Help Restore Your Country

Accessing UK Legislation

UK law is immensely complex. Primary legislation (bills) spawn endless secondary legislation (orders, regulations, amendments, schedules, etc) which can become extremely difficult to track. Entire acts or their sections are superseded, amended, repealed, cited, consolidated, and so on. What is in effect at the current moment is a snapshot.

• The official record is managed by the National Archives at legislation.gov.uk and trimmed by a quango called the "Law Commission." It is available freely as public domain text under the Open Government licence.
• It has a developer site, a Github account, and API (of sorts) which isn't particularly helpful.
• Statutory instruments are collated into a separate index.
• The authoritative encyclopaedia of English law, Halsbury’s Laws of England, is held in Lexis+.
• The largest research service is William S. Hein & Co., Inc's platform, HeinOnline.
• The the official Law Reports, Weekly Law Reports, Industrial Cases Reports, Business Law Reports, Public and Third Sector Law Reports, are produced by the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR).
• Schema.org metadata descriptions for open data portals can be found at the Institute for Information Business at WU Vienna.
• The Foreign Office has a database of 14,000 treaties managed by a platform called Knowvation, which has different export formats.
• EU law, treaties, and case law can be found at Eur-Lex.
• Strasbourg European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgments are published via HUDOC.

Accessing UK Case Law

Third parties may apply in writing using Form EX107 for court transcripts under Civil Procedure Rules (CPR Part 5.4C or Criminal Procedure Rules), for a fee, with the court’s permission.

• Some case law can be found at the National Archives and "Supreme Court."
• The largest free resource is the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII)
• Most judgements can be found at Judiciary.uk
• The (paid) industry standard is Thomson Reuters' Westlaw UK.
• A (paid) alternative for professionals is LexisNexis UK's LexisLibrary.
• International common law judgements are typically held in (paid) vLex Justis.

Accessing Government Information

You have rights under UK law to be provided with information about the information the government or other institutions hold about you and what you are paying taxes for.

Statistical Data

• The key hub for all UK government data is the Official of National Statistics.
• The mandarins dump "open" datasets at data.gov.uk.
• You can find a lot of datasets and collations on Datahub and Github.
• A huge library of information is available at the UK Data Service.
• Departments who publish their own data include Defra, the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, NaPTAN, and the Admiralty.

Making Freedom of Information (FOIA) Requests

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 gives anyone the right to request recorded information from UK public authorities (e.g. government departments, NHS, councils) within 20 working days. Requests can be refused for cost (s.12) or specific exemptions (s.21–44). You don’t need to be a UK citizen or resident, and can demand they disclose information they hold about policies, decisions, statistics, emails, reports, etc.

• The simplest way to make an FOIA is to use the free online service by the charity What Do They Know.

Making Subject Access (SAR) Requests

Section 45 of the Data Protection Act 2018, referring to Article 15 of the UK GDPR gives you the right to make a Subject Access Request for the personal data an organisation holds about you (e.g. emails, medical files, HR records) within a month. These can also be restricted (e.g. for crime prevention, journalism, legal privilege, management forecasting). Only you can apply.

• The simplest way to make an SAR is to use the online service provided on the Information Commissioner Office's website.

Accessing Institutional/Background Records

Broadly speaking, although the UK doesn't publish criminal offenders or mugshots, there are a lot of places which legally provide information on the behaviour of individuals and companies - if you know where to look.

