Allison Bailey v Stonewall - Employment Tribunal hearing

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The Tribunal will start on 25th April at 10am. If you would like to view online you need to send a request for access as early as possible.

Send an email to

[email protected]

The subject heading of the email request should read

“MEDIA OR PUBLIC ACCESS REQUEST – Case number 2202172/2020 - Ms A Bailey – 25th April 2022.

Then ask for the pin for the online access.

You will be contacted with instructions on how to observe the hearing.

I have sent a request but haven't had anything back yet. Hopefully nearer the time.

Excellent - BC has picked up on the discussion in the chat room about the difficulty of navigating the monster bundle 💥

Touche, Pluvia.

Tribual adjourning to make their decision. Resumption at midday.

Fascinating morning. I'm finding it incredibly restful listening to them taking their time to give a very detailed statement, and the judge patiently allowing them to finish. Compare to my workplace where we'd have been galloped through this process.

Cripes, they've had how long to get a workable bundle???

They’re really turning themselves inside out to try and avoid making the bundle available. Draw up an alternative index?? Jeez Louise

IO offering to prepare a new bundle?

I get the impression they've fucked this up hugely, submitted a huge guddlebeast of a doc.

Exactly, Domesticated.

I pity the poor bastard who is looking at a long day/night mucking about with it.

OMFG Just make it downloadable, the genie is getting out of the bottle whether they like it or not. FFS

So not just one huge bundle - TWO bundles. Twice the confusion, folks…….yippee……

asking for a night to fix it?

Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes to mind.

Wow, could they be any shiftier?

What are the implications if the document is made downloadable? I see something about "contempt of court" - does that mean that even if Stonewall have allowed embarrassing secrets to slip into the document no one would be allowed to write about or draw attention to that fact?

Also, is it a good sign that this judge was the judge for Appleby vs Tavistock? It must at least mean she hasn't swallowed the Bench Book, right?

The adjournment hasn't happened yet despite EJ's efforts and it relates to an application by the first respondent about, I believe, another witness/more evidence.

If one permits docs to be downloadable then one risks the vilification of some witnesses to be made easier

they know they’re in the wrong

this is damage control innit?

I wasn't going to download the bundle (I have more than enough to do/ read) but now I am, and I'm going to read as much as I can.

Bless EJ Goodman - her face!

This is not going to get finished in the time is it? Especially given that time was lost early on.

Resumption time will now be 12.15.

No, this is going to drag on. Just searching for relevant pages will probably eat up a day or two.

The good news is that Allison is backed by thousands of people — and the more GCC/ Stonewall go on about how the contents of their witness statements and evidence must remain a secret, the more people will come flocking to find out what's going on. So we can dig a bit deeper — deeper than Stonewall.

I hope someone from the Charities Commission is taking a look at this. Surely a charity having to find £100,000+ to defend itself, and arguing that the material it has submitted to the court can never be released to the public, needs to be investigated?

Donations are still coming into the crowdfunder, thankfully. I think the publicity - and publicity around Stonewall's delaying tactics - will encourage many people to keep digging.

What journalist now doesn't want to see and write about those witness statements? This has suddenly become a hot potato.

Nice one, SW and GCC.

I don’t understand how on Earth Stonewall think they can get away with witness statements and evidence being kept out of the public domain.

I was asked to give a witness statement by the police but refused as I couldn’t do so anonymously and I felt my safety was at risk if the accuseds knew my name. The police were very clear that it’s a central tenet of our legal system to know who had accused you, and for evidence to be held up to scrutiny, unless there are very good reasons for it to be hidden. And the case I was involved with didn’t meet that threshold, so I didn’t give a statement.

It’s almost like SW have got something to hide, isn’t it?

Reading the bundle now. I'm not sure where we stand with quoting any material from it so I won't, but it's evident there was at least some investment within GCC in a wide-ranging and strategic campaign to advance transgender rights through strategic litigation. That's not out of scope of what they were entitled to do, but it's definitely not something they are going to want in the public domain now the tide is turning.