Once again thank you to everybody who has pledged money to support this challenge and get us through our first target of £50,000 and up to the £56,000 currently pledged.
When the initial work behind the People’s Challenge to the Government on Article 50 was started by Jolyon Maugham back at the end of June and we started to put the group of concerned citizens together, we knew the fundraising was going to be hard work and would rely on the help and generosity of ordinary people.
We made a conscious choice to follow the strategy of establishing the legal premise, putting a specialist legal team in place which would be able to make the arguments, and then asking people to pledge money.
This meant that those supporting the People’s Challenge knew exactly, who is in the legal team, and the arguments we are making.
We also needed to bring together a representative group of concerned citizens:
UK citizens in the UK;
UK citizens resident overseas (Expatriates);
and citizens of overseas territories like Gibraltar.
The group, Grahame Pigney, Robert Pigney, Paul Cartwright, Chris Formaggia & Tahmid Chowdury, representing ALL UK Citizens, including expatriates, was notified to the court on 2nd August. It has since been enlarged by Fergal McFerran from Northern Ireland joining us.
Even though this would mean that we were going to be fund raising during the holiday period and the Olympics we knew we could not expect people to back us unless we had done the groundwork and established a proper basis for the challenge we were making.
For this reason we set the initial target at £50,000, a sum that would allow further preparatory work to be done and make the written submission, including depositions from our group of concerned citizens, as well as testing the support for this People’s Challenge.
We knew that if we achieved this initial target it would give us and our supporters the confidence that the full target of £150,000 is possible.
What we had not allowed for was the stunning success of Team GB in Rio, which succeeded in keeping just about all other news out of the media.
Thanks to the generosity and support of all of you we have raised the initial £50,000 in the first 3 weeks. This will allow John Halford at Bindmans to start the next stage of preparing our case, the written submissions.
We have extended the campaign period to 3rd October. With the holiday period over and Brexit now back in the headlines, we are certain that we will achieve our £150,000 overall target.
A recent press release produced some surprising results. An article sent out by Richard Wheeler of the Press Association was picked up by the Express as being a direct appeal to Brexiteers to support our challenge. But reading the comments at the bottom of the Express article, it seems very likely that at least some of those who campaigned so noisily on the platform of “Take Back Control” don’t actually want that control to reside with the UK’s Parliament.
There have also been articles in the Mail, Huffington Post, on AOL, plus some regional papers. It also produced a phone interview between myself and Ian Dale on LBC (30th).
Once again thank you for your support. If you would help spread the word to others or perhaps you could find a little more to pledge during this second phase, Paul, Chris, Tahmid, Fergal, Rob and myself would very much appreciate it.
Grahame Pigney
Our Crowd Justice Campaign page is People’s Challenge to the Government on Art. 50
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The People's Challenge 