLP since 1 January 2021, to date only five have resulted in any kind of positive outcome for the GLP. You can, if you want, characterise that as a ‘win ratio’ of about 8%. But to my mind it is more meaningful to focus on the actual impact on public policy of those rare legal ‘wins’. Which, as with the earlier legal ‘wins’ on Brexit and Covid19, is ‘virtually nothing’:

  • 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 case about transgenderism, in 2025.

2025: For Some Women Scotland (© Claire Maugham)

However, with the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling in For Women Scotland on 16 April 2025, Maugham and the GLP found – or, more accurately, rediscovered – their ‘next new thing’: the aggressively misogynistic and homophobic, pseudo-religious ideology of transgenderism. And, since then, they have lucratively mined a rich seam of seemingly surplus cash in the so-called ‘trans community’: two crowdfunders launched in late April 2025 in support of the GLP’s efforts to undo the ruling have so far raised a combined total of almost £642,000, more than twice the grand total of £304,000 raised from all crowdfunders in the whole of their FY 2024-25 (Feb 2024 to Jan 2025).

In a witness statement to the High Court in December 2021, Maugham stated that the GLP’s work on transgenderism “has a particular resonance for me because of someone important to me who is affected by these issues”. That person is widely understood to be the eldest of Maugham’s three daughters, who appears to have started ‘identifying’ as trans in 2019 – the year after Channel 4’s “non-binary answer to Big Brother”, Genderquake, was filmed in the Maugham family’s second home (the fabled windmill) – and is now an adult trans activist going by the pseudonym ‘Grin’. And, according to ‘Grin’, her youngest sister (now 15) started ‘identifying’ as trans in 2023.

‘Grin’ was evidently a founder of the strangely secretive transactivist group Trans Kids Deserve Better, which mounted week-long protests outside the offices of NHS England and the Department for Education in 2024, and the London office of the Equality & Human Rights Commission in 2025. Members of the group go by monikers such as ‘Paint’, ‘Grin’ and ‘Oracle’, which apparently “enables zem to feel like ze fit in”. Seriously.

Since late 2020 – when, by her own account, the then 13-year-old ‘Grin’ was on the waiting list of the since discredited and now defunct Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) – the GLP has raised a total of £1.242 million from 13 crowdfunders in support of transgenderism-related lawfare. The first of these, launched in November 2020 in support of various legal actions in defence of services provided by the Tavistock GIDS, had raised £193,225 by the time it was closed in July 2024, without any significant change in public policy having been achieved.

The second, launched in June 2021 in support of a legal challenge to the Charity Commission’s grant of charitable status to the LGB Alliance, raised £83,692, but the claim was dismissed by the First-Tier Tribunal in July 2023. And two crowdfunders – the first launched in October 2021 – in support of a legal challenge to waiting times in NHS transgender services raised a total of £120,256, but the claim was dismissed by the High Court in January 2023, and then by the Court of Appeal in July that year.

A crowdfunder launched in March 2024 in support of an application by transgender icons Victoria McCloud and Stephen Whittle to intervene in the Supreme Court case of For Women Scotland raised £31,874, but the application was dismissed by the Court in October 2024. And another launched in June 2024 in support of a legal challenge to a ban on the supply of puberty blockers to trans-identifying children raised £60,237, but the claim was robustly dismissed by the High Court in July 2024.

Before and for several weeks after that High Court drubbing, the unelected Maugham had a melodramatic meltdown on social media, during which he accused the democratically-elected Secretary of State for Health & Social Care, Wes Streeting MP, of supporting a measure that “will kill trans children”. This and other emotive and inflammatory claims by Maugham and the GLP on social media were strongly criticised in a report by the Government’s adviser on suicide prevention, Professor Louis Appleby. And a few weeks later Maugham emailed supporters to inform them that, as “it’s getting harder and harder to win rights for the trans community through the courts, and it doesn’t feel right to keep asking the community and its allies to carry on contributing to the enormous costs of this increasingly difficult litigation”, the GLP would now be “focusing our legal campaigns elsewhere” instead.

2026: Good news!

Maugham did not respond much better to the Supreme Court ruling of 16 April 2025, in the case of For Women Scotland, on the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010. Seemingly forgetting what he himself had confidently asserted in September 2019 – that “if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law” – Maugham accused the judges of the “so-called Supreme Court” of having “ripped up the Equality Act”, of having been “hubristic, reckless or bigoted in the way they approached the For Women Scotland case”, and of having “abandoned their judicial oath in service of pleasing their wealthy friends”. The Chinese Communist Party will have been hugely impressed.

Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the GLP had launched a crowdfunder in support of a new Fighting Fund for Trans Rights, and one week later they launched another, in support of a legal challenge to the ruling that later turned out to be a legal challenge not to the ruling itself, but to the Equality & Human Rights Commission’s Interim Update on the ruling. And those crowdfunders – both of which remain open to new donations – have since raised a stonking £641,667 from some 15,000 members of the so-called ‘trans community’ and their allies. 

Yet, as noted previously on this blog, all that Maugham and the GLP have achieved with that moolah (so far) is yet another drubbing in the High Court on 13 February, and a bill from the EHRC for almost £300,000 of legal costs. For not only did the High Court dismiss all three grounds of the GLP’s legal claim, but it ruled that the GLP did not have standing to bring the claim.

Somewhat characteristically, Maugham and the GLP immediately sought to spin this comprehensive legal defeat as something of a ‘win’, telling supporters and potential donors to the inevitable new crowdfunder in support of an appeal to the Court of Appeal that:

The judge has said we are right about the law in a central part of our case: it can be entirely lawful for service providers to allow trans women to use the women’s toilets – without having to admit cis men. This means that the Minister will have to send back the EHRC’s draft guidance to be rewritten. It’s good news. 

Needless to say (but associate professor Michael Foran of Oxford University has helpfully said it), that is actually fake news. Two months on, the Minister appears not to have sent the EHRC’s draft guidance back to be rewritten. And, despite – or because of – the above good/fake news, the GLP’s new crowdfunder has already raised almost £50,000. Should it go on to reach its (initial) target of £100,000, Maugham and the GLP will have mined a grand total of some £760,000 from a rich seam of seemingly surplus cash in the ‘trans community’ to fund their attempt to undo the Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling. Yet, as you may recall, if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law.

That £760,000, plus the some £535,000 blown on the earlier transgenderism-related cases, is an awful lot of money for nothing since November 2020, and one has to wonder how long the ‘trans community’ will continue to buy the false hope offered by Maugham and the GLP. As one member of that community is reported to have said on social media in February:

Maugham always pretends he’s had some sort of win even when he has unambiguously and comprehensively lost. He did the same with his Brexit cases. I’m fed up of this turd polisher claiming he does so much for us.

Posted in Crowdfunding, Sex & Gender | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A single enforcement body for workers’ rights: OK, it’s taken 25 ****ing years, but … we’re finally there!

Posted on April 6, 2026 by wonkypolicywonk

Between 2000 and 2013, while working as employment policy officer at Citizens Advice, I researched and wrote a series of deadly boring policy reports arguing for a consolidation of the three main labour market enforcement bodies – the HMRC minimum wage enforcement team, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, and the Gangmaster Licensing Authority – into a single enforcement body fit for the 21st century, with the legal powers and resources to “root out the rogues” without imposing unnecessary regulatory burden on the great majority of compliant employers.

In the reports – and in any number of shorter articles, submissions to parliamentary committees, campaign leaflets, and conference presentations – I noted that, all too often, vulnerable workers are too fearful of further victimisation or dismissal to issue an employment tribunal claim, the principal means of enforcing most statutory workplace rights. And, as a result, rogue employers can profit from exploitation with near impunity.

