Horsfield Menzies Blog vs Behaviour : Angus Menzies – Victimisation For Dummies?

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Angus Menzies has written a handy guide to victimisation. He called it simply “VICTIMISATION”, but TCAP prefers the more practical title. His advice is straightforward: do not retaliate against somebody because they complain about discrimination, understand what counts as a protected act, examine the context and remain alert to detriments that follow. Excellent. Now let us apply Angus Menzies’ own fucking lesson to the conduct of Horsfield Menzies in my disability-discrimination case. This should be educational.

Angus begins with the kind of sentence that makes you wonder whether somebody at Horsfield Menzies has secretly started writing TCAP prompts. Employers, he explains, will generally understand that the Equality Act prevents retaliation against workers who complain about unlawful discrimination. Subjecting somebody to a detriment because they have carried out a protected act can amount to victimisation.

His article then considers Kokomane v Boots Management Services Ltd, where the interesting question was how explicitly an employee needed to identify discrimination before a complaint attracted protection. Importantly, the answer was not simply a matter of hunting for particular magic words. Context mattered.

Employers, therefore, were expected to join the dots.

Wonderful.

Angus Menzies has supplied the fucking marking scheme.

Lesson One : Find The Protected Act

Kokomane interested Angus because the complaint in that case did not march into the room wearing an Equality Act sandwich board. Instead, the Tribunal had to consider how the words would reasonably be understood against their wider background.

My case requires considerably less detective work.

I brought disability-discrimination proceedings under the Equality Act 2010.

Section 27 expressly identifies bringing proceedings under the Act as a protected act. Consequently, nobody needed to infer discrimination from a vaguely worded grievance, excavate hidden meaning from an email or consult the office oracle.

The fucking thing came labelled.

My claim was issued on 18 November 2024. It alleged that Page had moved me towards an interview for a Cepac production role, discussed the wage, asked about the gap in my employment history and then heard me explain the mental-health reason for that gap. Afterward, the promised interview confirmation never arrived. Cepac disputed that account and also disputed disability.

So Angus can put the highlighter away.

Protected act identified.

Now we get to the interesting bit.

Angus Says Look At What Happens Next

One passage from the Horsfield Menzies article deserves particular attention. Angus warns employers of the possibility that victimisation may be alleged where a perceived detriment follows certain complaints.

That is his framework.

Protected act first.

Possible detriment afterward.

Context around the two.

Now open the Cepac file.

My Equality Act claim was issued on 18 November 2024. By 31 January 2025, Cepac, represented by Horsfield Menzies, had already applied to strike it out. Then, by March, Sam Butler was discussing converting a case-management preliminary hearing into a public hearing capable of determining that strike-out application. Costs and medical disclosure were also firmly in play.

In other words, a disability-discrimination claimant brought Equality Act proceedings and, within weeks, his conduct had become a proposed route to ending them.

I am merely following Angus’ instructions here.

Look at the context.

The Dots Arrived Pre-Joined

Fortunately, we do not need to speculate about when the conduct strategy emerged.

Employment Judge James later recorded it.

At paragraph 173 of the April 2026 judgment, he said I had known that “the respondent was intending to rely on his conduct as a reason for strike out since early 2025.”

Thanks, Judge.

Accordingly, the Tribunal itself places the respondent’s conduct-based strike-out strategy in early 2025. That is useful because Angus tells employers to examine what follows a protected complaint, while the file shows his own firm’s client already preparing to use my conduct as a reason to destroy an Equality Act claim within months of issue.

At this point, Victimisation For Dummies is starting to resemble the illustrated edition.

First, Dispute The Disability

Cepac did not simply defend the underlying recruitment allegation. It also disputed that I met the Equality Act definition of disability and put me to proof.

Fair enough. Once disability is contested, medical evidence becomes relevant.

So the evidence arrived.

On 14 March 2025, my GP, Dr Melanie Pritchard, recorded a history of depression and anxiety, difficulty controlling emotions and particular difficulty managing frustration under stress. Those problems, she said, significantly affected daily life.

Nothing about that wording requires specialist interpretation.

Stress.

Frustration.

Difficulty controlling emotions.

Horsfield Menzies had the fucking manual.

