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A Key Labour Court Battle & Nobody Told You?

Updated: Feb 25, 2021

Today saw the first preliminary hearing for Neslen and others vs Evans, a key Labour left court case seeking to serve justice for eleven victims of unlawful Labour Party disciplinary procedures.



The final outcomes of these challenges may set precedent which sees your rights as party members enforced through the courts. Rights such as being able to reasonably expect the party to abide by its own Rule Book and public statements it makes such as that time Keir Starmer declared that the party was adopting all of the recommendations of the EHRC report in full. Well it turns out he has not and refuses to apply those good standards in outstanding cases...


Many of these members have been suspended for years. Several have never been told what they are suspended for. You may agree that is pretty basic requirement, but unfortunately the party does not act in accordance with natural justice.


The hearings oday was before Master Lisa Anne Sullivan QC. The claimants where represented by Maya Lester QC of Brick Court Chambers and Jamie Potter of Bindmans.


Today's hearing was initially scheduled to join five claimants to an existing group of six before the final hearing. However, in an eleventh hour desperate move the party folded and dropped all charges against three proposed claimants forcing the them to withdraw from the case as the primary "relief" had been achieved. A massive victory for these grass roots members who you will be able to welcome home inside of Labour tonight! Because of this victory the purpose of the case was to join two claimants; Alma and Sameh to the existing group of six. Additionally there where issues of preliminary hearings the party wished to attain orders for.


These newly closed cases provided different perspectives on problems which were otherwise identical to the rest of the claimants and would have helped win the final case. However, it appears that the party did not believe that these three cases would stand up to legal scrutiny, and decided the better option would be to drop them entirely.


So with only two left to join the action the case proceeded. A hearing initially listed for the morning dragged on to 4pm further increasing costs to both parties before Master Sullivan could make a judgment.


Master Sullivan found in favour of the claimants on all counts which were the matter of joining the cases and some other preliminary hearings over minor matters which would have doubled the court time required. Master Sullivan ordered the Labour Party pay the claimants costs of £25,000.

To date the Party's external defence has racked up a princely sum of £53,000 in costs across the last couple of weeks. Not to mention in house counsel time and staff time which has been misused.


Today alone the party has blown £78,000 of your membership fees, union fees and kind donations attacking eleven of your fellow members on spurious charges and this is only the beginning. By the time the case is over we can expect these figures to increase exponentially and the party has adopted a strategy of gambling with your money in the hope that claimants will be frightened by the high stakes and quit.


The future is bleak for the party if they continue behaving this way. The party revealed in documents submitted to the court that they have over 200 outstanding disciplinary cases giving some indication of the extent of the financial trouble the party could be in if it does not learn its lesson and avoid getting into these situations.


One argument against joining these cases was that it could potentially cause a "floodgate" effect of all these members joining cases together to access affordable justice. This is basically the whole point of joinder applications. Such applications save the courts time and everybody on either side the risk of losing many multiple times the costs.


If all disciplinary cases are handled by the party in this way (and there is a lot of evidence they are) then the party simply can not afford to continue and could lose a hundreds of thousands of pounds across the next two years in similar cases if they only ever had one preliminary hearing each before ending through the party giving up. The author fears the true potential litigation liability based on a minimum of 200 cases is in the millions.


Which rich donors are going to pay for that? The last time Labour was getting private donations of this scale was the cash for honors scandal. A matter which still damages public faith in elected office to this day.


We need a Labour Party that can afford to fight the Tories in election campaigns without selling out and the current management is too busy fighting the members to provide both.


The next hearing will be scheduled in front of the Queens Bench Division at some point between the 8th June and 30th July. Subscribe to follow this case and please give a little to The Left Legal Fighting Fund.






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