Jolyon explains how difficult it all is and how important he is and how necessary it is for everyone to send money.
Our work is funded by members of the public from whom we crowdfund. In our last financial year they contributed (as our soon to be published financial accounts will show) over 80% of our income. I am enormously proud of this – you are accountable to those who fund you and it is right that we be accountable to the public.
But the scope of our work is broad and our inboxes feel like a bottomless pit of human misery – from Black academics and other professionals, victims of sexual violence, trans people, whistleblowers and on and on. Those without money who try to live decent lives and do the right thing experience Britain as profoundly broken – its police, so-called justice system, its notional accountability mechanisms, the whole thing is broken – and frequently they find their way to our door. So there is huge need, and we lack the resources to even scratch the surface of it. We are constantly fundraising to do more.
To do more what? He doesn’t say. What they do is crowdfunded, he tells us, but what is the crowdfunding funding? What is it that they do? Besides telling us how important it is that they do what they do? And where the donate button is?
We are profoundly worried about the use of the US driven anti-trans playbook to target Black people. The same lawyers are being instructed, the same “journalists” are being briefed and are pushing the messages, the same tactics are being used (we have moved from “you are a victim of sexual violence not because of men but because of trans women” to “you are struggling not because of the increasingly wealth share of billionaires but because Black people are unfairly advantaged”); and the same press punishment beatings are being used to warn off those who want to advocate for Black community.
What? Who? Where? There’s a lot of passive voice, but no agents. Who is doing all this targeting and instructing and briefing and pushing and using? Funnily enough, he never says.
I have seen this coming for some months and I have been asking some bigger funders to fund us to work in this space – we know how the playbook plays out because we have seen it used on the trans community – but we have not succeeded in persuading those funders.
Seen what coming? What does “this” refer to? Besides the agent-free list of non-specific outrages?
Meanwhile, Good Law Project now has a huge new workstream connected to Professor Arday, an inbox bulging with requests for help from (understandably) terrified Black people. But little in the way of new resources with which to meet that huge extra demand.
What help? What kind of help? What’s he talking about? Does he mean legal help? If so why on earth doesn’t he spell out what his Project is doing? Why is he so systematically and blatantly vague and evasive?
He does finally tell us of one specific action, but after all that hand-waving it seems insufficient.
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