Moreover, the eventual Tribunal judgment itself accepted in principle that my medical condition may lead at times to emotional dysregulation. Consequently, this was not some explanation invented retrospectively after relations had collapsed. The vulnerability was sitting there in the medical evidence while the litigation was still developing.

Then Horsfield Menzies started pulling triggers and collecting the reactions.

Read The Manual. Press The Buttons. Photograph The Warning Lights.

This is where the sequence becomes especially unpleasant.

Cepac demanded proof of disability. Horsfield Menzies sought medical records. Those records and the GP evidence explained how the condition could manifest, including emotional dysregulation and difficulty managing frustration under stress.

Meanwhile, the litigation itself became increasingly adversarial. Strike-out, costs, public-hearing applications, arguments about attendance, medical disclosure and challenges to postponement all accumulated. Even my healthcare arrangements became something the opposing solicitors were prepared to investigate.

As my responses became angrier, sharper and eventually public, those reactions were increasingly accumulated as evidence that the claim itself should die.

The sequence is therefore worth stating plainly: demand evidence explaining the disability; obtain evidence explaining the reaction; continue applying pressure directly engaging the identified vulnerability; collect the reaction; then use the reaction to seek strike-out.

Angus, mate.

Your article said context.

TCAP is simply doing the homework.

Sam Butler Finds The Pressure Dial

By March 2025, Horsfield Menzies’ approach was already well established. Butler opposed postponement and argued that being unfit for work did not mean I could not attend a hearing. He also told the Tribunal that neither it nor the respondent could wait indefinitely until I considered myself ready to proceed.

Then the firm went further.

Horsfield Menzies contacted my medical centre, obtained information about alternative appointments and clinician availability, and Butler subsequently argued that it would be more expedient for me to move my healthcare than for the Tribunal to move the preliminary hearing.

Remember what the medical evidence said.

Stress.

Frustration.

Emotional regulation.

Yet the firm holding that information continued turning the pressure dial and later pointed at what came out of the machine.

Very clever.

Very professional.

Very fucking compatible with Angus’ advice about examining context.

Meanwhile, The Costs Meter Keeps Running

Financial pressure arrived alongside the procedural pressure.

During March 2025, Butler placed increasingly substantial potential costs exposure into correspondence. One letter estimated that Cepac’s costs could eventually reach around £25,000 to £30,000 and described my conduct in terms including “quite frankly bizarre and utterly vexatious”.

Later, Cepac formally sought £24,683.50.

Eventually, the Tribunal awarded £20,000.

Again, Angus tells employers to think carefully about detriments following protected acts. Therefore, let us inventory what followed mine.

I brought disability-discrimination proceedings. Cepac contested disability. Medical disclosure followed. A conduct-based strike-out strategy emerged in early 2025. Horsfield Menzies pursued costs, challenged postponement, examined medical material, contacted my medical centre and increasingly placed my behaviour at the centre of the litigation.

Ultimately, the underlying discrimination allegation never reached a completed merits trial.

My conduct did.

Perhaps Angus could turn that chronology into a CPD handout.

The Medical File Becomes An Instruction Manual

What makes this particularly grim is that Horsfield Menzies did not merely know I had some generic mental-health diagnosis.

The firm possessed evidence explaining how the disability could manifest under pressure.

That distinction matters.

Knowing somebody has anxiety is one thing. Receiving medical evidence describing difficulty controlling emotions and frustration under stress is something else entirely, particularly when your own litigation strategy then increases the stress and later treats the resulting dysregulation as evidence of unreasonable conduct.

By then, the medical evidence had effectively supplied the warning label.

The conduct bundle documented what happened after the warning.

Yet Horsfield Menzies treated those two things as though they lived on different planets.

That is not sophisticated contextual analysis.

It is reading page one, triggering precisely what page one describes and then filing page two as evidence of defective character.

Angus Says Context Matters. His Firm Preferred Screenshots.

By April 2026, the respondent’s dedicated strike-out material had become enormous.

Strike Out Evidence Part 1 contained extracts from my communications and blog material. Strike Out Evidence Part 2, meanwhile, contained extracts from my X accounts. Together, those dedicated collections occupied pages 1409 to 1599 of the combined bundle.

That is 191 pages curated specifically around conduct.

The main hearing bundle itself ran to 1,657 pages excluding the index.

