"Does the UK have a two-tier justice system? Do the police crack down more harshly in different circumstances? Do concerns about race relations, multiculturalism and political ideology, play a role in how individuals are policed and punished?
'We're going to end two-tier policing sir'
Now anyone who raises this question will be given short shrift by the authorities. When a Sky News reporter asked Mark Rowley, Britain's most senior police officer, if he would end two-tier policing a few months back, Rowley grabbed the mic from the journalist's hand and dropped it on the ground. He later dismissed accusations of two-tier policing as 'complete nonsense'.
But anyone who still doubts that something has gone badly wrong with Britain's criminal justice system need only look at its treatment of Lucy Connolly.
Lucy Connolly is a child minder and the wife of a local counselor in Northampton. She was jailed for 31 months during last summer's Southport riots. Not for joining those riots, but for sending a tweet. The tweet in question was undoubtedly despicable. On the day when three young girls were brutally murdered in Southport, Lucy Connolly called for mass deportations of asylum seekers, having apparently believed the misinformation swirling online that the murderer was a Muslim asylum seeker. 'Set fire to the hotels full of the bastards for all I care, and take the treacherous government and the politicians with them,' she wrote. This was an awful, hateful thing to say, but could it really be blamed for any of the awful hate-filled violence that followed? Connolly deleted the tweet later the same day. The post had been visible online for no more than 4 hours, but that was enough to see her convicted of inciting racial hatred, and to have her punished to the fullest extent possible. She was sentenced to 2 years and 7 months in prison. This is longer than you would get for many violent crimes. Indeed, one of the riers in Southport Philip Prescot, who was involved in the horrendous assault in the local mosque and himself threw bricks at the police, received 28 months to Connolly's 31.
What's more, as Allison Pearson has uncovered in the Telegraph, Connolly has repeatedly been denied the leniency that would normally be expected in a case like hers. Connolly is a firsttime offender. She poses no danger to the public. She is also a mother to a 12-year-old daughter and has to care for her sick husband. She was diagnosed with PTSD after she lost a baby yet she was refused bail after she was charged, and now she's been denied a temporary release from prison that she appears legally entitled to. This is a right that's often granted to far more dangerous offenders.
It's hard not to conclude that the state is making an example of her. The judge who sentenced her took the opportunity to spell out why that might be.
"It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive," he said when sending her down. The Telegraph has since reported that the media interest in Connolly's case is what has so far scuppered her early release. Last summer's riots were an exceptional and horrifying event. The police and the courts had to crack down hard to prevent further disorder.
But the notion that those who said horrible things rather than did horrible things should be punished more severely is bizarre. As is the idea that different standards must apply when it comes to say, early release, in order to send a message.
There are also some striking examples of other actual riots around the time of Southport being treated rather differently by the authorities. In fact, just 2 weeks before the Southport riots broke out, a different riot erupted in Harehills, a diverse suburb of Leeds. This was sparked when social services attempted to take a Roma child into care. Yet while the police were rightly out in force after Southport to quell the violence and disorder, in Harehills, the police simply ran away. Rioters overturned a police car, set fire to a bus and wreaked havoc for the rest of the evening. The police essentially allowed the rioters to tire themselves out. Strikingly, the day after the Harehills unrest, Leeds city council issued a joint statement with representatives of the Roma community, praising their contribution to the diversity and richness of the area. Could this have been a hint that the identity of the rioters played a role in the authorities' response? That a misguided concern about race relations or further unrest got in the way of keeping all of the residents of Harehills safe?
It's hardly a stretch of the imagination. Differential treatment for different ethnic groups is an unseemly but inevitable outgrowth of the system of multiculturalism. From the late 1980s onwards, the modern British state has treated different ethnic and religious groups as distinct blocs. Self-appointed community leaders are called upon to represent these groups, and they can often have a great deal of sway on policy, in the police and in local council. Needless to say, differential treatment by the state then becomes inevitable.
'Community leaders have been speaking to the police as well because-'
'Free Palestine!'
We saw this grim system in action in Birmingham just after the Southport riots. Masked, armed Muslim men, supposedly protecting their communities from further rioting, were essentially allowed to roam around Bordesley Green. An LBC journalist was chased away with a metal pole. A Sky News broadcast van had its tires slashed. An innocent man was badly beaten outside a pub, leaving him with a lacerated liver. Incredibly, the police knew that large crowds were planning to gather there. But they decided not to show up or intervene. The next day, Emlyn Richards of West Midlands Police explained why. Here he is speaking to Sky News:
'We had the opportunity to meet with community leaders, with business leaders, prior to that event to kind of understand the style of policing that we needed to deliver during the course of that operation'
He then added that the community i.e Birmingham's Muslim community leaders,
'They were trying to kind of make sure that that was policed within themselves as well'
Apparently, the police just defer to these community leaders, insisting masked men will police themselves. Similarly, around the same time in Stoke-on-Trent, a police liaison officer in uniform was filmed telling a group of Muslim men that if they were carrying weapons then they should stash them at the mosque. 'We are not going to arrest anybody', he assured the crowd.
You also see stark two-tier policing when it comes to the punishment of speech crimes of which there are many on the British statute book. Just contrast the cases of the Paraglider Girls, convicted for celebrating the anti-Semitic killers of Hamas, with a far-right activist convicted for producing his own anti-Semitic stickers. Just a week after the 7th of October attack in Israel, two women were spotted with stickers of paragliders on their backs at a demonstration. This was clearly a reference to the paragliding Hamas terrorists who had slaughtered and raped their way through the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel. For this, the women were found guilty under the Terrorism Act of showing support for a terrorist group. Yet despite the guilty verdict, the sentencing judge decided not to punish the defendants because, in his words, emotions ran very high on this issue. Instead, he let them off with a 12-month conditional discharge, effectively no more than a slap on the wrist. Far right activist Sam Melia in contrast felt the full force of the law. He was sentenced to 2 years in prison for producing his own disgusting stickers, many of which were anti-Semitic. One read "Why are Jews censoring free speech?" Another said "Small hats, big problems." Both sets of stickers were undoubtedly racist and vile but why was one case treated so much more seriously than the other?
