Tommy Robinson due to be released from prison within days
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was jailed in October after admitting multiple breaches of an injunction made in 2021 that barred him from repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee who successfully sued him for libel.
The sentence comprised a 14-month 'punitive' element and a four-month 'coercive' element. The sentencing judge Mr Justice Johnson told Robinson he could have the latter taken off his sentence if he 'purged' his contempt by taking steps to comply with the injunction.
• Tommy Robinson in jail: 1,250 phone calls and daily doctor visits
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
'Facial recognition can make mistakes, it's not a decision-maker'
Later this year, as you walk down the street in West Yorkshire, your face may well be checked against a criminal facial recognition (LFR) has been used by some police forces for eight years - but new funding means it is now to be rolled out in more week, the Home Office confirmed that a total of 10 new LFR vans would be deployed across the country, with two of those set to be used in West Yorkshire, according to government said the technology had been used in London to make 580 arrests in 12 months, including 52 registered sex offenders who breached their groups have said they are worried about how intrusive LFR could prove to Alison Lowe, West Yorkshire's Police and Crime Commissioner, has told the BBC that photographs and data collected by LFR will not be Lowe explained: "Those photographs will be inputted into the system. It's using a live feed, and it measures against that police watch list. Other faces get pixelated out automatically."The technology is so sophisticated that it just has numbers - even for the people that it recognises, it's just a series of numbers. But then there's a match that will pop up for the police and they'll only see the face of the person on the watch list. "After that piece of work is finished, when they're going home for the day, all those faces are deleted from the system." There have been concerns about false matches when LFR is Thompson, 39, who was wrongly identified as a suspect by LFR last year, and who is now bringing a High Court challenge against the Metropolitan Police, describes live facial recognition as "stop and search on steroids".Ms Lowe said she was aware that LFR technology could make mistakes and police needed to be clear in how they used it."It definitely causes me concern as I've worked with black and brown communities for many years and I hold myself to a very high standard in regard to cases of disproportionality," she said."It can make mistakes, and the whole point of live facial recognition is that it's not a decision-maker."Ms Lowe said mistaken identity was easy to disprove when a human reviewed the matches by LFR technology."There's got to be a lot of training associated with this," she said."We know the College of Policing have been looking at whether or not bias in relation to ethnicity, race or gender is embedded, and apparently it's neutral as to those things. "We need to be alive to those risks. We need to be holding the police and criminal justice partners to account." West Yorkshire Police declined an interview request about the introduction of LFR vans in the county, but confirmed that two LFR vehicles would be brought into use by the force later this a statement, human rights organisation Liberty said of the use of LFR technology by police forces: "Any tech which has the potential to infringe on our rights in the way scanning and identifying millions of people does need to have safeguards around its use."Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said LFR was being rolled out "without a proper legal basis"."There's never been a vote, there's never been a consultation from the public or from parliament," she said."So the fact that the government is investing millions in taxpayer's money into this Orwellian and undemocratic technology is a real misstep and we're really, really concerned about it."Home Secretary and West Yorkshire Labour MP Yvette Cooper has pledged that people's data would remain secure if their images were caught on Cooper said: "The overwhelming majority of images are deleted within 0.2 seconds, so for those who are not on the wanted list of serious criminals, those images are not held. They are immediately deleted."There do have to be safeguards. We will do a new legal framework. I think this is technology that we do need to make sure is properly used." Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Proposal for new Kent council map dubbed 'appalling'
A proposal for the reorganisation of local government in Kent has been branded "appalling and disrespectful" by one Council has put forward an outline for four unitary authorities to replace itself, Kent County Council (KCC) and the 12 district and borough councils - part of a major national shake-up announced by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner last year. It comes after KCC said its preferred option was for only three unitary authorities at a meeting last Vince Maple, leader of Medway's authority, described Labour's option as the way forward and best matching outlined plans for an England-wide overhaul. He said: "Whilst I appreciate there are currently different options, I wholeheartedly support the proposed model."This is the perfect opportunity to take a fresh look at the map of the county and get it right."However, other politicians did not agree, some even accusing the authority of trying to "break" them apart, according to the Local Democracy Reporting of Tonbridge and Malling council, Matt Boughton called the announcement "appalling and disrespectful" on social even within Medway there was a conflict of leader George Perfect said his group "vehemently disagreed" with the proposals, describing them as "not consistent with the aims and objectives as laid out by the government".Independent Group councillor Michael Pearce also expressed dissatisfaction online, suggesting the proposal "looks and smells a lot like gerrymandering". Currently under the two-tier system, the county has 12 district and borough councils, which split responsibility for public services with the overarching map which Medway Council is suggesting would see the creation of a North authority, including Medway, Sittingbourne, the Isle of Sheppey, Gravesend, Northfleet and West council would stretch from Royal Tunbridge Wells up to Longfield and Istead Rise, encompassing Tonbridge, Sevenoaks and Snodland, and reaching to the boundary of Mid authority is the largest in terms of geographical area, and includes Maidstone, Bearsted, Staplehurst, Cranbrook, Hawkhurst and also includes Faversham and Ashford and stretches down to Dungeness and across to East council covers Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne Bay, Margate, Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Deal, Dover and for how the boundaries of the new authorities are due at the end of November, and Maple encouraged residents to make their views known.
