In cheering Thursday news, the First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber) has today dismissed the nasty, illiberal attempt by Jolyon ‘mostly tax avoidance‘ Maugham, his (Not Very) Good Law Project, and their pet Mermaids to legally challenge the charitable status of the LGB Alliance – the only known instance of one charity seeking to remove the charitable status of another.

As Kate Barker, CEO of the LGB Alliance, notes in The Telegraph:

There’s something essentially mean-spirited about one charity attacking another. It’s not good for the sector, for the individuals or causes they support, and certainly not for public life.

Jolyon and the GLP want you to know that Mermaids, not the GLP, were the claimants in this case. But it’s been clear since May 2021 – when Jolyon announced on Twitter that “we’ve found a very effective way to challenge the baffling decision of the Charity Commission [to grant the LGBA charitable status]” – that the legal challenge was Jolyon’s not-so-brilliant idea. The GLP’s December 2021 outline of the case makes it very clear who was the puppet, and who was pulling the strings. And it was the GLP, not Mermaids, who funded the legal challenge by crowdfunding £83,692 from 3,104 pronoun people.

Whatever, it turns out Jolyon’s cunning plan wasn’t very effective after all. Furthermore, since the legal challenge was launched in June 2021, the troubled and deeply troubling Mermaids have been found to be not waving, but drowning, and as a result are now themselves subject to a statutory inquiry by the Charity Commission, with further evidence of safeguarding failures continuing to emerge. As one well-placed observer put it to me: “Jolyon has really done a number on Mermaids”.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

For more detail on the Tribunal’s decision, see this very good explainer by Michael Foran of the University of Glasgow School of Law; the Tribunal’s decision is here; and the Charity Commission’s response to the ruling is here.

Anyway, here’s my updated table of the GLP’s court outcomes since mid-2021. If you’re a mathematician or statistician, you may be able to see from this that the GLP are not winning 45% of their legal cases.