GINA MILLER

the businesswoman has twice led legal challenges against the government – and won

‘i grew up in British Guyana and watched children play in the streets wearing rags and with no shoes on their feet. I had a wardrobe of clothes and it felt wrong, so I sneakily gave them some of my dresses. That’s my first memory of having a sense that something wasn’t fair.

Since then I’ve spent my life campaigning on a range of issues and rose to prominence when I led the legal challenge against the Government in favour of giving MPS a say over triggering Article 50 – the legal mechanism taking the UK out of the EU. The morning after the referendum vote in 2016 I was distraught; not because Leave had won, but because I knew from months of campaigning that neither side had a plan of what would happen next. I thought somebody, somewhere was going to say something. But no one did.

That’s the thing with activism; people tend to assume they can’t make a difference, someone else will do it or something simply can’t be true. What I’ve found is the simplest questions are the ones people are the most afraid of asking. So I stood up and fought for our parliamentary sovereignty. I thought more people would join me, but they didn’t.

When Boris Johnson suspended Parliament in September I realised I was going to have to do it again. Once more, the highest court in the country ruled in my favour. I’ve never been afraid to ask the simple questions because they tend to be the ones that lead to huge consequences. Unless you call things out, injustices will continue to happen. It can be overwhelming to know where to start, but I don’t tend to look at things in their entirety, I take one step at a time. I’m proud my activism has created an environment where a Prime Minister can’t put themselves above the law now. We live in a democracy and my actions have preserved that. I’ve also found timing is crucial: I first started talking about the need for companies to take more responsibility when it comes to the environment nearly 10 years ago, but the oxygen for the conversation wasn’t there then. Now the timing is right and the world feels ready to address these issues. I’m hoping to get back to campaigning on other issues close to my heart soon.

The danger of activism becoming a trend, though, is that our views become black and white and we make short-term decisions because of the pressure to belong to a certain group or who shouts the loudest. That’s not the best way. We need to inform ourselves fully and look at all the possible solutions first. Being an effective activist isn’t an easy job. Sometimes the most successful activists are the ones who know how to bring people together or can provide the background knowledge to give others a voice.

Unfortunately, things appear to be going backwards in terms of respect for female activists and strong female voices. I’ve had my fair share of abuse and I’ve learned, if you’re a woman who sticks her neck out, you have a Teflon coating, know what you’re getting into and accept your weaknesses, faults and failures – then no one else will be able to break you down.

I’ve spent a long time working on myself and discovering what my weaknesses are. Now, if someone calls me a difficult woman I can say, you’re probably right, and so? What I didn’t expect was the sheer volume of the daily death and gang rape threats and, most recently, discovering someone set up a crowdfunding page to hire a hitman to kill me. Much of this abuse is related to my race, not just my gender.

It makes me cry. It gets to be too much and I need to let it out. But then I get up and carry on. I’m pretty good at compartmentalising the abuse I get, but what hurts the most is the fact my three children are so often dragged into it. They’re the target of kidnapping and death threats and that is truly heart-breaking. We’ve been living on high alert for four years now and it’s exhausting.

I’m not a public figure so there’s only so much the police can do, which means I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of my own money over these three years, when you add up the legal costs, security and people to support me. One of the attacks often thrown at me is that I’m privileged, or that it can’t possibly be my money. Yes, I’m lucky I can afford to protect myself, but my family and I barely go out any more. Saying that, I think one of the most important things we can do is to be involved and responsible in the society we live in. Like anything, activism takes practice. But my philosophy is simple:

I wake up and I think I’m going to do my best today.’

‘people tend to assume they can’t make a difference – that someone else will do it...’