While we at Spiked think no one should be criminalized for speech, even speech that's bigoted and extreme, the double standards are striking. Much of this could be down to plain old political bias creeping into judges' decisions. The judge Tan Ikram who sentenced the Paraglider Girls was later found to have liked an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn, something he insists was unintentional.
But there are also clear examples of two-tier justice beginning to be institutionalized through official guidelines.
Recently, the Sentencing Council, an unelected quango that sets sentencing guidelines in England and Wales, tried to impose an explicitly two-tier system of sentencing. The new rules would have required judges to almost always order something called a pre-sentencing report for defendants from an ethnic, cultural or faith minority. When a defendant has a pre-sentencing report, it makes it more likely that they'll be given a lighter sentence. The result would be a system that treats minority groups more favorably, purely on the basis of their ethnic or religious background. Ultimately, the Sentencing Council backed down when the Labor government threatened to block the guidance with legislation, but two-tier justice lives on in other areas.
For instance, in January new guidelines around bail conditions came into force. As you've probably guessed by now, they insist that ethnic minority suspects should be prioritized for bail. They even order judges to consider the historical trauma faced by certain groups when deciding who should be granted bail. The aim of both this policies is to eradicate racial disparities in the justice system. The Sentencing Council argues that minority offenders are disproportionately given longer sentences. The Ministry of Justice says minorities are at a higher risk of being remanded in custody.
The assumption is that these disparities are caused by racist discrimination and unconscious bias. And so the way to tackle them is through conscious discrimination in the other direction. The result is a justice system that really does judge suspects on the basis of their race or faith. That puts its thumb on the scale for some offenders, but not others. All of this is not only unjust, it also fails to address the deeper reasons that might be driving disparities on a group level. Two-tier justice isn't just about assuaging past historical wrongs, or trying to fiddle sentencing data in the present. It also often slips in in the name of calming community tensions, or keeping the multicultural peace. This is what drove what is easily the most grotesque two-tier scandal in modern Britain, the grooming gang scandal.
For decades, the authorities turned a blind eye to gangs of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men, as they raped, trafficked, tortured and murdered mostly working class and poor girls. The rape gangs have been identified in over 50 British towns. The victims number in the thousands, spanning generations.
Strikingly the authorities were often well aware that these unspeakable crimes were going on. A report on the rape gangs in Telford Shropshshire, says it was commonly known among police officers, police civilian employees and the public, that groups of Asian men were systematically abusing children. But time and again, those in charge of protecting those children refused to intervene. Or worse, actively colluded to cover up the crimes, for fears of sparking a race riot.
Tellingly, the police often treated the victims of the rape gangs far more harshly than the rapists themselves. Young women in Rotherham complaining of sexual abuse were threatened with arrest for wasting police time. A Rotherham girl known only as child H was 11 years old when she first reported her abuse to the police. When a man was later found with explicit pictures of her on his phone, still no action was taken. Then, when she was discovered in a derelict house with a number of men, her tormentors walked free, but she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
As just about every inquiry, report and investigation into the rape gangs has shown, the identity of the perpetrators warped the state's response. Partly, the police, councillors and social workers feared being accused of racism. But their far bigger fear was that being more open about what was happening would stoke a racist backlash among the white working classes.
In Oldham, an official document warned that the grooming gang scandal could provide ammunition for far-right groups. In Rotherham, a senior police officer warned the father of an abused teenager that the town would erupt if the rape gangs' crimes became public knowledge. Alexis Jay's report into Rotherham talks of broad concern among the local authorities that the ethnic element could damage community cohesion. Damage community cohesion. That's really just a way of saying that these girls had to be sacrificed for the good of multiculturalism, and out of fear of what might happen if these evil crimes were talked about openly and investigated fully.
This portrays a deep contempt for both white Brits and Pakistani Brits alike. The former are apparently a poggram in waiting, want to go on a rampage against Asians in response to the crimes of a few. Meanwhile, Pakistanis are presented as totally uninterested, offended even, by the police pursuing pedophiles operating within their midst.
This is life under multiculturalism. Multiculturalism might pose as simply being the same thing as tolerance, diversity, a true melting pot. But in truth it means something very different. It means treating groups differently on the basis of race and faith. It means approaching society not as a body of citizens with values and standards in common, but as an assemblage of perpetually antagonistic tribes who must be tiptoed around and managed, in order to maintain calm. Even if that means turning a blind eye to depraved crimes or corroding the principle of equality before the law. This isn't anti-racism but a toxic racial paternalism, and it produces the precise opposite kind of society to the one that is supposed to be intended.
Welcome to two-tier Britain, where division is sown in the name of harmony and people are treated differently in the name of equality. If we truly believe in a free and equal society, we need to dismantle this poisonous regime"
Lucy Connolly's case is a good example of the left wing belief that words speak louder than actions.
If the police are too weak to police minorities because they will be overwhelmed, maybe if white people in the UK decided to riot en masse too, they would be allowed to govern themselves through 'community leaders'.
If emotions run high on an issue white people care about, of course that's more reason to punish them even more harshly, because they're dangerous.