I suggested replacing this fragmented enforcement architecture with a “more joined-up system of advice, guidance and practical business support for small, low-profitability employers, and a more pro-active approach to compliance and, where necessary, enforcement” through a single enforcement body – or Fair Employment Agency.

From the outset, my proposal was firmly opposed by the Great Protector of workers’ rights, the TUC. Enforcing workers’ rights is a job for trade unions, not government, I was told. And union membership was now growing so rapidly that all workers would be unionised by the 26th century. Well, all workers in whatever remained of the public sector in the 26th century, anyway.

Whatever, we can now let bygones be bygones, because tomorrow the Fair Work Agency, provided for in the Starmer Government’s humongous Employment Rights Act 2025, finally comes into existence.

Matthew Taylor, who produced the 2017 Taylor Report on the gig economy and modern working practices for Theresa May’s ill-fated government, and served as the then government’s head of labour market enforcement between 2019 and 2021, returns as Chair of the new executive agency, and Lisa Penney joins him as CEO. Somewhat predictably, the usual suspects are not happy, but all long journeys begin with a single step and tomorrow is not just a step, but a giant leap for enforcement of workers’ rights. A quarter of a century ago, I shot for the moon, and now Matthew Taylor and Lisa Penney are in lunar orbit, preparing to land.

Needless to say, I have not had a ‘thank you’ telegram from the King, or even just an Easter Egg from employment rights minister Kate Dearden MP. The TUC will probably claim the Fair Work Agency was their idea. But I plan to spend tomorrow stuffing my face with chocolate while re-reading some of my old reports and blog posts, including this one, originally posted in August 2024:

Single Enforcement Body: Yes kids, we’re almost there!

Posted on August 21, 2024 by wonkypolicywonk

Almost three years ago, in December 2021, I concluded on this blog that, in terms of progress towards the creation of a single enforcement body for workplace rights – a reform I had first proposed 20 years earlier, when a lowly policy wonk at Citizens Advice – we were not nearly there yet, but we were over halfway.

At the 2019 general election, the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem manifestos had all pledged a consolidation of the existing, fragmented enforcement architecture into such a single enforcement body – you wait 18 years for a manifesto pledge to implement your great policy idea, and then three come along at once. A few weeks later, the new Tory Government’s first Queen’s Speech had duly included an Employment Bill to “strengthen workers’ ability to get redress for poor treatment by creating a new, single enforcement body”. And in June 2021 the Government had published a positive response to the high level consultation on the issue it had conducted in 2019 (in response to the 2017 recommendation on enforcement in the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices).

Sadly, in 2022 we hit horrendous political traffic, followed by a long series of policy speed restrictions. And, given how things have since turned out, my December 2021 blog post should perhaps have made more than a passing reference to the fact that, in September that year, the Labour Party’s New Deal for Working People had pledged to “establish and properly fund a single enforcement body (SEB) to enforce workers’ rights”:

The new body will be given extensive powers to inspect workplaces and bring prosecutions and civil proceedings on workers’ behalf relating to health and safety, minimum wage, worker exploitation, and discriminatory practices.

Labour will ensure that there are enough inspectors employed in the system via the SEB so that they can undertake unannounced inspections and follow up on anonymous reports.

That final point about the number of inspectors is key. As Torsten Bell, until recently the chief executive of the super wonky Resolution Foundation and now the Labour MP for Swansea, notes in his super wonky new book, Great Britain? How we get our future back:

Labour market rules only mean something if they are enforced. Too often they are not.

Responsibility for enforcement is ludicrously spread across six different organisations, overseen by seven different government departments. Nor do the enforcement bodies have enough boots on the ground to be a meaningful deterrent for unscrupulous employers. The International Labour Organisation recommends countries should have one labour market inspector for every 10,000 workers. We manage less than a third of that benchmark – only 0.29, or one for every 34,500 workers.

This system puts the onus on workers themselves to protect their own rights, by going to an employment tribunal. But the workers most likely to have their rights infringed are also those those least likely to bring a case.

If we were remotely serious about labour market rules being enforced, then we would have a single enforcement body cracking down on problems such as bogus self-employment. [And] it should be adequately resourced, doubling the number of inspectors from 900 to 1,800 to present a credible threat to dishonest firms.

Amen to that, and I just wish Torsten had been around between 2000 and 2013, when I researched and wrote a deadly boring series of policy reports, articles and submissions to parliamentary committees, all arguing for “a more pro-active approach to compliance and enforcement” through a single enforcement body – or Fair Employment Agency – but was repeatedly thwarted by the Great Protector of workers’ rights, the TUC (which argued that enforcement is a job for trade unions, not government).

Whatever, in May this year Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay updated the 2021 New Deal for Working People with a pledge that “Labour will deliver where the Conservatives have failed. We will finally establish a Single Enforcement Body to enforce workers’ rights, including strong powers to inspect workplaces and take action against exploitation.”

Guardian headline, 23 June 2024

A few weeks later, Labour’s manifesto for the General Election included a pledge to “create a Single Enforcement Body to ensure employment rights are upheld”. And on 17 July, in the King’s Speech, the newly elected Labour Government set out its plan to bring forward an Employment Rights Bill to, among (many) other things, “establish a new Single Enforcement Body, also known as a Fair Work Agency, to strengthen enforcement of workplace rights”.

We’ve been here before, of course, and – given the (laudable) breadth and depth of the legislative programme set out in the King’s Speech, and the deplorable state of public finances – I am not counting any chickens. But I do think I can say, with a degree of confidence: yes, kids, it’s been a long, long journey, but we are nearly there.

Suffice to say, if and when we do finally get there, I have a (short) list of things I think should be included in the Fair Work Agency’s remit, such as enforcement of unpaid employment tribunal awards.

Yep, I wrote a series of boring reports on that issue, too.

Posted in Workers' rights | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Road to nowhere

Posted on March 10, 2026 by wonkypolicywonk

(With apologies to Talking Heads)

With the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling of 16 April 2025 in For Women Scotland – on the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 – approaching fast, now seems a good time to check the pulse of the various crowdfunded legal challenges to the ruling launched by four transactivist groups: the Good Law Project, TransLucent, Liberty and the Trans Legal Clinic.

The Good Law Project, led by free speech and suicide prevention champion Jolyon Maugham KC, were first out of the blocks last April, launching one crowdfunder within 24 hours of the Supreme Court ruling, and a second just one week later. Those crowdfunders – both of which remain open to new donations – have since raised a stonking £641,056 from 14,936 members of the ‘trans community’ and their allies. But all that Maugham and the GLP have achieved with that moolah (so far) is a proper drubbing in the High Court on 13 February, and a bill from the EHRC for almost £300K of legal costs.

Immediately following this comprehensive dismissal of Maugham’s supposedly ‘legally swaggering‘ challenge to the EHRC’s ‘Interim Update’, the middle-aged messiah announced that he and the GLP are “going nowhere”. Which is possibly the truest thing he’s ever said. And much the same can be said of their fellow travellers on the road to nowhere, TransLucent.

TransLucent’s two crowdfunders have so far raised a tidy total of £36,342, and both remain open to new donations. Yet TransLucent’s threatened legal challenge to the EHRC’s ‘Interim Update’ is clearly as dead as Maugham’s deceased parrot, and as things stand they won’t be intervening in the legal action launched by Sex Matters against the City of London in respect of the Hampstead ponds, as Sex Matters were refused permission by the High Court in January. (However, Sex Matters are now seeking permission to appeal that ruling in the Court of Appeal.)

Last summer, the once respected but now comical human rights group Liberty didn’t get very far along the road to nowhere before being rear-ended by the High Court, and then by the Court of Appeal, after which they were ordered to hand all but £638 of the £20,638 they had raised from the ‘trans community’ to the EHRC. Hopefully, they were with the AA at the time.