Apparently nobody at Horsfield Menzies struggled to locate context when the context was a rude post that they had simply decided was aimed at them (and usually wasn’t).

Those could be collected by the hundredweight.

By contrast, the broader causal sequence received rather less enthusiasm: discrimination complaint, Equality Act claim, disputed disability, medical vulnerability, mounting pressure, reaction, further pressure, more reaction, screenshot, bundle, strike-out.

The respondent developed an industrial capacity for documenting the smoke while behaving as though discussion of who kept feeding the fucking furnace was beside the point.

Angus Even Received The Complaint

This is my favourite part because Angus Menzies was not simply an author sitting safely outside the dispute, explaining victimisation to employers from behind a professional biography.

I emailed him.

On 23 March 2025, my complaint about Sam Butler went directly to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin.

Directly.

Not through a generic enquiry form. Not into some administrative abyss. Not tied to a balloon and released over Altrincham.

Their actual inboxes.

Among other things, the complaint raised the use of disability-related medical information, contact with my medical centre, costs pressure and litigation conduct. Then, the following day, I asked whether the complaint would be investigated and when I could expect an outcome.

No investigation outcome was communicated to me. In fact, Daniel Rubin responded, effectively telling me they wouldn’t be engaging with it.

Consequently, Angus had yet another piece of context available to him.

His own article tells employers that even complaints which do not explicitly spell out discrimination may require contextual treatment. Mine arose from a live disability-discrimination case and complained about how the lawyers defending that case were behaving.

No dots needed joining.

The dots had fucking email addresses.

Victimisation For Dummies : Advanced Module

At this stage, Angus’ article can comfortably be converted into a workbook.

Start with the protected act: Equality Act disability-discrimination proceedings. Next, consider what potentially detrimental treatment followed: strike-out, costs, medical disclosure battles, public-hearing pressure, conduct allegations and, eventually, the destruction of the claim without a completed merits trial.

Then examine knowledge and context. Horsfield Menzies knew the case concerned disability, obtained medical evidence explaining emotional dysregulation under stress and received a direct complaint about the way the litigation was being conducted.

Finally, look at what happened afterward.

The conduct case kept growing.

Angus says context should be examined.

Apparently that principle works beautifully until the context belongs to the disabled claimant opposing his own fucking firm.

Procedure Is Such A Lovely Word

Litigation possesses a wonderful linguistic laundering machine.

Pressure becomes costs management. Mining medical records becomes forensic relevance. Calling a claimant’s healthcare provider becomes checking availability. Trying to end an Equality Act case becomes a strike-out application. Collecting hundreds of pages of reactions becomes evidential preparation.

Individually, every stage can be dressed in perfectly respectable procedural vocabulary.

However, Angus Menzies’ own article reminds employers that victimisation analysis is interested in more than the tidy label attached to each individual act. Context matters. Sequence matters. Knowledge matters. Most importantly, why something followed the protected act matters.

Suddenly, “procedure” is not the end of the conversation.

It is merely the wrapping paper.

The Underlying Case Never Reached A Completed Merits Trial

The eventual outcome is worth remembering because nobody should mistake it for some triumphant factual vindication of Cepac’s recruitment account.

There was no completed merits trial.

The underlying dispute was comparatively straightforward. I said Page had moved me toward an interview, discussed the wage, asked about my employment gap, heard the mental-health explanation and then failed to deliver the promised confirmation. Cepac denied that an interview had been offered and maintained that I had not been shortlisted.

Contemporaneous evidence exists.

Recruitment evidence exists.

Page evidence exists.

Those issues could have been tested.

Instead, the litigation developed an enormous second life centred on me: my emails, my tone, my complaints, my medical appointments, my social-media posts, my blog, my criticism of lawyers and eventually my criticism of judges.

Consequently, the case about whether Cepac discriminated against me became a case about how the disabled claimant behaved while trying to litigate whether Cepac discriminated against him.

That is quite a fucking procedural achievement.

Build The Pressure. Curate The Reaction.

The mechanism deserves scrutiny because it is more revealing than any isolated angry email.

Horsfield Menzies knew the medical position. It knew stress mattered. It knew emotional regulation under stress had been expressly identified in my GP evidence.

Nevertheless, the litigation remained aggressively adversarial.

