In my skeleton argument for the EAT, I tried to convince them that the Tribunal should have made a distinction between the things to which I objected and the things that caused my resignation:

My appeal to the EAT was mainly based on paragraph 12 of the Tribunal’s Decision, which, after an irrelevant discussion about whether I had suggested to Grattan plc that they change that part of the Stop and Search policy concerning suspension of employees, went on to state that:

"It matters not because in the end the real concern and objection was in respect of the randomness of the searches. At page 133 of the of the bundle, in a letter to the respondent dated 3 September 2001 the Appellant stated:

Paragraph 12 ended there. So that you can draw your own conclusions, I shall quote paragraphs 13 and 14 of the Tribunal’s Decision in their entirety:

To be fair, I must point out that the Tribunal did, in another part of their Decision, acknowledge that I particularly objected to random body searches and mobile ‘phone searches. (That is not the same as acknowledging that those were the only features of the policy that caused my resignation.) However, I thought that for the Tribunal to use a quotation stating that I am prepared to tolerate a considerable amount of random Stop and Search, to justify a conclusion that I would not tolerate any, showed that they had lost track of the logical thread of the case.

In my skeleton argument for the EAT, I wrote:

In paragraph 14 of their Decision, the EAT referred to my reliance on paragraph 12 of the Tribunal’s Decision. However, they did not make it explicit that the original Tribunal had used a quotation, stating that I was prepared to accept random searches, to justify a conclusion that I was not. They did not even acknowledge that a logical contradiction existed, even within paragraph 12. The EAT did state that they had to look at the Tribunal’s Decision as a whole, but that should not prevent them from acknowledging errors in parts of the Tribunal’s Decision. I can only speculate on the EAT’s reasons.

The EAT did not even make it very clear that I was accusing the Tribunal of a logical inconsistency within their own Decision. The EAT’s description of my arguments could be read to infer that I used the quotation from my letter to show that the Tribunal had made an inaccurate finding of fact. Far from it. As I wrote in my skeleton argument for the EAT:

For those reasons, I can find little parallel between my arguments as described by the EAT and the arguments that I presented to the EAT.

There were a few less important issues, but it is sufficient to say that the EAT dismissed my appeal. It does not matter. More important for the reader is that the EAT clarified something that I thought that the original Tribunal had left ambiguous. That is, when the Tribunal stated in paragraph 39 of their decision that

"…we do not consider that there was anything unreasonable in the introduction of this policy or its content",

they were bearing in mind that Grattan plc’s Stop and Search policy included random body and ‘phone searches for information.

One or both of the following links to the EAT’s judgment may still be valid:

or