Meanwhile, the legal dream team behind the Trans Legal Clinic – fashion icon Olivia Campbell-Cavendish, instagram celebrity Oscar ‘dying swan‘ Davies, and barristers Amanda Weston KC of Garden Court Chambers and Jenn Lawrence of Monckton Chambers – have raised £28,767 in support of Victoria McCloud’s application to the European Court of Human Rights. However, they remain stuck in the gateway services, sipping matcha lattes and ordering new outfits for Olivia as they wait to hear whether their clown car has secured the Court’s permission to set out on the road to nowhere.

And finally, the taxpayer-funded road to nowhere not being toll-free, on 13 February Maugham and the GLP launched yet another crowdfunder, in support of their attempt to appeal last month’s High Court drubbing. Should this reach its (initial) target of £100,000, Maugham and the GLP alone will have mined more than £750,000 from a rich seam of seemingly surplus cash in the ‘trans community’ to fund their road trip to nowhere since April 2025.

However, despite – or perhaps because of – Maugham and the GLP’s “egregiously false” depiction of Justice Swift’s ruling of 13 February, the ‘trans community’ and their allies seem a tad reluctant to throw good money after bad. It seems the road to nowhere is a long, hard road.

Posted in Crowdfunding, Sex & Gender | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Wealth of nations, poverty of policy

Posted on February 27, 2026 by wonkypolicywonk

Zack Polanski, the former boob-enlarging hypnotist and Liberal Democrat who now leads the Green Party, says that yesterday’s Gorton & Denton by-election result proves the Labour Party is a busted flush, and that voting Green is now the only way to keep Nigel Farage out of Downing Street. And it’s hard to disagree: as Andy Beckett has argued in the Guardian, the ‘Labour minimalism’ of Kinnock, Blair, Mandelson, Brown and now Starmer is simply “unsuited to modern times” in which “populists of both left and right say supposedly taboo things to voters – and soar in the polls.”

And not just ‘taboo’ things. In Beckett’s words, “we have entered a new age of political rhetoric”, with populists such as the ubiquitous Polanski able to say incredibly stupid things to voters, yet soar in the polls. Incredibly stupid things, such as ‘we will spend £700 billion per year on a universal basic income’ and ‘we will raise £15 billion per year from a wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires’.

As well as replacing the DWP’s annual spend on welfare benefits and pensions of some £340 billion with a universal basic income of £1,600 per month for each of Britain’s 55 million adult citizens costing up to a staggering £1,056 billion per year (the details of the policy remain stuck somewhere in Polanski’s head, it seems), the Green Party is committed to introducing “a 1% tax on wealth over £10 million and 2% over £1 billion, raising £14.8 billion per year”. And when, this morning, the Today programme’s Nick Robinson put it to a jubilant Polanski that such a wealth tax would just lead to wealthy people leaving the country, the self-declared lefty populist retorted that Switzerland has a wealth tax and is “literally famous for having wealthy people in it”.

Disappointingly, Robinson failed to respond to this idiocy by pointing out that Italy has a wealth tax and is literally famous for being an economic basket case.

In fact, Switzerland is one of only three European countries – the others being Norway and Spain – with a comprehensive net wealth tax of the kind proposed by Polanski and the Green Party, while four other European countries – Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands – levy a limited wealth tax on selected assets only. In Belgium, for example, there is a wealth tax of 0.15% on securities account holdings, and in Italy there is a wealth tax of 0.2% on financial assets and 0.76% on property held abroad. 

Furthermore, Switzerland does not have a federal (i.e. national government) wealth tax of the kind proposed by Polanski and the Green Party. Rather, under law first introduced in 1840, each of the 26 cantons (the autonomous member states of the Swiss Federation) taxes the net worldwide wealth of residents, and the tax rates and allowances vary substantially between cantons. So, the wealthiest residents of Geneva canton face a wealth tax of as much as 1.1%, while the wealthiest gnomes in Zurich canton get away with a wealth tax of just 0.3%. And you don’t have to be a millionaire, let alone a billionaire, to pay wealth tax in Switzerland: in Zurich canton, for example, the wealth tax kicks in when your net wealth exceeds just 81,000 swiss francs (£77,800).

So, I’m not sure that Switzerland tells us very much about how well a national wealth tax would work under a Green Party government led by Zack Polanski. Or maybe I’m missing the same thing that seems to have been missed by Germany, Japan, the United States, Austria, Sweden, Portugal, Australia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Denmark, Greece, Estonia, New Zealand, Poland, Iceland, Czechia, Latvia, Cyprus, Israel, Romania, Luxembourg and Turkey, none of which have a net wealth tax.

Indeed, since 1995, six of those countries – Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland and Sweden – have abandoned a net wealth tax, due to the challenges and costs associated with collection and enforcement. And in 2020, a major study into the case for a wealth tax in the UK – the Wealth Tax Commission – concluded that an annual wealth tax, of the kind proposed by Polanski and the Green Party, would be ineffective due to high administrative costs, and because it would be easy to avoid paying the tax.

But hey, the voters of Gorton & Denton have “embraced hope”. So everything will be fine.

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Chartsengrafs

Posted on February 18, 2026 by wonkypolicywonk

(With apologies to Grandaddy)

Charts come. And then they go. Which is sad. Indeed, I am told that the sudden disappearance from this blog of some of my charts has desolated as many as four nerdy people. So, as free speech and suicide prevention champion Jolyon Maugham KC has seen fit to publish selected extracts (from one side only) of my correspondence with him in early January, it seems only fair, in a democratic society, that I should exercise my Article 10 right to give back those four dejected nerds what they so desire.

Yeah, I’m trading tears in for charts and graphs. Well, two charts.

Following the end of the Covid pandemic in early 2022, with Maugham and his Good Law Project “blundering around trying to find the next thing that we should focus on”, the GLP’s income from crowdfunding plummeted, from some £450,000 per quarter in late 2021, to some £200,000 per quarter in late 2022, to just £40,000 per quarter in late 2024, after the ballot box demise of their Tory cash cow. And it bottomed out at a mere £5,803 in September 2025, and £5,206 in October.

Things picked up somewhat in November, with the launch of not one, not two, not three but four new crowdfunders, including one in support of the GLP’s first significant legal challenge to Keir Starmer’s Labour Government. But, three months on, all four of those crowdfunders appear to have run out of steam, at least for the time being, and in January total income from the GLP’s 11 open crowdfunders – including yet another new one, launched on 30 January – was a modest £17,479.

Of course, such crowdfunding constitutes only one of the GLP’s various income streams, with most income coming from regular, direct donations. But the launch of 15 new crowdfunders in 2025-26 – three more than in both 2024-25 and 2023-24 – suggests that crowdfunding of their litigation remains an important tool for Maugham and the GLP.

Maybe, in 2026, Jolyon Maugham KC will reflect on the wise words of Jolyon Maugham QC in 2017:

If you have a very strong presence on social media and you are happy to leverage it to raise money, crowdfunding is a powerful tool. And it’s very useful in governance terms if you want to take cases where the people are: if they won’t fund the case, perhaps you’re not where you should be.

And maybe, in 2026, Maugham and the GLP will improve the unenviable track record of their crowdfunded litigation in recent years. Of the 63 discrete crowdfunders they have launched since 1 January 2021, to date only five have resulted in any kind of positive outcome for the GLP. You can, if you want, characterise that as a ‘win ratio’ of about 8%. But to my mind it is more meaningful to focus on the actual impact on public policy of those rare legal ‘wins’. Which is ‘virtually none’:

  • 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 case about transgenderism, in 2025.

Yet, since 1 January 2021, the GLP has raised (and spent) £3.263 million of crowdfunded donations, as well as more than £21 million of direct/regular donations and grants. Make it make sense.

