Bereavement For Her, Strike Out For Me
When Cummins wheeled her in, I did not treat her like an enemy. I treated her like a human.
Their in house man, Jiten Kotecha, emailed the tribunal to say she had suffered a bereavement. The subtext was clear enough. If she turns up off her game, this explains it. Get the mitigation on the record in advance.
I did not jump on it. I replied with condolences. I made it clear I would not object if they wanted an adjournment to give her breathing space. Cummins declined to ask for one. They chose to press on with the hearing anyway, bereavement flagged, excuse banked.
At the video preliminary itself the judge went out of his way to be sympathetic to her position. Soft tone, generous comments, signalling that he understood she was under strain. I echoed that. I matched the judge. I did the human reaction. However hard Cummins had gone at me, I was not going to kick a barrister who had just been put before the court as grieving while her own client insisted on rolling the hearing.
Now park that and look at what she is doing for Cepac.
Same barrister. Different client. Same disabled claimant. Different class of Human Being. This time she is preparing an aggressive strike out of my case. She will have read the papers. She will have seen the internal emails and timings. She will know exactly what they have done to a disabled applicant, and she is still happy to front a strategy that tries to weaponise my distress and disability against me as “conduct”.
So the record is simple. When Kotecha told the tribunal she had a bereavement, I treated her like a person. I softened my stance. I offered not to oppose an adjournment. I put decency ahead of point scoring. Faced with my medical evidence and the mess these companies have made of my life, she has gone the other way. She has chosen to be the sharp end of their attack.
She is very good at the law. No argument there. But if you can look at a disabled claimant in this state, having already seen what two sets of respondents have done, and still take the brief to crush him, then you are not just a hard nosed advocate. You are simply fucking empty where the human bit is meant to be.
Lee Thompson – Human Being first, Founder of The Cummins Accountability Project second