 |
| Allison Bailey |
I'm afraid I'm probably the least surprised person in the UK that Allison Bailey, a London barrister, lesbian and co-founder of the LGB Alliance, finds herself having to sue Stonewall UK in conjunction with her former chambers in an Employment Tribunal having been driven out of chambers for alleged "transphobia." Allison Bailey is a feminist who supports womens' rights. Many lesbian, gay and bisexual people, have come to regard Stonewall as homophobic since it adopted wholesale the "queer theory" ideology of the modern "trans" cult, or Black Pampers as the bullying, fascistic ideologues have recently been christened, aptly as they walt at being a civil rights movement. Stonewall's history of fighting against equality for LGB people goes back rather further than even the advent of the modern "trans" cult. Stonewall UK has always been rather more concerned with maintaining its place in the Rights Industry at the forefront of suckling on the publicly funded teat.
People tend to forget that the United Kingdom has never really been all that united. The (only 101 year old) Northern Ireland has a separate legal system which ultimately derives from the English Common Law as applied in all of Ireland as the occupation by England and later Great Britain extended the pale, gradually supplanting the ancient indigenous Brehon Law, until in 1801 Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom. Wales has been subject to English common law since the conquest of the native princes by England. Scotland's lawyers werenae daft in 1707 and, like the Ministers of the Church of Scotland, they ensured that Scots Law, which derives more from a European legal tradition, survived the aristocratic sell-out of Scotland to England in 1707 to form Great Britain. Scots law had its own history of expansion, gradually supplanting the hybrid Norse Udal Law and Gaelic Brehon law in the Highlands and Hebrides and the Udal law in the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland). All 3 jurisdictions (England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) also have Statute Law, created by the Westminster and subsidiary parliaments / assemblies since incorporation into the "United" Kingdom. Until Brexit, UK citizens were also subject to EU law. Supra-National Law has not disappeared since Brexit. The UK has entered treaties both with other countries and international bodies. For example, the European Convention on Human Rights is not an EU entity, nor is the European Court of Human Rights which enforces the Convention.
Why the whistle-stop tour of UK law? Well, the law has always been an instrument to reinforce the wealth and power of those in power. Only since the worst excesses of the first half of the C20th, has law really attempted to regulate how those in power treat ordinary citizens. Forget the Westminster pantomime of slamming doors and Black Rod, the Commonwealth which replaced the Divine Right of the King turned out to be so genocidally bad and venal that the executed King's son was invited to resume the thrones of Scotland, England & Wales and Ireland! If you are one of those ordinary citizens wishing to redress a wrong suffered by yourself at the hands of the State, the obstacles are truly formidable! If the wrong was done by a UK institution which was your employer, and that institution was the Armed Forces; despite having been through the whole mill, I still hae ma doubts whether you'd be better reaching for the Mess Webley than to seek redress through the Courts.
Even as a military man, if you thought the MOD hierarchy was Byzantine and deferential, you ain't seen nothing yet until you've tackled the legal system! If you're at the forefront of 'new law', it's even worse. Navigating how all the different levels of Tribunals and Courts interact with each other and are bound by higher courts variously domestically in Scotland, between the Scottish Tribunals and Courts and those elsewhere in the Union, the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (now the UK Supreme Court), the European Court and the European Court of Human Rights, not to mention the more nebulous 'international best practice' which only really affects you once you reach the more stratospheric levels of this Byzantine hierarchy makes navigating Dante's Inferno look like a walk in the park. Once you reach the more stratospheric levels, the dramatis personae are even dressed in C18th costume, reinforcing what can more than appear to be the Swiftian satire you've somehow got yourself involved in.
How I ended up in this Swiftian satire of Establishment hypocrisy will have to wait until I can bother my backside to write some more. It'd be nice to think that events of the mid 90s were ancient history. I've kept schtum up to now, but all of the players will by now have finished their RAF careers, so I've no worries about affecting anyone else.
However, the story of how I became the first and last gay man in Scotland to have to sue for sex discrimination and sexual harassment and how that suit was sabotaged by Stonewall and the Labour Establishment, how the (Tory) Secretary of State for Defence ended up playing trains, how Loving and the US Supreme Court comes into it, and how the work done by me and my predecessors in getting equality for lesbian, gay and bisexual people was hijacked by the puerile, narcissistic "trans" cult will have to wait. I've just heard on the BBC Radio 4 news the latest instalment of the Partygate pantomime and the man I knew as Lt Chris Mackenzie-Geidt, who has obviously played the British Establishment game very well indeed, since he now sports all the Imperial baubles and accolades as Lord Geidt GCB GCVO OBE QSO PC FKC, is now at a bit of a crossroads and may have to exit stage left, albeit with a pension far better than I've got to look forward to! The Swiftian satire that is the British Establishment continues unabated, even if it is moving into more surreal Flann O'Brien territory. I need to switch off, change channel to be soothed by A Mire Ri Mòire and get on with other stuff at the moment.
