Cases

Victory at last. Following judicial review proceedings, issued by Good Law Project alongside noted environmentalists Dale Vince and George Monbiot, Government has confirmed in its Energy White Paper that it does concede the need to review the Energy National Policy Statement.

A No Deal Brexit would cause – the medical evidence demonstrated – drug shortages with manifest risk to the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands.

Parliament adopted the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Act 2018 (section 55) which prevented the Government from concluding an agreement pursuant to which Northern Ireland would have different customs rules than the rest of the UK. We contended that the Withdrawal Agreement agreed in 2019 had that effect and was therefore illegal.

The Prime Minister stated that the UK would leave the EU on 31 October 2019 come what may, statements that could not be reconciled with his clear legal obligations under the Benn Act to request an extension.

We believe Uber has broken the law by failing to charge VAT on the taxi services it offers. The sums involved are enormous – perhaps a quarter of a billion pounds a year of VAT alone. And we don’t have confidence the tax man will collect that tax itself. So we have gone after Uber, and HMRC, ourselves.

We brought proceedings with Amalia Illgner against Tyler Brûlé’s media empire, Monocle. Monocle – an empire then given a nine-figure valuation – refused to pay minimum wage to those working in its offices.

Before Ms Miller’s case emerged into the public eye, we crowdfunded the case that eventually became the ‘People’s Challenge’. Alongside Ms Miller we successfully challenged the Government’s position that Article 50 could be triggered without Parliamentary authorisation.

The DUP admitted to having allowed itself to be used to funnel cash from a shadowy group called the Constitutional Research Council to the Leave side of the Referendum campaign. We believed – following the High Court’s decision in our case against the Electoral Commission – that the Constitutional Research Council had broken the law by not declaring the cash as its own spending. And we believed the DUP had broken the law by not properly checking the source of the cash.

The Good Law Project sought to establish, via the High Court of Ireland, whether our Parliament could, if it wanted to, reverse our decision to leave the EU.

We believed the Electoral Commission had failed both to investigate Vote Leave’s overspending and properly to apply the law. The Electoral Commission denied both allegations but a day before they knew we were going to start our claim against them, they agreed to reopen the investigation into Vote Leave. They subsequently agreed with us that Vote Leave had overspent – a decision Vote Leave accepted.

As you may recall, the High Court ruled that the Electoral Commission had misunderstood the law surrounding donations during the EU Referendum.

The Government commissioned studies into the economic impacts of Brexit for different sectors of the economy but refused to show those studies to Parliament – or the public.

Working with a cross party group of 75 MPs and Lords, led by Joanna Cherry QC MP, we challenged the unlawful suspension of Parliament, so that our elected MPs could do their job holding the Government to account.

On 29 March 2017, the UK sent a letter to Brussels notifying it of our intention to leave the EU under Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union. Immediately, the clock started ticking down to 29 March 2019 (unless any extension was agreed by the EU27).