Allison Bailey v Stonewall - Employment Tribunal hearing Thread 2

[ickky]

The Tribunal started 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.

When joining the live tribunal
select the video and mic that are not crossed out, this is the courts vid and mic.
On the next page select NONE on the drop down windows for vid and mic, these are your own video and mic.

You must be muted so as to not disturb the hearing.

There is also live tweeting from twitter.com/tribunaltweets

Abbreviations:
AB: Allison Bailey, claimant
BC: Ben Cooper QC, barrister for AB
SW = Stonewall Equality Limited (respondent 1)
IO = Ijeoma Omambala QC, barrister for SW
RW = Robin White assisting IO
GC = Garden Court Chambers Limited (respondent 2) (GCC would be a better abbreviation)
AH = Andrew Hochhauser QC, barrister for GC
JR = Jane Russell assisting AH
RM= Rajiv Menon QC & SH = Stephanie Harrison QC (jointly respondent 3 along with all members of GC except AB)
EJ = Employment Judge Goodman hearing the case
Panel = any one of the three panel members (EJ and two lay members)

Allison Bailey v Stonewall - Employment Tribunal hearing Thread 1 👇

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4529887-Allison-Bailey-v-Stonewall-Employment-Tribunal-hearing?

Yes, just finished reading it myself. Devastating - can't wait for BC to take SW and GC(C) through it.

I cant get it out of my head since I finished reading it. The way they treated her, threw her under the bus indeed. My anger is now at boiling point - she must win. I can't quite believe what she was put through by the best legal minds in the land. It's beyond belief. Diversity and inclusion my arse, they should have lauded her, instead they crucified her. Familiar names popping up too Drummond, Jones etc. Just donated again.

Some news coverage by the BBC (but nothing in The Grauniad, naturally...): www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61326359

So much to read in that bundle!
Shocked at how GC treated one of their own.
The stonewall info reads like they are a student union.

I'm so hoping that we meet more of the GC team at the tribunal...

Some documents are here to read:

allisonbailey.co.uk/documents/

I still can't believe how much Alison has gone through. Reading her statement - especially the Garden Court bit - is like going through three years worth of the FWR board on steroids.

I hope Ben tears them to shreds and this gets widely reported on. It sounds like she has a strong case.

Spent several hours last night reading Allison's witness statement. Quite astounding stuff. It weaves through the timeline of what happened very well.

Another one whose jaw was on the floor in places. I was struck how petty and gossipy some of these people are. You tend to have an idea of barristers being very professional and considered people. I feel like I've been disabused of that notion a little.

I thought it was very illustrating as to how Stonewall (via the most activist members of the chamber) managed to convince almost the entire chambers of their wrong interpretation of equality law but also the level of support for their ideology out in the real world.

You can almost sense the penny drop when Allison's case really blew up in the press and online and she amassed a lot of support. By that time they were truly personally and professionally invested in Stonewall. The Diversity Scheme was embedded and they clearly felt no choice but to double down.

They were so convinced that Allison holding opinions of her own was damaging to the reputation of GCC they failed to realise the damage they were doing to their own reputation. I wonder if they realise now?

Do you remember when SW and GCC tried to have it struck out? (It’s on her website.) Judge Stout said, I think, that it was a strong case with more than a reasonable chance of success. I know that’s a legal form of words, but still, they mean something. Allison succeeded on another couple of case management/ financial matters too.

That was a good day in court for Allison.

I've not been keeping up but have just been going through some of the tribunal tweets to catch up. It's staggering to me how an outside organisation (SW) can present a proposal, join our diversity scheme, let's look at all your policies etc and a business (GCG) just throw the whole lot open to them.

I'll never know why there has been so much enthusiasm (not just GCG but all employers that hopped onto the scheme) to embrace this. What is the big deal about being able to say you are well up the ranking of SW approval? If you are an established business with good employee benefits people will want to work there anyway.

Meanwhile in the NHS hospitals are flooding the corridors with rainbow notices and telling the public they are working. Towards "Rainbow Badge Accreditation" which has Stonewall's fingerprints all over it.

It seems (from discussion in this thread) like GCC wanted to start up a specialist team on Trans Law, so there was a partnership situation proposed.