However, 2026 hasn’t started brilliantly for Maugham and the GLP, what with the High Court comprehensively dismissing their legal claim against the Equality & Human Rights Commission’s ‘interim update’ on the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling – a claim for which they had, by the day of the ruling, 13 February, pointlessly crowdfunded a stonking £487,859 from 11,816 donations. And the EHRC are now seeking legal costs of almost £300K from the GLP. Ouch.

Needless to say, Maugham and the GLP are undeterred by this resounding court defeat, and plan to “fight until the battle is won”. So there is yet another new crowdfunder, with an initial target of £100K, in support of an appeal to the Court of Appeal. And, somewhat bizarrely, Maugham has written to the Minister for Women & Equalities, Bridget Phillipson MP, threatening new legal action if she does not now reject the draft EHRC Code of Practice that’s been sitting on her desk since September. Yet, as Associate Professor Michael Foran of Oxford University notes, before concluding that Maugham and the GLP are either “incompetent or they are wilfully spreading misinformation about [the High Court] judgment”:

Given the fact that the High Court upheld the legal accuracy of the claims made in the [EHRC’s] Interim Update and given the fact that the [draft] Code of Practice is based on that interpretation of the law, it is staggeringly unclear how the GLP could claim that the Minister is now under a legal obligation to reject the Code. There is simply no foundation in the findings of the High Court to support this claim.

And, according to a report in The Times yesterday, it’s not only lawyers and legal academics who are accusing Maugham and the GLP of publishing “egregiously false” statements about the High Court judgment. The paper quotes one member of the ‘trans community’ stating online:

Maugham always pretends he’s had some sort of win even when he has unambiguously and comprehensively lost. He did the same with his Brexit cases. I’m fed up of this turd polisher claiming he does so much for us.

So, early days, but it’s not yet looking as if 2026 will be the year in which Maugham finally acts on the famous words of Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you … think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Anyway, here’s my allegedly nerd-pleasing Table of Failure & Futility (ToFF), updated.

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Refuge of a scoundrel

Posted on February 13, 2026 by wonkypolicywonk

In mid-November last year, it was reported by one of those present that Jolyon Maugham KC, the founder and executive director of the Good Law Project, had implied to a recent meeting of Cambridge University students that he is gay. On social media, this generated a fair amount of bemused comment and, on 24 November, when asked why Maugham might have said such a thing, I glibly and crudely replied by referencing Maugham’s own account (in his 2023 autobiography) of what I understood to have been transactional sex with older men in his youth. And it turns out my understanding was mistaken.

Suffice to say, Maugham did not take this well: in addition to reporting me to the police under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, he instructed “leading counsel in relation to defamation, harassment and breach of privacy” and – somewhat bizarrely – lodged a complaint to the Charity Commission against the human rights charity Sex Matters, presumably under the Guilt by Association Act 2025.

Maugham reporting me to the police did not trouble me greatly – just like him, I’m prepared to go to prison if that’s where I find my ethics require me to go. Or something. But over the Christmas holiday period, Maugham’s shameless use of my crass and regrettable social media post as a stick to beat the wholly innocent staff and supporters of Sex Matters gnawed away at my mental health.

I have a long history of serious mental ill-health: over the past four decades, I’ve been repeatedly hospitalised, including after being sectioned, and bear the scars of having once tried hard to separate my head from my body, using a Stanley knife. And so, early on 5 January, after two days of frighteningly rapid mental decline, I realised that I had an ever-shortening window in which to do something to avoid calamity.

So, that morning, I sent an email message to the Good Law Project, requesting an opportunity to speak to Maugham, to apologise. Unsurprisingly, I got no response. So I spoke to a good friend whom I thought might know a way to contact Maugham direct. Concerned about my welfare, that friend then contacted a friend of Maugham’s, and a few hours later I was able to send the following email direct to Maugham:

Dear Jolyon,

Further to my earlier email to the generic GLP address, a friend of mine has kindly spoken to a friend of yours, who in turn kindly suggested that I set out my apology to you, and my offer to withdraw entirely from all public debate about the GLP and related matters, in writing, via this direct email, which (for reasons I will come to) they kindly shared.

I would like to apologise unreservedly to you, your family and GLP staff for my recent comments on social media. These were crass and deeply regrettable. I would be happy to agree the text of an apology for you to share publicly, should you wish.

To ensure that there is no repeat, I undertake to withdraw entirely, and permanently, from all public debate about you, the GLP and all related matters. I will delete not just those recent social media posts for which I now apologise, but also all previous posts, by deleting my X/Twitter account. And I will delete all relevant blog posts.

I am not in a position to expect anything in return, but in the interests of my own family, including my elderly mother (for whom I care part-time) and my disabled adult son, who depend on me, I appeal to you to accept my apology and withdrawal from public debate as offered in good faith, and leave me in peace, so that I can continue to support my family.

Thank you for your consideration. I had hoped to be able to speak to you by ‘phone to make my apology and appeal to you more personally, but of course you may prefer to discuss only by email.

I may not deserve it, but please give my family this chance, Jolyon. They do not deserve to suffer for my actions.

Richard

To his credit, Maugham responded within a few hours:

Hi Richard, 

A few points:

1. I will take some time to think about this and discuss it with my family.

2. We had already instructed leading Counsel over the Christmas period in relation to defamation, harassment and breach of privacy.

3. There is also the matter of my complaint to the police under s127 which I understand them to be pursuing.

4. I don’t know what this refers to: “a friend of mine has kindly spoken to a friend of yours, who in turn kindly suggested that I set out my apology to you.”

5. I would like to know whether you have been funded to write your Labour Pains blog, or to do other work targeting me and my family.

Jolyon

A couple of hours later, I replied to Maugham:

Thank you for responding, Jolyon.

On your point 1, I understand. Ditto your points 2 and 3.

On point 4, I do not want to get anyone into trouble or cause any difficulty between you and your friend, which is why I did not give their name. They acted as they did for humane reasons. But if you really want to know, then I will tell you. Or they may tell you themselves, of course.

On point 5, I can assure you that I have never been paid a penny by anyone for anything on the Labour Pains blog (or for any other relevant work – though I can’t think of any, in any case).

To be clear, when I said that I will delete my X posts and Labour Pains blogs, that was not conditional on your response – I was not seeking a ‘deal’. I have already (permanently) deleted most of the blog posts, and will complete the process this evening.

Richard

And, in the early hours of 6 January, I emailed Maugham again:

Further to my earlier email, I have now completed (permanent) deletion of all relevant Labour Pains blog posts, and have (permanently) deactivated my X account.

I cannot change the past, but I have now done all that I can to make amends.

What you do now is up to you. It is you that will have to live with your decision.

I wish you and your family well.

Richard

Then, on 14 January, by email, I received the following letter from Matthew Gill, an SRA-regulated solicitor employed as “defamation lawyer” at the Good Law Project:

Dear Mr Dunstan

Thank you for your emails to Good Law Project and our client, Jolyon Maugham KC.

We note you have decided of your own volition (we did not ask you to do this) to deactivate your account on x.com and to delete the posts on your ‘Labour Pains’ blog which relate to Mr Maugham, his family and Good Law Project.

We also note your offers, again of your own volition (we had not asked you for this), to issue a public apology and desist in the future from issuing any public facing communications about Mr Maugham, his family and Good Law Project.

In order to draw a line under this matter, Mr Maugham, his family and Good Law Project will agree to make no civil claims against you in respect of your historic actions on the following bases:

1. You make a payment of £5,000 to the charity Refuge. Mr Maugham seeks payment of this sum in recognition of both (i) the costs that have been incurred in instructing Leading Counsel to assess the merits of bringing a claim against you and (ii) the harm caused by your publications.