The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Review, Frankly: Sturgeon psychodrama suddenly makes sense
Macmillan, £28 THERE is a classic episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? in which Bob and Terry are desperate to avoid the England score. Welcome to the world of the Frankly reviewer. The past week has been spent trying to shut out what people are saying about the memoirs of Scotland's first woman First Minister. Wait till the book arrives, said the better angel on my shoulder. Give it the considered judgment readers deserve as they ponder shelling out £28 (now half that on Amazon). So I did. And the conclusion? Just as the England match turned out to be called off, meaning Bob and Terry missed nothing, so it is with Frankly - up to a point. Something becomes blindingly clear in these 464 pages, and the former FM is going to hate it being pointed out. Sturgeon opens with an account of her Ayrshire childhood that is almost comically dull. 'A quirk of the door numbering meant that, although we moved half a street away, the change in our address was slight: 56 to 55 Broomlands Road,' she tells us. From an early age, she considers herself extraordinary. 'I had - at the risk of sounding daft - a very strong sense of 'destiny'.' A bit like Harry Potter, one might say, though for some reason she doesn't make the comparison. As she gets older, a pattern of thinking emerges. Nothing is ever Nicola's fault, or not for long. Time and again, she will take a criticism, consider the possibility of being wrong, then reject the notion entirely. On her parents buying their council house, for example: 'I ended the right to buy in Scotland and was accused of hypocrisy. It was an easy attack to make, but it was wide of the mark. For one thing, I wasn't responsible for the decisions my parents took.' No, but she benefited from those decisions. This inability to see the bigger picture is a constant. That and self-doubt. Not that it lingers for long. She fears voters in Govan find her unlikable, yet boasts about being cheered at airports after the 2015 election. Read more One can hardly fail to sympathise as she battles her way up the ranks, routinely encountering misogyny as she goes. It was tough - it still is. Yet she doesn't do herself any favours. You expect her to go in, studs up, against opposition politicians. Labour's Jim Murphy was 'boorish and cocky'; Tony Benn 'appeared to barely know where he was', etc. This is nothing compared to what she says about her own side. Jim Sillars and Alex Neil get it in the neck for 'hurling criticism from the sidelines'. Kenny MacAskill announces Megrahi's early release 'like he was reading a bedtime story'. Even when she is being nice she finds a way to ruin it. Referencing a successful campaign to save a shipyard, she writes: 'I went to a mass meeting at Govan and was presented with a big bunch of flowers from the unions. There might have been a touch of unconscious sexism in the gesture, but it still meant a lot to me.' Who thinks like that? There is, of course, no doubt who really gets her goat. So much has been written about the political partnership with Alex Salmond, but a lot of it fails to get to the heart of the matter. This memoir does, albeit unintentionally. What leaps from the pages is the howling dysfunctionality of the relationship. The Salmond-Sturgeon psychodrama made Blair and Brown look like Terry and June. There was one fundamental difference between the Labour rivals and the SNP pair, however. Reader, I do believe she cared for Salmond far more than she realised, particularly at the start, and this influenced her later behaviour. There is no suggestion that the relationship was anything other than platonic. What happened subsequently was no ordinary falling out between politicians. This was intensely personal. Complicated. At least it was on her part. How else to explain writing which reads at times like a bad Mills and Boon parody? He fixes her with a stare and 'works his political magic'. They go on the campaign trail together, singing along in the car to Dolly Parton. He takes a helicopter back to HQ after an election victory: 'Alex disembarked and strode purposefully to the lectern. It was like a scene from The West Wing.' They part on the eve of the independence referendum: 'We hugged and wished each other luck. We knew that by the time we were next together, for better or worse, the world would have changed.' Revealing choice of words there, 'for better or worse', because as the years pass, their relationship begins to sound like a marriage, one that she was rapidly outgrowing. Her 'IRL' (in real life) husband, Peter Murrell, barely figures in the book, save for when she is brushing off Salmond's advice not to have hubby as the party's chief executive. Remind us how that one worked out? With critics, her instinct is to lash out. She chooses her battles carefully, however. I doubt her claim that Salmond leaked details of the allegations against him to the Daily Record would have made it past a lawyer had the former FM been alive. For a political memoir, Frankly is remarkably light on policy. The most glaring example of this is the three paragraphs she spends on Scotland's drugs deaths, compared to the six pages lavished on The Queen. Look under F in the index and you will find naff all on ferries. Covid ends up a blizzard of questions but no answers. Education gets a glance. On the double rapist Isla Bryson, Sturgeon asks if she could have handled things differently, before concluding it would not have changed anything. Remember, it's never Nicola's fault. If you are looking for an insightful analysis of the Sturgeon years you won't find it here. She, at least, ends the memoir on a high, telling us: 'I've learned to dance in the rain.' Deep as a puddle to the end. Alison Rowat is a features writer and columnist at The Herald