Then the respondent curated manifestations of that distress as evidence against me.

That does not mean every angry email becomes automatically acceptable. It means something far more inconvenient for the clean narrative eventually presented against me.

The reactions did not happen in a vacuum.

Angus’ own article says context can be so important that employers may have to recognise a protected discrimination complaint even where the employee never expressly says “discrimination”.

Yet when the relevant conduct came from the disabled claimant opposing Angus’ own firm, context appeared to become optional.

The rude sentence could travel alone.

Everything preceding it could apparently miss the fucking bus.

Early 2025 Changes The Picture

Judge James’ judgment supplies an especially useful timestamp.

The respondent intended to rely on my conduct for strike-out since early 2025.

That matters.

The claim had only been issued on 18 November 2024. Accordingly, the conduct strategy was not some desperate response conceived after a year of TCAP, hundreds of articles or a spectacular late-stage collapse in relations.

It existed much earlier.

Afterward, later conduct simply kept being fed into it.

The basket was already there.

Horsfield Menzies kept collecting.

This is precisely why chronology matters, which is fortunate because Angus Menzies has kindly written an article explaining why chronology and context matter.

Again, TCAP is only following the instructions.

Angus Menzies : Join The Dots

Angus expressly tells employers to consider whether contextual dots need joining.

Fine.

Mine require very little artistic ability.

A disability-discrimination complaint leads into Equality Act proceedings. Disability is contested. Early in 2025, a conduct-based strike-out strategy exists. Medical disclosure follows, including evidence of emotional dysregulation under stress. The respondent increases procedural and financial pressure. Horsfield Menzies contacts the medical centre. Costs warnings continue. I complain directly about Butler to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin. No investigation outcome reaches me. Meanwhile, conduct evidence keeps accumulating until 191 dedicated pages of it sit inside the hearing material. Finally, the claim is struck out without the underlying discrimination dispute reaching a completed merits trial, and a £20,000 costs order follows.

Angus wanted employers to join dots.

I may have overachieved.

“Most Employers Do Not Intend To Retaliate”

Angus also writes that most employers do not intend to retaliate against people who complain.

Perhaps.

Fortunately, Equality Act litigation does not depend upon finding RETALIATION PLAN.docx sitting in somebody’s shared drive.

Instead, causation is examined through evidence.

Context matters.

Sequence matters.

What the decision-maker knew matters.

What followed the protected act matters.

Angus understands this perfectly well when he is advising employers. He explains it professionally, cites authority and encourages organisations to examine surrounding facts rather than relying on simplistic labels.

So TCAP has done exactly that with the file carrying his own firm’s name.

Suddenly, the article stops looking like generic employment-law content.

It starts looking like instructions left at the fucking scene.

Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour

This series keeps producing the same strange embarrassment.

Horsfield Menzies publishes remarkably sensible things.

Investigate properly. Understand disability. Prevent harassment. Respect equality. Examine context. Do not retaliate against people who complain about discrimination.

Meanwhile, its own litigation material keeps wandering into view behaving like the website and the case file have never fucking met.

Angus Menzies tells employers to understand protected acts broadly and pay attention to detriments that follow. Yet his firm represented Cepac after I brought a disability-discrimination claim and, within months, a conduct-based strike-out strategy was already in motion. Horsfield Menzies sought medical material describing how my condition manifested under stress. Pressure continued. My reactions became evidence. I complained directly to Angus about the tactics. No investigation outcome reached me. Eventually, the conduct file expanded until the underlying claim disappeared beneath it.

The merits never received a completed trial.

The reaction did.

That is the fucking story.

Victimisation For Dummies?

So thank you, Angus.

Genuinely useful article.

Section 27. Protected acts. Detriment. Context. Causation. Join the dots. Consider what the employer knows. Watch what happens next.

All excellent advice.

TCAP has now applied it to Horsfield Menzies.

If readers examine that chronology and decide it resembles precisely the kind of post-complaint retaliatory sequence Angus tells employers to scrutinise, they will not have reached that conclusion because TCAP invented some exotic new legal test.

Instead, they will simply have followed his fucking instructions.

Angus Menzies wrote VICTIMISATION.

Horsfield Menzies supplied the practical exercise.

Victimisation For Dummies?

Turns out the workbook was in the case file.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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