2. You publish on your blog ‘Labour Pains’ a public apology in the following terms, to remain visible and prominent on your blog for at least 12 months:

“I apologise unreservedly to Jolyon Maugham, his family and Good Law Project for my harassment of them. I accept many of my statements were false and my campaign was harmful and intrusive. I have paid a substantial sum to Refuge in settlement of all claims against me.”

3. You agree not to reinstate or to post in future any social media or blog posts which make personal attacks or comments on Mr Maugham or his family.

If this is acceptable to you we will draw up a binding agreement for you to sign. This offer will remain open for seven days. We recommend that you take legal advice on this letter.

Yours faithfully,

Good Law Project

On 20 January, via email, I replied to Matthew Gill (and James Douglas, Head of Legal at the Good Law Project, to whom Gill had copied his email to me on 14 January):

Dear Mr Gill,

Thank you for your letter of 14 January.

When I suggested, in my email of 5 January to your ‘client’ and Executive Director Jolyon Maugham KC, that I would be happy to agree the text of an apology for him to share publicly, what I had in mind was refinement of the apology I had already given in the previous paragraph of that email.

It did not occur to me that you or your ‘client’ would respond by demanding my unqualified admission to nebulous and unsubstantiated allegations that I have not been given any opportunity to consider in detail, let alone rebut in part or full. And, having taken advice, I consider it unreasonable of you to do so.

However, if you would now like to substantiate your allegations – including by identifying all those statements of mine that you consider to be ‘false’ – then I will be happy to give that information my full consideration.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Dunstan

Meanwhile, on 16 January, without having discussed the matter with me, Detective Constable Nicholas Freeman of the Metropolitan Police had emailed me, stating:

I have now considered the facts of this case and reviewed your two emails dated 05/01/26 to Mr Maugham and the Good Law Project.

In light of the full and frank apologies you provided in those emails, your confirmation that you intend to delete the offending post and the associated X/Twitter account, and the fact that you have offered a written apology that Mr Maugham may publish if he wishes, I am satisfied that this matter can be concluded by way of a Community Resolution.

This means the incident will be recorded by the police as an out‑of‑court disposal Community Resolution. It will be held on police systems and is searchable by all UK police forces via the Police National Database. Should any further allegations of similar behaviour arise, this information may be taken into account.

A community resolution does not give you a criminal conviction or criminal record; however, the matter will remain recorded on police indices.

Kind regards,

DC Nicholas Freeman, Walworth Police Station

To date, I have not heard further from Jolyon Maugham, Matthew Gill, or DC Freeman. But on 26 January, on their website, the Good Law Project posted an update setting out selected extracts (from one side only) of the correspondence, and stating that Maugham “intends to bring civil proceedings against [me]”.

Thanks to his previous work as a tax lawyer, Maugham is a wealthy man, and the Good Law Project has some £4 million sitting in the bank. On the other hand, it’s fair to say, as Maugham supporter Liz Church has done on social media, that my family and I can “afford foreign holidays”. Maybe someone should report us to the Metropolitan Police for that.

So, while I do not resile one bit from my apology to Maugham, it seems only fair – and in keeping with the Good Law Project’s own transparency principles – that I make the full correspondence available, to enable those who are interested to make their own assessment of its contents.

Posted in Crowdfunding | Tagged | 1 Comment

Assisted dying: Labour’s self-administered lethal cocktail

Posted on December 2, 2024 by wonkypolicywonk

So, on Friday, 236 Labour MPs voted for Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of the Labour Government to assume responsibility for Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill, and for the increasingly bitter Red-on-Red warfare of the last eight weeks to continue for at least another five months.

Because, as the Cabinet Office Guide to Making Legislation makes clear (in paragraphs 45.24-26), by adopting a neutral position on a Private Members’ Bill (PMB), the Government has nevertheless indicated that it is “prepared to accept [the PMB] reaching the statute book with all of the consequences”, and “the Government has a duty of care to the statute book”. In short, from now on it is up to the Government, not Kim Leadbeater and her supporters, to avoid the risk of which I warned in October: a lack of proper scrutiny leading to the statute book, and the public, being lumbered with legislation that – come implementation – turns out to be a pile of pants.

This means the easy ride that Kim Leadbeater and her supporters have enjoyed to date is at an end. Perhaps most significantly, the Government will surely now have to publish the impact assessment, explanatory notes, legal issues memorandum and delegated powers memorandum that – if it has been following the Guide to Making Legislation – it submitted to the Parliamentary Business and Legislation (PBL) Committee of the Cabinet in late October (see paragraph 45.25).

While the time gap between Leadbeater publishing her PMB (on 11 November) and the Bill’s Second Reading was no shorter than it is with many government Bills, public and parliamentary scrutiny of the Bill’s provisions prior to Friday’s debate was seriously hampered by the lack of such documents, and in particular the lack of an impact assessment showing the likely impact on and associated financial cost (or otherwise) to the NHS and the justice system.

So, for example, when the former President of the Family Division of the High Court, Sir James Munby, included in his detailed demolition of the PMB’s proposed safeguards a simple calculation – based on Kim Leadbeater’s own figures – showing they could consume the entire current capacity of the High Court Family Division, there was no answer from Leadbeater and supporters such as Lord Falconer to Sir James’s straightforward questions:

Where are the judges to be found? And what of the impact on the wider administration of justice which, as is unhappily notorious, is already under enormous strain?

On social media and by email, I repeatedly asked Kim Leadbeater, Lord Falconer and the PMB’s eleven co-sponsors to simply confirm whether they accept or contest Sir James’s calculation of the possible dire impact on the High Court. Yet, despite Leadbeater’s oft-stated commitment to a “robust and well-informed” debate, I never got an answer. Indeed, the only response to my (reasonable and polite) enquiries was the newbie Labour MP and only legally qualified co-sponsor of the PMB, Jake Richards, blocking me on social media (then scoffing about having done so when challenged by an acquaintance).

Instead of addressing such questions – which they must surely have anticipated – supporters of the PMB chose instead to hide behind the disingenuous notion that “this debate has to proceed not on the basis of pounds and pence. It has not to be a debate about money, but about morals.” Yet no minister has ever stood up at Second Reading of a government Bill and said: “I cannot tell you how the provisions in this Bill will actually work, or how much they are likely to cost the taxpayer. And we may well change them anyway. But if you like the general idea of this Bill, please vote for it today.”

However, what worked prior to and at Second Reading will not work at committee stage. It’s now clear that the Bill’s committee stage will be more like that of a government Bill, not a PMB. Immediately after MPs backed the Bill by 330 votes to 275 on Friday, Kim Leadbeater tabled a motion to give the committee the power to take oral and written evidence, thereby remedying one of the key deficiencies of the PMB process. And it would be ludicrous for the Committee to take such evidence without subsequently debating it. So it is safe to assume that the committee will sit multiple times over weeks or even months, rather than just the single, short sitting that is all most PMBs experience – during Friday’s Second Reading debate, Ruth Jones noted that, in the last session of Parliament, the average PMB committee stage involved a mere 35 minutes of debate.

The committee will want to see the Government’s impact assessment, and – if the Second Reading debate is anything to go by – the minister on the committee will face a raft of searching questions from well-prepared and heavily-armed opponents of the Bill. I watched Friday’s debate, and to my mind the best of the 44 speeches were all made by such opponents – most notably Danny Kruger, Rachael Maskell, Meg Hillier, Jess Asato, Ruth Jones, James Frith, Florence Eshalomi and Ben Spencer – while the flimsiest were made by leading supporters of the Bill such as Paula Barker, the laughably dim Christine Jardine, and the aforementioned Jake Richards. And the debate’s low point was provided by newbie Labour MP, Cat Eccles, who pompously rose during Danny Kruger’s speech to make a pointless point of order (and later doubled down on social media).

