Courts and Parties

Ali v. Green Party

This is an important case, I’ve just run across, where the courts have ruled on the impact of the Equalities Act on the internal operations of a political party.

This is a shorter summary

Basically, the complainant alleged that he had been discriminated against because of his gender critical beliefs.

The judge found that Parliament would not have meant to limit or control the internal operations of political parties, and the contest of ideas. He did find, however, that the complainant had been poorly treated due to unfair processes being used to remove him.

This is important for us, as it means things like our membership restrictions would likely survive a legal challenge, and to the extent that our rulebook prescribes a disciplinary process, as long as we follow that, we should be protected from judicial interference.

That said, the Green Party has had to spend over a million pounds defending itself from this and similar cases.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dgd9d9503o

It’s worth noting, although Ali was only granted £9k in compensation, the court, because it had rule in his favour on one out of twenty odd allegations, awarded costs of 60% of his spend (this amounted to £90K).