Two-tier justice is a national disgrace
It did not help his point that just a few weeks before, the Sentencing Council for England and Wales had sought to make this implicit bias explicit, suggesting that some offenders should receive more lenient sentences based on their ethnicity. Even this Labour Government felt compelled to pass emergency legislation to block the move.
Perhaps the most visible manifestation of two-tier justice is the treatment of Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor jailed after posting on social media that people could 'set fire to all the… hotels full of [asylum seekers] for all I care'. This was a stupid and reprehensible remark, fired into the void of social media with little thought as to its potential consequences. Ms Connolly entered a guilty plea, and was sentenced to 31 months' imprisonment.
Had she stood her ground, she might well have walked free. Ricky Jones, a Labour councillor who made a seemingly explicit call for violence – telling a large crowd that they needed to 'cut' the 'throats' of 'disgusting Nazi fascists' and 'get rid of them all' – was cleared by a jury yesterday.
There is a clear difference between a guilty plea and a jury decision. The clear disparity in outcomes, however, will further fuel criticism of a system that appears to function very differently for those from the correct part of the political spectrum. And for the cynical, there is the question of the pressure placed on Ms Connolly by the prospect of being held on remand for an extended period.
This does not help with the 'community tensions' politicians are at pains to minimise. Nor does it help public acceptance of the justice system when visibly absurd outcomes mount up on a near daily basis. As Robert Jenrick has said in his interview with The Telegraph, the perception that judges 'act politically and bring their own personal politics into their job as a judge' has been immensely damaging. His proposals for tighter checks on appointments and a robust system for removals make a great deal of sense.
This is particularly so in comparison with what appears to be the preferred outcome of the Government: for critics to shut up and accept that the legal system produces the right outcomes. Not only does this fail to silence criticism, it serves to further undermine faith in the law. Criticism of Britain's two-tier system will continue for as long as we get two-tier outcomes.
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A spokesman for Staffordshire Police said: 'We arrested a 56-year-old man, from Newcastle-under-Lyme, on Tuesday 8 July, on suspicion of harassment without violence, sending communication/article of an indecent/offensive nature and knowingly/recklessly obtain or disable personal data without consent of the controller. The man has been released on conditional bail as our enquiries continue.' A Staffordshire Fire and Rescue spokesman said it would be inappropriate to comment while legal proceedings are active. It's not against the law to criticise someone in authority. Not yet, anyway By Lord Young On the face of it, Staffordshire Police's efforts to gag a critic of the Staffordshire fire and rescue service are quite shocking. Robert Moss, a former firefighter and Labour councillor, was arrested last month under suspicion of having committed an offence under the Malicious Communications Act. That in itself was quite heavy-handed, given that his alleged 'crime' was to have criticised the fire service's management in a private Facebook chat. But the really sinister thing – which Mr Moss's barrister describes as 'Orwellian' – was that his bail conditions included a gagging order, stopping him from saying anything more about his former employer, either online or offline. Thankfully, with the help of the Free Speech Union (FSU), the organisation I run, he managed to get this order removed and he's now free to say what he thinks about his former employer. He is still under investigation, but I'd be amazed if he's charged with a criminal offence, given that it's not against the law in this country to criticise someone in authority. Not yet, anyway. The reason I'm not shocked by this case is because it fits a pattern of the police over-reacting to social media posts, often at the behest of people who feel they've been unfairly criticised. Earlier this year, the FSU helped Julian Foulkes, a retired special constable who had his home in Kent raided by six police officers after he got into a spat with a pro-Palestinian activist on X. After commenting on the 71 year-old's 'Brexity' books, the officers arrested him, confiscated his electronic devices, took him to the station in handcuffs, locked him in a cell for eight hours, then interviewed him under suspicion of having committed a Malicious Communications Act offence, only releasing him after he agreed to accept a caution. With the FSU's help, Mr Foulkes managed to secure a pay-out of £20,000 from Kent Police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment, as well as an apology from the Chief Constable. We are trying to get comparable compensation from Hertfordshire Police for the arrest of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, two parents whose home was raided by six officers from Hertfordshire Police following 'disparaging' comments in a WhatsApp group about the management of their child's school, as well as critical emails they'd sent to the headteacher. They were detained in front of their young daughter before being fingerprinted, searched and left in a police cell for eight hours. Like Robert Moss, they were interviewed under suspicion of having committed a Malicious Communications Act offence. According to custody data obtained by The Times, the police are currently arresting more than 30 people a day over 'offensive' posts on social media and other platforms. In total, police are detaining around 12,000 people a year under suspicion of committing just two speech offences, up from about 5,500 in 2017. At the FSU, we received a surge in requests for help following the investigation into Allison Pearson for a year-old tweet and the imprisonment of Lucy Connolly, who wrongly blamed the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport on an illegal immigrant in an intemperate social media post. Several dozen people have been prosecuted for various speech offences in connection with the Southport attacks, including one man who spent eight weeks in jail for sharing a meme suggesting a link between migrants and knife crime, a case that was singled out in the US State Department's recent report on the erosion of free speech in Britain. Of the people who are arrested for speech offences, only a fraction end up being convicted. For instance, in 2023 fewer people were convicted for breaching section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act and section 127 of the Communications Act than in 2017, when the number of arrests was much lower. This suggests the police are being over-zealous in their pursuit of thought criminals, with the data revealing that only about one in 20 of those arrested under suspicion of committing these two offences end up being sentenced. But that's scant comfort to those who find themselves under police investigation, particularly when the bail conditions interfere with their right to freedom of expression. In many cases, when the police decide to take no further action the nightmare isn't over since the episode is then logged as a 'non-crime hate incident', with the FSU estimating that more than a quarter of a million of these have been recorded since 2014. These can show up on enhanced criminal record checks, preventing people getting jobs as teachers or carers or securing a firearms licence. It's becoming increasingly clear that the police need a 'reset' when it comes to online speech offences. They should stop policing our tweets and focus on policing our streets.