Furthermore, in the run-up to the Second Reading debate, a number of MPs published incisive and considered statements setting out the reasons why they would be voting against the Bill. For example, Labour MP and Chair of the Science, Innovation & Technology Committee, Chi Onwurah, noted:

The Bill is flawed, there has not been sufficient parliamentary and public debate, [and] instigating State support for the taking of life should not be done through a Private Members’ Bill.

Detail on the implementation and the resources is lacking and there is no impact assessment … The Bill will have to work not in a theoretical world with great palliative care, a well-resourced NHS and great respect and emotional support for the dying and terminally ill, but in the real world with patchy palliative care, an under-resourced NHS, and where the dying may lack emotional support or even be subject to coercion … There has not been sufficient public or parliamentary debate for a Bill of this nature … I know that homosexuality and abortion were legalised through PMBs, but I do not accept the implied moral equivalence … Even without the slippery slope argument, extending the State’s abillity to support, sanction and assist in the taking of life requires wide-ranging consultation, research, debate and consideration.

So, while Kim Leadbeater gets to pick the committee, and she and her supporters will have an in-built majority, I predict the committee’s weeks or months of deliberation will be an intellectual mismatch, and that, by the time the Bill reaches Report stage/Third Reading on 25 April, it will be a Private Members’ Bill in name only.

Unlike at Second Reading, the repetition of simplistic points and the telling of emotional stories and outright untruths by Leadbeater and her supporters will have proved woefully inadequate in the face of oral and written evidence from external experts and hand-to-hand combat with MPs opposed to the Bill. The Government, not Leadbeater and her supporters, will have had to fill the information and legislative gaps, and through their advocacy for their own amendments ministers will have assumed direct responsibility for whatever kind of suicide service, safeguards against coercion, and associated training programmes for doctors and the judiciary Rachel Reeves – who voted for the Bill on Friday – is happy to fund out of her £40 billion fiscal black hole.

Meanwhile, as reported by the rabidly pro-assisted suicide Guardian, many in the Government will continue to tear their hair out in frustration at how the Bill is “dominating the conversation and causing conflict between Labour ministers and MPs. “It’s a nightmare,” one official told the paper last week: “If [the Bill] passes [Second Reading], it will eat up so much time. And it’s causing divisions among our MPs when we have worked so hard to try to build bonds between them.” Another reportedly said “Keir [Starmer] wanted it to happen. It’s that simple. There isn’t anyone else who thought this was a particularly great thing to do in the first months of a Labour government.”

Which is presumably why the issue was not even mentioned in Labour’s election manifesto. And now, having upset pensioners and many Labour MPs by cancelling this year’s winter fuel allowance, and the farming community over inheritance tax, the Government has, in the reported words of yet another insider, got itself “in the situation where the first thing we are seen to be offering [in terms of improving the NHS] is making it easier for people to die”.

Oh well. That’s life, I guess.

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Assisted dying Bill: a ‘how to vote’ guide for Labour MPs

Posted on November 27, 2024 by wonkypolicywonk

Are you a Labour MP? Maybe newly-elected on 4 July, or otherwise unfamiliar with the deeply defective and anachronistic Private Members’ Bill process? Still undecided how to vote on Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill on Friday?

Well, fret no more! Just select the answer to each of these five, simple questions that best fits your view, work out your total score, then follow my voting advice. Sorted!

Q1. Are you ready to be associated forever with releasing the assisted suicide genie from the bottle?

(A) Yes, old and sick people are incredibly costly, and I’d much rather we spent the money on nukes, atomic submarines and freeports.

(B) Look, terminally ill people have a right to be bumped off by the State. Who am I to stop them?

(C) Actually, no, not really.

Q2. Are you confident that doctors can reliably predict how long someone with a terminal illness has to live, and that they can spot family coercion a mile off?

(A) Yes, doctors are never wrong, and the NHS’s £3 billion annual bill for medical negligence is simply due to unscrupulous lawyers.

(B) Look, terminally ill people have a right to be bumped off by the State. Who are doctors to stop them?

(C) Actually, no, not really.

Q3. Do you believe implicitly in judicial omniscience and infallibility?

(A) Yes, the Birmingham Six were most likely guilty. Probably. Who cares?

(B) Look, terminally ill people have a right to be bumped off by the State. Who are judges to stop them?

(C) Actually, no, not really.

Q4. Given that the Government cannot afford to pay this year’s winter fuel allowance or abolish the two-child benefit cap, are you confident that creating a National Suicide Service will not impact adversely on either NHS services intended to keep people alive, or the chronically underfunded justice system?

(A) Yes, I’ve just hung a Dignity in Dying bauble on the money tree.

(B) Look, terminally ill people have a right to be bumped off by the State. Who are taxpayers and Treasury bean counters to stop them?

(C) Actually, no, not really.

Q5. Given that Report stage/Third Reading wouldn’t be until 25 April, after which the Bill would go to the Lords, are you happy for this Red-on-Red warfare to rumble on for another six months?

(A) Yes, every day in every way, this issue is demonstrating not just Keir Starmer’s outstanding leadership skills, but his mastery of political strategy and his unrivalled tactical acumen.

(B) Look, terminally ill people have a right to be bumped off by the State. Who are Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood, Bridget Phillipson and Morgan McSweeney to stop them?

(C) Actually, no, not really.

Now score your answer to each question, and total to get your final score:

For every question to which you answered (A): score 3 points

For every question to which you answered (B): score 2 points

For every question to which you answered (C): score 0 points

How did you score? And what should you do on Friday?

You scored 11-15 points: Speak and vote for the Bill on Friday, and be sure to let Kim Leadbeater know that you’d be proud to serve on the bill committee. Yes, Kim gets to pick the committee! Democracy 2024, innit.

You scored 5-10 points: Find something you really, really need to do in your constituency on Friday.

You scored 0-4 points: Skip the five-hour debate, but vote against the Bill on Friday. A ministerial post in Wes Streeting’s first government awaits you!

Actual footage of British democracy in action, September 2024
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Assisted dying: Kim gets Keir off the hook, but at what price?

Posted on October 17, 2024 by wonkypolicywonk

So, Keir Starmer had himself filmed making a personal promise to TV celebrity Esther Rantzen – Democracy 2024, innit – and now backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, having had her numbered wooden ball pulled out of a glass bowl at just the right moment – Democracy 2024 again, innit – has introduced a Private Members’ Bill (PMB) to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults in England and Wales. MPs will hold their first debate on the Bill – known as Second Reading – on Friday (sic) 29 November.

In fact, all that Starmer promised Eshter Rantzen – and the electorate – prior to the General Election on 4 July was that he would “make time available [for a debate and a free vote]” on assisted dying. He didn’t mention Private Members’ Bills during his staged conversation with Esther Rantzen in March, and the words he used suggest that what he actually had in mind was a debate and free vote in government time, at some point in “the next Parliament”. But, without actually delivering on that promise, he has, in his own words, now taken advantage of “an opportunity that has arisen” – Ms Leadbeater’s PMB.

Actual footage of British democracy in action, September 2024

Earlier this week, Ms Leadbeater idiotically told viewers of BBC Newsnight – all six of them – that her PMB is “potentially one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see in this country”. And, who knows, maybe it is. I’m undecided about assisted dying – no one wants to die a horrible death and, like Woody Allen, I am allergic to pain. The only good thing about watching my then best mate die, after he stupidly fell off Ben Nevis at the ripe old age of 43, was knowing that he hadn’t suffered more than two or three seconds of fear and pain.

Short of dying peacefully in our sleep, many of us would opt for such a quick and clean exit from life, if we could. I am an atheist, and would describe myself as a humanist. So I am instinctively sympathetic to the case for assisted dying. But the risks of legalising the assisted suicide of vulnerable, scared and therefore potentially manipulable people are not hard to see. There’s a good exploration of some of the issues involved here.

