Dr A Z Loutfi, counsel For the v Respondent — 2023

The claimant brought a religion or belief discrimination claim after his dismissal by the respondent on 20 July 2020. The case was listed for a preliminary hearing to decide whether he held a belief within section 10 Equality Act 2010. The tribunal identified the relevant belief as English Nationalism, including the claimant's evidence that ancestry and ethnicity were central to who counted as English.

Applying the Grainger criteria, the tribunal accepted that the belief was genuinely held, went beyond a mere opinion, concerned a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour, and had sufficient cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance. However, it found that the belief failed Grainger V. On the claimant's own evidence, it excluded people without the requisite ancestry from the English nation and treated Black and Jewish people as less British or not part of that nation. The tribunal held that this was incompatible with human dignity and conflicted with the fundamental rights of others.

The tribunal referred to Grainger plc v Nicholson, Gray v Mulberry Company, and Forstater v CGD Europe, including the Article 17 ECHR benchmark discussed in Forstater. It concluded that the claimant's belief, as articulated, was aimed at the destruction of the rights of those he sought to exclude and was not worthy of respect in a democratic society. The discrimination claim was therefore dismissed.