FOR ONCE, the week began on a high note. Rupert Lowe MP’s crowdfunder to finance an independent national inquiry into Muslim rape gangs had, by last Sunday, raised £500,000 in just over a week – the largest amount, he says, ever raised by a political crowdfunder! The inquiry will ask what happened, how did it happen and why was it allowed to happen? It cannot come too soon as this last week showed.
On Wednesday, Jess Phillips slid into Parliament to scrap Labour’s plans for their already feeble compromise of five local inquiries into the grooming gangs. Her announcement was stunning for its brazenness. Yes, the Tories before them were negligent, amoral and opportunistic and hopeless on this as well as stupid. From Cameron onwards, they missed a killer blow on Labour’s local culpability that a dedicated inquiry would have uncovered. But Labour is in a class of its own when it comes to ‘cheek’, and far nastier. There’s a brutal and uncaring streak that the party’s Gauleiters down the pecking order pick up on (see for example Allison Pearson’s report of what Lucy Connolly’s probation officer said to her). Brendan O’Neill spotted this deep unpleasantness in Jess Phillips’s body language during the grooming gangs debate that followed her statement in Parliament: ‘Her noiseless irritation upon hearing other MPs speak candidly about those gangs exposed something darker.’
He’s right, and Donna Rachel Edmunds writes on it and the subsequent debate in greater depth in tomorrow’s TCW, plus Labour’s great grooming gang cover-up that Phillips’s rushed statement further underlined. A proper inquiry would take this government down; more than one cabinet member is complicit, she believes. That is why they could hardly let even local inquiries proceed on an independent basis.
The government deserves to be brought down, and not just for this. Also for their vengeance politics inflicted on those who break their ‘rules’. Two-Tier Keir’s various ‘avuncular’ photo opportunities with children this week shouldn’t deceive. I found them about as convincing as the infamous ‘Stalin with baby’, a picture you can see in the Museum of International Propaganda in San Rafael, or as those photos of Hitler posing with small children.
Yes, I know all politicians want photo-ops with children, but it doesn’t sit well when at the same time you’re presiding over a government that locks a mother away for a tweet and denies her release on temporary licence as further punishment because she spoke to the press to get her story out. It is vindictive and cruel for her and her children. How can he think this is ok? Lucy Connolly’s sentence was a direct result of Starmer’s personalised brand of ‘swift justice’. Swift retribution, in fact, for anyone who stepped out of Labour’s Muslim ‘appeasement line’ after the savage slaughter of those little girls in Southport: his way of ensuring what led to this massacre would never be properly and openly debated.
Kemi Badenoch, I noticed on Friday, is finally waking up to this travesty of justice – but in a hopelessly roundabout way. Connolly has been unfairly treated, she agreed in a tweet, before burbling on about what she opines is the real problem. That is a perception of bias in the law. Come on, Kemi. Forget ‘perception’; bias is a matter of fact. Either she, or whoever wrote this garbled tweet for her, is not terribly literate. Time she took a leaf from Rupert Lowe’s book and learned how state the simple truth: ‘Lucy Connolly should not be in prison – she should be with her daughter and husband, at home. Show some sodding common sense, FOR ONCE.’
But Labour can’t show common sense. That would bring their house of cards down; punishing dissenters is what holds it up. Something that applies par excellence to Tommy Robinson. Regular readers will remember my report of a few weeks ago on his preliminary hearing for a judicial review of his isolation in imprisonment. The aim was to get his solitary confinement (or as the authorities put it, his ‘segregation’) reviewed, but the judge bottled it. It was refused on the Orwellian ground that he was being treated well, or in other words accorded extra ‘privileges’: a DVD player and some work (cleaning an empty locked cell) – information introduced into the proceedings by the Government’s counsel in what was a straight ambush. These ‘privileges’, conveniently granted just the week before, obfuscated the truth that Robinson had served five months in solitary confinement without them to that point, isolated in a block of 16 empty cells, with no interaction with other inmates – a measure unprecedented for a civil offender. So never mind his deteriorating mental health, all’s well at Woodhill HMP ‘Butlins’ where Tommy’s unsegregated safety cannot be guaranteed because the prison is not in the control of the Governor. That is pretty much what it boiled down to.
So Robinson, a civil offender whom the judge acknowledged has caused no direct harm or injury, remains confined under unusually restrictive measures while criminals convicted of violent crimes are released early to ease overcrowding
Friday’s session was to appeal against that decision. I just couldn’t get there this time. Ezra Levant, the hero of Rebel News who’s helped organise Tommy’s legal team, did. Once more he flew in from Canada to report the hearing. You can watch the court proceedings and read Urban Scoop’s full report here. No one I have spoken to is optimistic or has faith in the British judicial system. ‘If it is leveraged against you, you are not going to get anywhere,’ one of his supporters said to me on the phone yesterday, ‘however good the argument is.’
Levant, too, is starting to worry that it is impossible for Tommy to get justice in the UK’s legal system: ‘He has been so demonised, and the Government is so obviously pursuing a vendetta, he really has become an “enemy of the state”, as his book is titled.’ You can read and watch his full report here.
We still pray for a good result. We should hear in a few days.
Oppression weighs all around. The Online Safety Act is already doing what some of us think it was directly designed to do: censor us. Don’t miss yesterday’s TCW article on the censorship that ‘online safety’ produces and, most importantly, the VPN route around it. That you can circumvent it is the good news.
