An update for our GoFundMe supporters.

Here are some examples of what we have been doing, with links to blog posts we have published over the past year.

The most recent has been to do with voter registration and tactical voting.

We will be publishing further articles on our blog and the social media between now and polling day

Following the passing of the Benn Act, there was much speculation about whether the government could use EU law, an Order in Council or the Civil Contingencies Act to frustrate Parliament. Using our own expertise and pulling together other material, we were able to contribute to the debate by showing how it wasn’t possible for the Government to ignore Parliament.

As with everything we have done over the past 3 and a half years we have shared the results of our investigations ana analysis publicly through our blog and social media posts as well as directly to other campaign groups and co-ordination groups.

We have also been working with other campaigns to publicise how the Government is intent on excluding voters, or refusing to acknowledge how the democratic process in the UK fails to take into account the Internet world we live in and how vulnerable our democratic process is to being corrupted by moneyed interests and foreign countries’ interference.

Of course, there has been a great deal of work promoting the challenges flowing from the ground-breaking work we did which led to the Three Knights Opinion. We didn’t take a position as a claimant or intervener in the successful Andy Wightman challenge on the revocability of the Article 50 notification.

We judged, correctly, that there was nothing further that The People’s Challenge could add to the chances of success by doing so. Nevertheless, the ruling from the CJEU that the notification could be unilaterally revoked justified the money spent commissioning the Three Knights Opinion and the time explaining why the challenge was essential and would be successful, From the Three Knights Opinion to the CJEU ruling on Article 50 – A long year’s journey into light.

What next

As the current, increasingly autocratic and “fact free” government takes a more and more extreme stance and is prepared to walk away from membership of the EU with “No-Deal”, we have to take stock of the consequences of that, so that we can engage the legal teams required to challenge/fight the inevitable consequences for UK citizens.

Whether it involves challenging the UK government again over its aspirations to ignore Parliament, challenging the EU on the way it has treated UK citizens, or challenging the discriminatory way UK citizens have been treated in general depends on collecting the evidence and being able to fund the challenges.

The work behind the Millions in The Margins will guide what needs to be done. That the UK and the EU have found it politically expedient to ignore UK citizens and their EU rights and interests is no reason to allow them to abrogate their responsibility to all 65 million UK citizens.

Although nobody will want to pay for visas or health insurance for trips (business or pleasure) to the EU, for example, that’s only part of what we are talking about here, UK citizens wherever they live are not getting a fair BREXIT deal from the EU.

in the EU and reside in the UK, or do you have dependent family members elsewhere in the EU…? The list is extensive. Have you made a professional, family or financial commitment on the basis of your EU citizenship and the UK’s EU membership?

This will help us put the “meat on the bones” of the work we have already done with our Legal Milestones and Millions in the Margins analyses.

Apart from the Brexit related work, there are also worrying commitments in the General Election manifestos: both the Tories and Labour will repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act, handing back to the Prime Minister the power to dissolve Parliament; the Tories will extend the Voter Id trials and “stop the harvesting of postal votes”, both of which will see people in the poorest groups of society, together with the elderly, ethnic minorities and the homeless, threatened with being disenfranchised.

There will undoubtedly be more “devil in the detail” of the manifestos, particularly with as yet vague proposals in the Tory manifesto to examine “the relationship between Government, Parliament and the courts” and “ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of the individuals against an overbearing state, while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays”.

No prizes for guessing the government hasn’t enjoyed some recent appearances in the Supreme Court where it was judged to have fallen foul of the law (i.e. lost).

____________________________________________________

The People's Challenge - logoWe greatly value your support. Many of you have been with us for a good while and have donated not just once but multiple times. We thank you all for it, and we do know that there are practical limits to what people can contribute.

Whether you can donate right now or not (if you can, please click on the image above to do so), please spread the word among your contacts and on social media. Have you got a fiver you could spare for us? Could you spare us a fiver next month, the month after…?

Our ability to continue this work teeters on a knife edge and relies on the directors covering the shortfall.

This is how we are funded, we receive nothing from the big campaign groups, business, philanthropic bodies, political parties…

We follow matters as they develop. They’re always volatile, and in these times of Brexit extensions and now a General Election it means that days’ or weeks’ worth of work has to be set aside or even lost completely as the situation changes.

Our aim is to help people to see what’s going on, to understand what they are (or aren’t) being told, and to decide what’s best for our country: what’s really in the national interest, what protects fundamental citizenship rights and ensures that Parliament and not the executive (the government) is sovereign.

To help protect our fundamental rights, and support Parliament in safeguarding them, please support The People’s Challenge, so we can continue to help make your voice heard.

There’s still a long way to go (despite the repeated  ”fixed” deadlines) and there are no guarantees about the outcome. The only thing that’s certain is that if we stop trying, we will fail.

As we all know, without organisers there can be no effective campaign, without a client there can be no legal/judicial challenge.

Please share this article as widely as you can, and thank you again for your support.

You can follow us via our blog, on Twitter @PeoplesChalleng and our Facebook page.

Published by Grahame Pigney on behalf of The People’s Challenge Ltd.

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s