• Journalists use commercial platforms like Maltego and Skopenow to gather open source public intelligence (OSINT), as well as trackers like the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
• Births, deaths, marriages, civil partnerships, stillbirths and adoptions are held by the General Register Office but some can be searched at UK Public Records.
• The industry standard for business, news, media and patent intelligence is Nexis (by LexisNexis).
• The statutory register of judgments, orders and fines from the Ministry of Justice is available via TrustOnline.
• For company filings, directors, accounts, charges, insolvency, and business status, you can search Companies House.
• For tracking networks of companies across countries and jurisdictions, you can use OpenCorporates.
• For previous bankruptcy, IVAs, DROs, and company insolvencies, you can search the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Register.
• For trustees, filings, financials of registered charities, you can use the Charity Commission's Register.
• Offshore UK tax havens like Bermuda, Cayman, BVI etc resisted demands in 2018 for open registers by 2020, but Companies House Gibraltar has one. A lot of data can be found in the ICJ's Offshore Leaks Database.
• Verify if firms or individuals are authorised to offer financial services via the Financial Conduct Authority Register.
• For title deeds and property ownership (£3 per title), search HM Land Registry, Scotland's Land Information Service, and NI's Land Registry.
• The elections team at local councils hold an open electoral register of voters.
• For criminal record checks, use ACRO (Police), the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), Disclosure Scotland, and AccessNI.
• Upcoming public court listings are published on CourtServe.
• With someone's consent, you can verify their driving licence or immigration status.
• Upcoming insolvencies, company strike-offs, and probate are published in The Gazette.
• Disqualified legal beagles are recorded in the Solicitors' Register and the Bar Standards Board (BSB) Register. Magistrates and judges are recorded by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office.
• Individuals or firms subject to UK financial sanctions are on the HMG Sanctions List (OFSI).
• Members of the Civil Service are registered annually in its official yearbook, and embassy officials are given in the London Diplomatic List.
• Banned teachers must be registered with the Teaching Regulatory Authority.
• The roadworthiness of a vehicle can be searched via numberplate to see its MOT status.

Accessing Academic Literature

If you're looking for background information produced in universities or published in journals to supplement your research (such as statistical data, evidence, methodology etc), most is freely available to anyone. They are indexed in library catalogues and union catalogues, typically published by CalmView, and known as tools for bibliographic discovery.

• Most academic papers are available via Google Scholar.
• Scholars who disagree with paywalling science read them for free by pasting their reference codes (e.g. DOI) into the infamous Sci-Hub.
• The largest global union catalogue (10,000+ libraries) is WorldCat (OCLC).
• The largest in the UK (204 institutions) is Library Hub Discover. There is also Archives Hub.
• For London-specific research, you can use the AIM25 Project.
• Other countries provide the same, e.g SUDOC (France) and ZDB (Germany).
• You can easily search the British Library or Library of Congress.

Mining Authoritative Data Sources

There are thousands of tools to rip and chunk data, depending on whether you roll your own code or want something off-the-shelf. If you're new, for speed/power you want Go or Rust, for flexibility learn some Python, for statistics pick up R, and if you just want to hack everything to pieces, there's Node.

• To download a whole website, start with HTTrack (what Edward Snowdon used to save the GCHQ wiki). For code, use Scrapy (Python).
• For automatic scraping of web pages with captcha-bypassing and IP address rotation, use a commercial service like Scrapify, ScrapingFish, Octoparse, Zyte, Decodo, or Oxylabs.
• For consuming APIs, the two main tools are Postman and Insomnia.
• For extracting text from different types of files, use Apache Tika.
• If you need to do optical character recognition on scanned documents, use Tesseract.
• For creating and modifying PDFs programmatically, use Gotenberg.
• If you're going hard into data mining, look at RapidMiner, Knime, Orange, Gensim, OpenRefine.
• For legal work in particular, look at Relativity, Brainspace, Lexpresso, LegalRuleML PoolParty, Kira, Luminance.
• For news, look at Aylien.

Storing & Analysing Data

If you're downloading or generating data, you'll want a way to store it and query it. Most software professionals understand the options already, but if you're a hobbyist or beginner, you'll want to learn a little SQL and transfer information between places in CSV format. If you're after something as simple as possible, just use Google Sheets.

• For a free cross-platform database GUI with support across all major servers, use DBeaver.
• If you want "spreadsheet-like" format with "vertical" tables of rows and columns (a relational database, or RDBMS), the most popular free open source kinds are SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL (aka MariaDB), and SQL Server. If you're not sure, PostgreSQL typically offers the most features and flexibility, but it tends to be more strict.
• If you want unstructured "horizontal" data without SQL stored like a JSON document, the most popular open source kinds are MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, and HBase. If you're not sure, use MongoDB with its GUI, Compass. If you specifically want powerful linguistics and search specialties, use Elasticsearch.
• If you are analysing geometric spatial data for mapping, you can use ArcGIS, SpatiaLite, add PostGIS to PostgreSQL, or use Mongo/Elasticsearch's in-built support for GeoJSON.
• If you need to map relationships between people or things, use a free open source node graph database like Neo4j.
• If your data needs to talk to an LLM, you will need to be able to do vector similarity searching, which is best handled by Chroma, Pinecone, Weaviate, PostgreSQL, Mongo, or Elasticsearch.
• To automatically generate sophisticated, attractive graphs, hook your database up to the free open source visualisation dashboard server Grafana or Redash.
• If you want a way for people to send you sensitive information in a secure way, set up a whistleblower platform using SecureDrop.

