POLITICAL IMPRISONMENT IS BEING NORMALISED

FOR NON-PROGRESSIVES

I’m referring to the suicide of Peter Lynch (above) a 61-year old serving a 32-month imprisonment for ‘violent disorder’, and last week’s 31-month sentence on Lucy Connolly, for a tweet. Both result from the July riots, following the Southport slayings.

Both sentences are indictments of how politically biased and corrupted our legal system has become, especially under two-tier Starmer. It’s now obvious that association with violence which can be described as ‘right wing’ is regarded more harshly by our media, politicians, police and judiciary.

Lynch was present at the riot outside a hotel in Rotherham housing asylum seekers and was jailed for violent disorder. He committed no violence; his offence was shouting ‘scum’ at the police. This was translated into: ‘You were unquestionably trying to rev up the situation as best you could’. He was clearly a disturbed individual. His anger at the horrific grooming scandal in the town was used as veiled justification for his jailing. Well now he’s dead, killed by imprisonment for getting abusively angry.

Nothing remotely equivalent has happened to the huge number of incandescent pro-Hamas supporters calling for genocide and glorifying the October 7th racial massacre of Jews. Indeed, the judge in the Lynch case previously spared some students from jail who held up mocking posters of Hamas killers using hang-gliders, because he said their feelings ‘were understandably running high’ (revealing he shared those views). Whilst opposing them, I don’t think they should be criminalised. But so much for an impartial legal system!

Lucy Connolly herself was jailed for tweeting and quickly deleting:

‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’

No doubt a vile tweet, by a woman with a history of mental illness following the death of a child. The judge who sentenced her, Judge Melbourne Inman, heard another case from the disorder after the Southport murders. Here the offence wasn’t a quickly deleted mad tweet, it was an act of real violence in which a man was very seriously injured.

On August 5th, a week after the Southport attack, Muslims waving Palestine flags attacked the Clumsy Swan pub in Birmingham. One man outside was set upon by several, punched and kicked and then hospitalised with a lacerated liver.

In that mob was 19 year-old Haris Ghaffar, the first to try to break into the pub, repeatedly booting its hastily barricaded door. The court heard that Ghaffar was well aware the mob were armed with knives and he pleaded guilty to violent disorder. Judge Melbourne Inman KC sentenced Ghaffar to just 20 months. This sectarian mob was ‘a depressing sight’, he loftily said. Presumably the man with a lacerated liver found it a tad more than depressing. Inman seems to have displayed his bias without any concern for doing so. In some ways, that is the most worrying aspect; this is the normalisation I refer to.

So for a hastily deleted tweet, which can’t be shown to have caused any harm, Lucy Connolly received 31 months in prison. For joining a mob armed with knives, which put one customer in hospital, the same judge gave 20 months in prison.

What better proof is needed for both our two-tier justice system and how crimes committed by ‘right wing’ rioters are being judged politically, not just criminally? The BBC does something else which make this clear: every headline on Connolly is tagged with her marriage to a Tory local politician. The implication is that this itself is reprehensible. And remember how our delightful Deputy PM, the classy Angela Rayner, called Tories ‘scum’ the week before one (David Amess) was murdered by an Islamist. Needless to say, she escaped chokey.

Many people claim it’s worse to hold angry views about immigrants than it is to harbour anger towards Israelis. In fact, both are equally unjustified (but can be rationalised) and neither should lead to imprisonment, unless violence is either involved or directly threatened. I realise rioting is complex but it’s important that actions are the issue and not words, unless specifically targeted. It’s nowhere near enough to hold - or contribute towards - angry feelings. And I’d apply that equally to those whose views I oppose.

I predict that under future governments of a different hue, some now gloating over these political imprisonments will suffer the same and their current myopia will be to blame. But it will still be wrong.