Can we have a reminder of what the correct settings are, please?

I have both my microphone and camera set to none. In addition, when logging in, I I need to select the black pair of audio and video icons from the Connect dropdown (none of the ones with a red circle)?

Well aren't GCC in quite the pickle?

A controversial campaigning charity that has been misrepresenting the law targets a barristers' chambers to set up a partnership that is mainly of benefit to the controversial campaigning charity, and the chambers full of lawyers goes along with it.

One barrister resists, and is punished for it.

Has anyone been able to view the public bundle? I haven't been able to open any of the links.

Thanks for doing the maths Spindle!

I never understand why the grassroots support demonstrated by these crowd funders isn't used as evidence of women's support across a wide range of people - some who can afford hundreds of pounds and others only a fiver. 8,900 people (probably mostly women) think Alison's right. OK, some people might have donated twice, so let's say 8,000. That's still not a 'fringe group of extremists'. If you look across all the GC crowdfunders, it must be thousands and thousands of women donating.

Normal women.

Many won't be able to donate to more than one crowdfunder at a time, I certainly can't, I have to think carefully where I put my money. I've got kids to feed, bills to pay. Increasing costs all around. When I donate to this, it's money that I could use for another pair of shoes or towards club fees or saving up for a holiday for my kids. It's not an easy decision. But I do think it's important for my children's future that sex-based rights are protected (they're girls) and we can talk freely about sex-based discrimination and oppression.

Allison is a total shero and a great role model for my daughters. Wishing her every success today.

Thank you JulesRimet for that link earlier, interesting. If only they'd taken another option. CriticalCondition, its certainly been very harmful for women🙁

I had a quick snoop around the rest of the blog, I was a bit taken aback to see all these ideas: transmen, cisgender, transwomen are women etc. being discussed in the late noughties - a decade before I ever heard about the issues! A different world with Julie Bindel being nominated for an award by Stonewall and Stonewall being against equal marriage.

(Sorry this is a bit OT)

Reading everything that Allison worked for, while I was still a teenager.
To look at someone at GCC bleat "But I'm still learning" in the face of this is... quite something.

What is the big deal about being able to say you are well up the ranking of SW approval?

It's about "DEI" stuff being embedded in organisations. If you have a "DEI" department, or some sort of commitment, how do you judge whether they're beneficial or not, or whether they're achieving anything? That's hard to do.

So to try to at least have something to measure, they or the staff working on it would love to have some sort of performance metric. And Stonewall will provide you one. Then they can say "see, we're at the top of these 'inclusion' charts, aren't we brilliantly diverse and inclusive, it's really worth while paying all of us DEI people lots more money!"

It's a symbiotic relationship between these campaigning groups and the "political orthodoxy" enforcers/grifters inside organisations.

And if a few annoying lesbians have to be thrown under the bus to get those inclusion points, hey, whatever.

Morning, apologies if this has been asked a million times before but how do you get the link to watch live? I have some time today for the first time. Thank you.

Instructions are in the op at the top of the page.

On the first page where you put your name, there is a box underneath, select the top option, the one where they are NOT crossed out, these are the courts video and microphone, so you can see and hear.

On the next page it asked for your own setting, you select none on both options so the court cannot hear or see you.

Re the clusterfuck that is DEI in organisations, I think there has been a total lack of leadership from the top down, by which I mean from the government, the government equalities office, and, until recently, the EHRC.

It's at least partially coming out in the wash now, with all these court cases and scandals.

Thank you Ickky. That is really useful. I’ve found that unlike the instructions, Safari works better than Chrome

Glory be!

The clerk muted everyone - so it can obviously be done easily.

I agree with this. I think it's also been a case of strategic ignorance. Equality issues have never really been important, and if they have then women's rights have always been at the bottom of the pile. I think many places always thought they could have a "plan" someone reports on once a few months where senior people um and ah about bits of it, and request an "update" in a few months' time. More than sluggish. A good way of getting nothing down for the relatively small cost of one E&D person.

It was harder to ignore disability matters but even they seem to have been casually disregarded these last few years. Too much work, I suspect. Easier to chuck a rainbow symbol on a Twitter handle, type something vacuous, and sit back, congratulate self on "being inclusive".

AB giving no fucks this morning 🤣