Our work is needed more than ever

With your help we’ve been on quite a journey.

The Good Law Project started, without a single big backer and with no employees, in my office only two and a half years ago.

And we have enjoyed a series of quite astonishing successes.

Less than a week after the referendum we launched and completed a crowdfunding for the case that became the Miller case and established that the Government could not unilaterally remove individual rights. We sued the Electoral Commission and forced it to re-open its abandoned investigation into Vote Leave’s overspending in the referendum. The Electoral Commission subsequently found Vote Leave guilty and fined it and Vote Leave abandoned its appeal. We launched the Wightman case that established we could unilaterally revoke our Article 50 notice. This case took twelve hearings and we defeated the UK Government, the Council and the Commission. Without that decision, we believe it is very likely the UK would already have left the EU. We were also the architects of the Cherry decision that returned our Parliament from an unlawful suspension by the Government. We persuaded Scotland’s Highest Court to force a Prime Minister who swore blind he’d never ask for a delay or accept an extension to do both. And we have ongoing proceedings to establish that the Prime Minister’s Withdrawal Agreement – which subjects 60% of Northern Ireland’s imports to EU tariffs – is unlawful.

We have won or supported or have in progress proceedings to recover over a billion pounds of VAT dodged by Uber; to protect interns from exploitation; to stamp out indentured labour practices by FDM Group and others; to protect world class academics from deportation; to remove from GPs the obligation to provide data to the Home Office; to ensure Universal Credit is properly calculated, and many others.

And we will shortly begin litigation to tackle the astonishing rates of child poverty in single parent families, to challenge the use of zero hours contracts to exploit workers with limited bargaining power and to put pressure on the Government to take seriously the coming calamity of climate change.

We still operate in my office. We are recruiting but we still work without a single full-time worker. We still rely on those who feel about the world as we do supplying their services for free or at discounted rates. Our organisation continues to be funded, almost entirely, through monthly donations and other contributions such as yours.

This is no accident. Establishment funders find it difficult to fund an organisation that stands in the face of Government. Some choose a comfortable existence over a real impact. And even those who say they want to fund strategic litigation give us a wide berth.

But there is much to be done. And we intend to do it.

We are beginning to professionalise, and you will soon see changes. A genuinely useful website. More frequent communications. But, above all, our work will continue.

To do this work we need your support. Please become a member here.

Jo Maugham QC