bens_dad

“For years, the Mail has campaigned against the insidious undermining of the sovereignty of parliament by the remote, unaccountable ECHR” - Daily Mail, June 1922.

But now they are refusing to comply with a data subject access request from Jo Maugham, claiming it “would be wholly disproportionate and an unwarranted interference with its Article 10 rights”.

As part of Radio Four's Boys Week, Thursday's "Woman's Hour" https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001yqyk was about boys.

From 18:30 to 23:15 a mother tells about her gender-questioning son who two years later appears not to be going to transition. Does anyone have any idea how many children do have a gender-questioning period and then decide that their birth assignment was right for every one who concludes they were wrongly assigned at birth?

From:
https://goodlawproject.org/high-court-slaps-down-fanciful-prosecution-of-trudi-warner/

The High Court has slapped down the solicitor general’s “fanciful” attempt to prosecute Trudi Warner for contempt of court, declaring that the minister had “significantly mischaracterise[d] the evidence”.
...
But the judge was clear that if the solicitor general wants to address this concern, he should do it in parliament, “not by way of contempt proceedings”.

I hope that the Solicitor General does not see the latter as an invitation.

Some of the high street banks make money by funding the fossil fuel industry. There is an organised campaign to have a mass switch away from these banks to ones that don't enable climate change:
https://justmoney.org.uk/the-big-bank-switch/

Some good thoughts on where open source is going
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rust-road-salvation-perdition-linux-ecosystem-david-edelsohn

Planning to do something that uses a lot of electricity ?
You can now get a forecast of how carbon intensive (not-green?) your mains electricity
over the next few days, available at https://www.carbonintensity.org.uk/

For those of you on Windows 11, your computer may even schedule updates at a low carbon time of day:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-update-is-now-carbon-aware-a53f39bc-5531-4bb1-9e78-db38d7a6df20

Sadly, this may even be a reason to have an internet connected washing machine or tumble drier.

Testing the new dreamwidth "Create Entries" page since DreamWidth are warning (https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/42768.html) that this is our last chance to complain before it goes live and the old one goes away.

From GoodLaw:

https://goodlawproject.org/update/win-private-equity-managers-could-face-420m-annual-bill-after-legal-challenge/

In May, we took legal action with the founder of Ecotricity, Dale Vince, to force the UK tax authorities to admit that some private equity fund managers have been paying tax at the wrong rate for more than 35 years.

Since 1987, HMRC has taxed the money that managers receive from private equity funds as capital gains – at a rate of 28% – instead of as trading income, which is taxed at 47%. This has seen Government losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year – enough to pay the salaries of more than 10,000 nurses.

We argued that this practice was unlawful in the case of buyout funds, which buy mature companies with borrowed money, use the company’s assets and income to pay off the debt, then sell them on.

HMRC has now conceded the key argument we raised, accepting that the money that managers receive from buyout funds – known in the trade as their “carried interest” – “would be taxable as trading income in the hands of UK tax resident individuals. HMRC would expect such individuals to file their self-assessment returns accordingly.”

Since buyout funds make up around 70% of the private equity industry, this would net the Government a further £420m a year in tax.

Our director Jo Maugham, also a leading tax KC, said: “Private equity fund managers have been grossly undertaxed since 1987, not because of the law but because of the political pressure put on HMRC by Government. This stance could be easily reversed, without any change in legislation, and should be. I hope a future Government takes that step.”



We’re thrilled to have achieved this win with Dale Vince and are grateful for the support of Phil White from Patriotic Millionaires, who helped to fund the legal counsel we needed. We’re also thankful to Dan Neidle at Tax Policy Associates, whose research sparked the idea for this legal action.


We’re especially grateful to our supporters who donated to this challenge. We’re not going to stop using the law to create a fairer, greener, better future for the UK – but we can only do it with your help.

Help us keep up the fight
Thank you,

Good Law Project Team

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/14/our-health-data-is-about-to-flow-more-freely-like-it-or-not-big-techs-plans-for-the-nhs

From a 38 Degrees email:
Under plans to build a new centralised NHS database, for-profit tech giants could soon have access to our medical history. The Government is about to award a £500 million contract to build the database to a big tech company. The frontrunner, Palantir, has a Trump-supporting CEO with links to anti-birth control start ups. It’s alarming - but nothing is set in stone.

That’s why, together, we need to shine the spotlight on these questionable deals being negotiated right now. A huge petition, signed by hundreds of thousands of us, is the perfect first step in kicking off a massive campaign that leaves the Government in no doubt that we, the British people, demand that our NHS data doesn’t end up in the hands of big private tech companies.

You can sign a petition calling on Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, to keep NHS records out of the hands of big for-profit tech companies?
SIGN THE PETITION
https://act.38degrees.org.uk/act/keep-nhs-patient-data-out-of-the-hands-of-big-tech-companies-petition

The NHS holds some of the richest sets of population-wide health data in the world but right now it’s largely stored in different GP offices, hospitals - all over the place. [4] To improve efficiency, the Government wants to bring it all together in a centralised database. It would help caregivers make quicker and more robust decisions and improve how the Government targets services and healthcare spending.

Lots of us agree this needs to happen - but it's need to be done the right way, with patients put before profits. Because scandals, like Google’s AI firm DeepMind using NHS patient records to build their own apps, shows how powerful data in the wrong hands could be misused.

That’s why back in 2014 when the Government tried to introduce this system, with the involvement of big private tech companies, we kicked off a massive campaign that gained heaps of press attention, got the NHS around our negotiating table and ultimately forced the Government to abandon their plans. But the dust has settled and now they're trying to quietly push this through again. We won then and with your help we can win again.

Giovanna, a grandmother and town councillor, was imprisoned for breaching a court order that banned her from explaining the reasons for her peaceful protest in court. She spoke to Good Law Project about why she’s launched an appeal, even though she’s already served her time in prison.
Gio’s story:

https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/climate_silencing/