However, I have spent much of my professional life working on legislative reform, including four years in the House of Commons as staffer to an MP who was not averse to using a PMB as a vehicle for her (not always mainstream) views and (not always practicable) policy proposals. And if there is one thing I learned from that experience it is that, in the 21st Century, the deeply defective and chronically anachronistic PMB process is not the way to make any important change in legislation, let alone ‘one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see in this country’.

Indeed, I would expect a notionally progressive government with an explicit manifesto commitment to “modernise the House of Commons” to be busy abolishing – or, at the very least, reforming – anachronisms such as the PMB circus, not nudging backbench MPs to have a go at introducing ‘one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see in this country’ without proper parliamentary scrutiny, so that the Prime Minister can say he has delivered on his promise to a TV celebrity.

Reasons why the PMB process fails to provide proper scrutiny include:

  • While PMBs go through the same legislative stages as government bills, the process is different and key Commons stages – the Second Reading debate, and Report stage/Third Reading – take place on Fridays, when there is no government business and most MPs are in their constituency, not Westminster. This hands significant leverage to single-issue campaign groups able to motivate and mobilise their supporters in the Commons, and means a PMB can pass Second Reading even if a majority of MPs don’t attend and don’t vote.
  • Unlike with government bills, debates on PMBs are not subject to a programme motion, (that is, they are not timetabled), but the Second Reading and Report stage/Third Reading debates must conclude by 2:30pm (i.e. just five hours after starting), if the Bill is to proceed, and by convention there are no time limits on speeches. This militates against proper debate – and therefore proper scrutiny – because just a handful of hostile MPs can time-waste and filibuster, with speeches and interventions by supportive MPs simply helping to run down the clock.
  • At Second Reading, both government bills and government hand-out PMBs are accompanied by explanatory notes and an impact assessment prepared by the relevant government department, and these are an essential aid to proper scrutiny. But, as Kim Leadbeater’s Bill is not a government hand-out PMB, there will be no such explanatory notes or impact assessment. In September 2015, Rob Marris MP’s Assisted Dying (No 2) Bill – the last PMB on assisted dying to be debated by MPs – was not accompanied by such explanatory notes and impact assessment at Second Reading (which it failed to pass), as it was also not a government hand-out PMB.
  • At Committee stage, unlike with government bills there is no provision for the taking of external evidence from experts or members of the public. And, if MPs are considering ‘one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see in this country’, maybe they should be taking full account of such external evidence. Furthermore, the PMB’s sponsor gets to choose the committee members. So, while the committee membership must “reflect the balance of views on the Bill”, the sponsor can exclude the strongest critics of the Bill.
  • As with Second Reading, at the crucial Report stage, the strict five-hour time limit means that hostile MPs can seek to block further progress of a PMB by tabling an excessive number of amendments – because, unless all such amendments are considered, the PMB cannot proceed to Third Reading. This is a more subtle way of blocking a PMB than filibustering at Second Reading.
  • In practice, because the sponsor of a PMB is a backbench MP (and then a backbench ally in the Lords), rather than a departmental Secretary of State, it is easier for government ministers to avoid accountability for the likely impact of the Bill during its passage through the Commons and Lords.

In September, after Observer journalist Sonia Sodha posted on X/Twitter that “it’s crazy to believe something so complex [as assisted dying] should be fast-tracked legislatively using a Private Members’ Bill”, the Labour MP and former Chair of the Committee on Standards Chris Bryant popped up to say:

That’s how we changed the law on homosexuality, the death penalty and abortion. It doesn’t mean lack of scrutiny. It just meant lack of whipping.

Leaving aside that the story of the abolition of the death penalty, for example, is a lot more complex than Sydney Silverman’s PMB in 1965 – there had been a four-year Royal Commission on Capital Punishment 1949-53, and the Homicide Act 1957, which started life as a government bill, had already abolished the death penalty in most murder cases – it’s a bit depressing to hear a senior MP say ‘this is how we did things in the 1960s, so it’s fine to do it this way, 60 years later, in 2024’.

Societal norms, and public attitudes towards and expectations of our parliamentary democracy, have changed enormously since the mid-1960s, when Sydney Silverman’s short, four-clause Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 finally abolished the death penalty in all cases of murder, Leo Abse’s 11-clause Sexual Offences Act 1967 partly decriminalised homosexuality (in England and Wales, at least), and David Steel’s seven-clause Abortion Act 1967 first legalised abortion. So what was necessary (to achieve progressive reform) then, is simply not necessary now.

In 2024, there is simply no good reason why a government recently elected on a platform of ‘change’ and an explicit manifesto commitment to “modernise the House of Commons” should use the defective and anachronistic PMB process to ensure a ‘debate and vote’ on an issue that it failed even to mention in that manifesto. With a 174-seat majority, Keir Starmer has any number of options for holding a Commons debate (and free vote) on the principle of assisted dying in government time, thereby delivering on his promise to Esther Rantzen (which wasn’t that he would ‘change the law’).

Were such a free vote on the principle of assisted dying to reveal a majority in favour among MPs, the Government could then establish a Royal Commission or ask the Law Commission to examine the issues and make recommendations for legal reform. If we are going to make ‘one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see in this country’, it is surely worth spending a bit of time getting it right.

But giving a nudge and a wink to Kim Leadbeater and her PMB in order to deliver on that somewhat undemocratic promise risks lumbering Parliament, the Statute Book and, ultimately, the public with poorly considered (so quite possibly flawed) new legislation on a complex and contentious issue. And, on 4 July, not a single person voted for that.

Update, 28 October: Two key cabinet ministers – health secretary Wes Streeting and justice secretary Shabana Mahmood – have now said they will vote against Leadbeater’s PMB, and there are growing signs of unrest among backbench Labour MPs about proper scrutiny of the Bill, which has still not been published. Indeed, with a number of Tory MPs piling in, Labour’s handling of Starmer’s unwise promise to Esther Rantzen is starting to look like yet another magnificent own goal.

Further update, 12 November: So, last night Kim Leadbeater published her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – all 38 pages of it, with 43 clauses and six schedules, making it one of the longest PMBs ever, and certainly far longer than the three 1960s PMBs referred to above. And there are Explanatory Notes prepared by Ms Leadbeater. However, there is no Impact Assessment and, as legal academic Yuan Yi Zhu noted last night, “more than half of [the 22-page Explanatory Notes] is just verbiage about why assisted suicide is great”. Indeed, to my mind, the Explanatory Notes add little if anything, and read more like a tick-box exercise.

In his thread on X/Twitter last night, Yuan Yi Zhu provides a handy summary of the Bill’s provisions, including what Ms Leadbeater describes as “the strictest safeguards of any legislation [on assisted dying] in the world”. Similarly, at a press briefing in the House of Commons this morning, Lord Falconer claimed the Bill has “the best and most robust safeguards in the world”.

This may or may not be true, but the fact is you don’t get ‘the best and most robust safeguards in the world’ for free. Indeed, it’s clear that, as Observer journalist Sonia Sodha noted last night, the Bill “would potentially impose massive capacity issues on the NHS/medical profession, on the chief medical officers, and on the family division of the High Court”. Kim Leadbeater has reportedly said that up to 3% of deaths would be covered by the provisions of her Bill, and in 2023 there were some 575,000 adult deaths in England and Wales (the total number of recorded deaths was 581,363, of which 3,743 were of children under the age of 18). So, even if only 2% of adults chose to apply for assisted dying, there would be some 11,500 applications per year.

Significantly, in terms of the Bill’s progress towards the Statute Book, those public spending implications mean that, even if the Bill passes Second Reading on 29 November, a money resolution would be needed before the Bill could proceed to committee stage. And only the Government can table a money motion.

