Statement about the BBC and our fundraising

Some of our supporters will have seen a statement on the corrections page of the BBC’s website. We have archived it here and this is what it records:

I’m afraid the truth is complicated. Although we got the important things right, we also got some things wrong. But I am accountable to our supporters, and I will always tell them when meaningful criticisms of us are well founded.

***

Following what Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, Lord Chris Smith, described as a “racist feeding frenzy”, Professor Jason Arday died on 14th of August. His family, friends and those of us, including me, who had been fighting to keep him alive were devastated.

On the morning of 15th August, helped by colleagues at Good Law Project and some of the small team around Professor Arday during the last month of his life, I drafted and collected prominent signatories to and ‘built’ (ie created on our website) an open letter to the Prime Minister to demand a public inquiry. Members of the public were invited to add their name and at the time of writing the letter has more than 145,000 signatures and it is still growing.

Our work is funded by members of the public from whom we crowdfund. In our last financial year they contributed (as our soon to be published financial accounts will show) over 80% of our income. I am enormously proud of this – you are accountable to those who fund you and it is right that we be accountable to the public. 

But the scope of our work is broad and our inboxes feel like a bottomless pit of human misery – from Black academics and other professionals, victims of sexual violence, trans people, whistleblowers and on and on. Those without money who try to live decent lives and do the right thing experience Britain as profoundly broken – its police, so-called justice system, its notional accountability mechanisms, the whole thing is broken – and frequently they find their way to our door. So there is huge need, and we lack the resources to even scratch the surface of it. We are constantly fundraising to do more.

Professor Arday’s death is a tragedy for his family and, a matter of far less importance, it is also an enormous institutional challenge for Good Law Project. 

We are profoundly worried about the use of the US driven anti-trans playbook to target Black people. The same lawyers are being instructed, the same “journalists” are being briefed and are pushing the messages, the same tactics are being used (we have moved from “you are a victim of sexual violence not because of men but because of trans women” to “you are struggling not because of the increasingly wealth share of billionaires but because Black people are unfairly advantaged”); and the same press punishment beatings are being used to warn off those who want to advocate for Black community.

I have seen this coming for some months and I have been asking some bigger funders to fund us to work in this space – we know how the playbook plays out because we have seen it used on the trans community – but we have not succeeded in persuading those funders.

Meanwhile, Good Law Project now has a huge new workstream connected to Professor Arday, an inbox bulging with requests for help from (understandably) terrified Black people. But little in the way of new resources with which to meet that huge extra demand. 

Despite all of this, Professor Arday’s death was very fresh and I told colleagues I did not want us to fundraise off the back of our letter to the Prime Minister. We would fundraise later, but not immediately.

Those in my team who built the open letter created a page which had no specific donate asks linked to Professor Arday; people who signed the petition were then directed to a page on our website asking them to share the links which also had no specific donate asks linked to Professor Arday; and we also emailed people on our mailing list asking them to sign the open letter and that email had no specific donate asks linked to Professor Arday. Ordinarily each of those pages would have specific donate asks; in this instance because of my request they did not.

Other individuals and organisations took a different decision and the success of one crowdfunding page speaks to the desire of the public to (amongst other things) articulate their grief at Professor Arday’s tragic death.

However, we did not rebuild our site to remove all general donate asks, or rebuild our pro forma email to remove general donate asks. So people who went to our site and saw the petition page were still being asked (e.g.): “Good Law Project only exists thanks to donations from people across the UK. When we work together we can win together” and shown a donate button.

To help readers better understand the point, this is an email we sent out in respect of a woman who was sexually assaulted and then sued for defamation by the man who sexually assaulted her. We funded her successful defence to that defamation action and then helped her successfully sue the police for failing to investigate her complaint. The “Support this case” button is what I would call a specific donate ask. When it was sent, clicking on that button took recipients to a crowdfunder (which we closed after she succeeded in her case) which gave them an opportunity to contribute to her legal costs.

There has been no equivalent in any of our communications about Professor Arday. We have never asked anyone to “support this case” financially or any words to that effect. I can’t recall another occasion in which I have directed Good Law Project to take this action – public fundraising is the lifeblood of the organisation – but I did here.

***

On the Monday after Professor Arday died, I did several interviews with the BBC. Only one of them was aggressively hostile and you can watch an extract from it here. There were repeated interruptions, the interviewer put to me that by trying to defend Professor Arday we had contributed to his death – an astonishing attack line taken straight from the mouths of the far right – to which I responded angrily – and then I was asked: 

“Are you fundraising off this and what do you say to people who accuse you of fundraising so close to the death within days of it and before an inquest has been heard?”

“Fundraising off this,” as I have explained above, was the opposite of what we had done and so in my answer, which you can listen to in the link above, I criticised the interviewer for taking social media comments (from people with a long long history of hostility to me and Good Law Project) at face value without bothering to corroborate them and said, forcefully, that it wasn’t true.

A more precise answer from me to the interviewer would have drawn a distinction between “fundraising off this”, ie, specific fundraising asks, of which there are none and asks that are always on our website and in our emails. I accept, in the context of a very hostile interview in which I was still very upset by the press’ treatment of Professor Arday, any proper criticism of me for not giving that more precise answer.

Several days later, a new allegation was put to me by a journalist at a non-mainstream media outlet. This is someone I don’t have a warm relationship with but I respect enough to speak to. The allegation was that after the interview we took down a donate ask which had previously been on the petition page. I told him that this was simply not true – and the journalist decided not to run the story.

I would never do what he had put to me, I didn’t do it or ask for it to be done, and it was unimaginable to me that anyone at Good Law Project would seek to cover our tracks. But to be extra certain, I checked with the senior trusted colleague who built the page and they confirmed that this had not happened. I conveyed this to the journalist.

However, what I learned this morning is that this is not the whole story.

The interview took place shortly after midday on the Monday after Professor Arday’s death. Later that afternoon colleagues posted a blog about the fact that the press had ignored multiple clear and explicit warnings about Professor Arday’s mental health. Those colleagues were aware that I did not want to fundraise in connection with Professor Arday’s death whilst it was still so raw and they saw in a ‘preview’ of the blog our general donate button and asked a junior member of our campaign technology team to take the button off. That request was actioned but also, it seems, over-actioned so as to remove the general donate button from the open letter to the Prime Minister.

The request was not linked to the interview I had given – very few colleagues had seen the interview which was one of five broadcast interviews I gave that day – and I did not ask for it to happen (or for that matter want it to happen) and neither I nor the senior trusted colleague was aware that it had happened until this morning. But I accept that it did.

So, standing back:

1. it is wrong to say we fundraised off Professor Arday’s death;
2. it is right to say that our website and email contained general donate asks;
3. it is right to say that a general donate ask visible from the open letter was removed after my interview with the BBC;
4. it is wrong to say that the removal was in any way connected to the interview.

I have apologised to the journalist (above) for misleading them. And it is right that I acknowledge that Barbara Rich, a retired barrister with a long history of hostility towards Good Law Project, is right about this narrow point.

It is extraordinary to me that a journalist at a non-mainstream outlet – someone I do not have a good relationship with – would come to me for comment before publishing a story but that the BBC would publish its ‘correction’ above without even asking us to respond: “Ms Rich has pointed out to us” (to quote the correction) does not seem to be, on its own, a sufficient basis for our notionally public interest broadcaster to publish a story.

But that is a matter for another day.