Contacting Your Representative

Your Member of Parliament (MP) is your attorney and representative in the UK legislative assembly under the Representation of the People Act 1983. Despite appearances, they are there to serve you. Every UK citizen has the right to contact their MP to raise issues, seek assistance, or express views on legislation and government policy. It's their job. Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689 protects MPs’ right to raise matters freely in Parliament, including issues submitted by constituents.

• You can find the useless empty shirt assigned to you on Parliament's website.
• The same site provides them a dedicated profile page.
• The parliamentary procedures and the constitutional conventions they have to understand are in a book called Erskine May (named after the author).
• The nonsense they talk is recorded in an official transcript named Hansard.
• Parliament records and publishes how they vote.
• You can email them directly for free using WriteToThem.
• You can track their financial interests, written answers, and voting records on TheyWorkForYou.
• You can see how often they violate their own party's ideas on PublicWhip.
• You can tell them what's broken in your road via FixMyStreet.

If you're lucky, they even hold “surgeries” (face-to-face meetings) where you can explain your grievances, and be punched in the face for it. If someone else isn't already trying to kill them.

Self-Publishing Tools

You don't need to go through a publishing company if you don't want to, or suspect you might experience political opposition from activist staff. You can produce and distribute entire books at virtually zero cost via print-on-demand.

• You can buy ISBNs from Nielsen, who are the official UK supplier. In the US, you will need to buy them from Bowker.
• The UK government provides official information on copyright protection. In the US, you can use the Library of Congress PCN Program.
• To write your book and export it with full professional typesetting (as PDF or ePub), the only choice is the amazing Reedsy Studio (freemium).
• You can improve your writing with tools such as ProWritingAid, Grammarly, and Hemingway. 
• You can check for accidental plagiarism using Copyscape.
• Instead of hiring an editor or proofreader or translator, you can use a commercial AI assistant or anonymous AI model through HuggingFace Chat.
• You can obtain free open source fonts from Google Fonts.
• If you're on a budget and don't have Adobe InDesign, Scribus is free open source software which is just as good.
• If you're on a budget and don't have Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape is free open source software which is just as good.
• If you're really on a budget and need to edit photos without Adobe Photoshop, you can use the free service from Photopea.
• High-quality print images can be generated for pennies using models such as Flux Pro.
• For converting between e-book formats, Calibre is free open source reader software which comes as a reader and a server.
• You can find audio narrators at Amazon's Audiobook Creation Exchange.
• You can publish your print or electronic book yourself directly to Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc via the world's largest distributor, Ingram Content Group. They have a free self-publishing service named Ingram Spark.

AI Processing Tools

ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Llama, and Deepseek will usually be enough for most people's needs. But if you want to go further, there's plenty of others.

• Start with the list of open source language models.
• You can test different models at the LLM Arena or directly on HuggingFace
• You may not need an LLM, just a machine learning algorithm or ordinary algorithm.
• If you want to fine tune your own hosted model or just need to make API calls, Groq, OpenRouter, Runpod, Replicate, and Vast offer cost-effective GPU and SaaS pricing.
• For categorising legislation, LegalBERT is a specialist language model trained on the UK law corpus.
• For image generation, Flux.dev is the highest quality and most flexible option.
• To introduce your own private data into prompts, you will need to use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which involves:
  • Generating vector embeddings of your text snippets with your chosen LLM and a tool like LangChain
  • Storing them both in a vector store database which supports similarity searching, such as Chroma, Pinecone, Weaviate, PostgreSQL, Mongo, or Elasticsearch.
  • Querying the vector store and prefixing the results to the API call made to your LLM.