(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.