So, to my mind, the Bill is dead in the water unless the Government abandons its supposed neutrality by agreeing to pick up the tab for the safeguards – however much it is. Which would be an odd thing to do, just weeks after banging on about a fiscal black hole. Indeed, this alone may explain why both health secretary Wes Streeting and justice secretary Shabana Mahmood have let it be known they will vote against the Bill at Second Reading. [On 13 November, Wes Streeting warned that legalisation of assisted dying would have significant resource implications for the NHS.]

It is true, as legal academic Daniel Gover noted to me this morning, that the Cabinet Office Guide to Making Legislation states (in paragraph 45.40, on PMBs) that “Moving such a [money] motion does not necessarily indicate government support for a [PMB]”. But the word ‘necessarily’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, not least because PMBs almost invariably provide for relatively minor and non-contentious legal reforms. And, of course, just like the Pirate Code, the Cabinet Office Guide is more like guidance, not a set of rules.

So, while it may be technically possible for the Government to table a money motion while still claiming to be neutral on the Bill, thereby smoothing the Bill’s onward passage to committee stage, to my mind this would look like the Government giving the Bill favourable treatment. Because the Government would be giving the Bill favourable treatment (just as it would be if it intervened to allow for e.g. time limits on speeches in the debates, as some procedural experts have suggested). And, politically, perceptions are important.

What’s more, I suspect such facilitation of the Bill’s progress towards the Statute Book, under the cloak of supposed neutrality, would lead to a not insignificant row between senior ministers over the cost implications and how or where the money to cover those new costs would be found. Which brings me back to the title of this post: Kim Leadbeater may have got Keir Starmer off the hook of his promise of a vote to Esther Rantzen, but at what cost?

If there is anyone sensible in Downing Street, they should be working towards killing off the PMB at Second Reading on 29 November. Otherwise, what has rapidly become a bit of a farce – with even a co-sponsor of the PMB, Lib Dem Christine Jardine MP, completely unable to explain how the ‘most robust safeguards in the world’ would actually work, and Leadbeater complaining bitterly about health secretary Wes Streeting’s (quite understandable) intervention about the cost implications – will rumble on for months. Because the first ‘remaining stages’ PMB Friday of the 13 scheduled sittings – i.e. the earliest date on which Leadbeater’s PMB could normally be expected to have its Report stage and Third Reading – is not until 25 April (the first seven of the 13 scheduled PMB Fridays are set aside for the Second Readings of PMBs). After which, the Bill would be debated – and picked apart – in the Lords.

Further update, 14 November: Indeed, during Business Questions in the Commons earlier today, the Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, told MPs that the PMB’s committee stage is likely to last “several weeks”, and that Report stage/Third Reading “will not be until April at the earliest”. And, shortly after Ms Powell sat down, the Transparency Project published a lengthy demolition of the PMB’s proposed safeguards by Sir James Munby, former President of the Family Division of the High Court. This will be a vital resource for those charged with drafting Second Reading speeches for an MP opposed to assisted dying, with choice soundbites including this zinger:

How confident can we be that the procedures set out in the Bill will be adequate to enable the court to identify and prevent possible abuses and in particular be adequate to detect what may be very subtle external pressures?

My answer is very simple. Only those who believe implicitly in judicial omniscience and infallibility – and I do not – can possibly have any confidence in the efficacy of what is proposed.

Do ministers really want another five or six months of this?

Update, 3 December: Today, with the PMB undergoing painful examination in the House of Lords, the Guardian reported a leaked Labour Party policy memo, the contents of which suggest that, ahead of last year’s general election, the Labour leadership planned how to introduce assisted suicide via a Private Members’ Bill. Well, blow me down with an Order Paper.

Posted in Democracy | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Single Enforcement Body: Yes, kids, we’re almost there!

Posted on August 21, 2024 by wonkypolicywonk

Almost three years ago, in December 2021, I concluded on this blog that, in terms of progress towards the creation of a single enforcement body for workplace rights – a reform I had first proposed 20 years earlier, when a lowly policy wonk at Citizens Advice – we were not nearly there yet, but we were over halfway.

At the 2019 general election, the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem manifestos had all pledged a consolidation of the existing, fragmented enforcement architecture into such a single enforcement body – you wait 18 years for a manifesto pledge to implement your great policy idea, and then three come along at once. A few weeks later, the new Tory Government’s first Queen’s Speech had duly included an Employment Bill to “strengthen workers’ ability to get redress for poor treatment by creating a new, single enforcement body”. And in June 2021 the Government had published a positive response to the high level consultation on the issue it had conducted in 2019 (in response to the 2017 recommendation on enforcement in the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices).

Sadly, in 2022 we hit horrendous political traffic, followed by a long series of policy speed restrictions. And, given how things have since turned out, my December 2021 blog post should perhaps have made more than a passing reference to the fact that, in September that year, the Labour Party’s New Deal for Working People had pledged to “establish and properly fund a single enforcement body (SEB) to enforce workers’ rights”:

The new body will be given extensive powers to inspect workplaces and bring prosecutions and civil proceedings on workers’ behalf relating to health and safety, minimum wage, worker exploitation, and discriminatory practices.

Labour will ensure that there are enough inspectors employed in the system via the SEB so that they can undertake unannounced inspections and follow up on anonymous reports.

That final point about the number of inspectors is key. As Torsten Bell, until recently the chief executive of the super wonky Resolution Foundation and now the Labour MP for Swansea, notes in his super wonky new book, Great Britain? How we get our future back:

Labour market rules only mean something if they are enforced. Too often they are not.

Responsibility for enforcement is ludicrously spread across six different organisations, overseen by seven different government departments. Nor do the enforcement bodies have enough boots on the ground to be a meaningful deterrent for unscrupulous employers. The International Labour Organisation recommends countries should have one labour market inspector for every 10,000 workers. We manage less than a third of that benchmark – only 0.29, or one for every 34,500 workers.

This system puts the onus on workers themselves to protect their own rights, by going to an employment tribunal. But the workers most likely to have their rights infringed are also those those least likely to bring a case.

If we were remotely serious about labour market rules being enforced, then we would have a single enforcement body cracking down on problems such as bogus self-employment. [And] it should be adequately resourced, doubling the number of inspectors from 900 to 1,800 to present a credible threat to dishonest firms.

Amen to that, and I just wish Torsten had been around between 2000 and 2013, when I researched and wrote a deadly boring series of policy reports, articles and submissions to parliamentary committees, all arguing for “a more pro-active approach to compliance and enforcement” through a single enforcement body – or Fair Employment Agency – but was repeatedly thwarted by the Great Protector of workers’ rights, the TUC (which argued that enforcement is a job for trade unions, not government).

Whatever, in May this year Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay updated the 2021 New Deal for Working People with a pledge that “Labour will deliver where the Conservatives have failed. We will finally establish a Single Enforcement Body to enforce workers’ rights, including strong powers to inspect workplaces and take action against exploitation.”

Guardian headline, 23 June 2024

A few weeks later, Labour’s manifesto for the General Election included a pledge to “create a Single Enforcement Body to ensure employment rights are upheld”. And on 17 July, in the King’s Speech, the newly elected Labour Government set out its plan to bring forward an Employment Rights Bill to, among (many) other things, “establish a new Single Enforcement Body, also known as a Fair Work Agency, to strengthen enforcement of workplace rights”.

We’ve been here before, of course, and – given the (laudable) breadth and depth of the legislative programme set out in the King’s Speech, and the deplorable state of public finances – I am not counting any chickens. But I do think I can say, with a degree of confidence: yes, kids, it’s been a long, long journey, but we are nearly there.

Suffice to say, if and when we do finally get there, I have a (short) list of things I think should be included in the Fair Work Agency’s remit, such as enforcement of unpaid employment tribunal awards. Yep, I wrote a series of boring reports on that issue, too.

Posted in Workers' rights | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment