Starmer’s political prisoners, pt. 2

The first part of this article is here.

After one rioter was convicted, one police force took the extraordinary step of publicly posting humiliating footage of him being arrested as he got off a plane, as well as his name and the street he lived on. Gongs were fast-tracked for riot responses. In Cumberland (where there were no riots), taxi driver Gerard Glaister was charged with posting racially offensive material on Facebook. The charges were later dropped. But not before Cumberland Council took it upon itself to unperson him anyway by revoking his licence to drive a taxi – extrajudicial summary justice which presumably cost him his livelihood. Discontinuing the case, the judge nevertheless warned him, for good measure: “You are now very much on the police’s radar.” Back in Downing Street, the prime minister chaired several COBRA meetings to coordinate a national riot response, pledging to raise a “standing army” of police offers against his own citizens, and to roll out CCP-style facial recognition technology to snag prospective rioters “pre-crime”. So zealously did the state spring into action to extirpate the alleged far-right menace that Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s extremism adviser, had to caution officials not to label the disorder as “terrorism”.

Anyone deemed to be involved in the disorder in any way found the entire British state arrayed against them — all save one institution: jury trial, “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. In that ancient bulwark against tyranny, justice can be weighed without regard to outside political pressure, and the accused has the chance to prepare a defence and tell their side of the story. It is telling that so far, the only individual accused of speech offences after Southport to have gone to trial, former prison officer Mark Heath, successfully argued that in his series of anti-immigration social media posts he simply was expressing his “strong views”, and was found not guilty of stirring up racial hatred by a jury. (Another to have pleaded not guilty to a speech offence, 45-year-old former Royal Marine Jamie Michael, was successfully bailed and will stand trial next month, defended by the Free Speech Union.) Last month, meanwhile, the jury trial of four men charged with violent disorder at unrest in Middlesbrough concluded with just one of them being found guilty. Two were found not guilty and the fourth had his charges dropped. A jury can be relied upon to see both sides of this issue, it seems, even if the wider political narrative offered no such nuance.

So the most consequential part of the Southport response was the decision that practically all of those accused of crimes after Southport, including just for speech offences, would be remanded in custody. As Starmer put it during the disorder, it was to be like clockwork: “The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand. Charges will follow. And convictions will follow.”

Follow they did. More than 1000 were swiftly arrested, with most rushed behind bars. The presumption of innocence went out the window, with the Home Office taking to social media to label them all “criminals”, despite most not yet being convicted — thus placing itself in contempt of its own court system. It’s a function of our long court backlog that any suspect is held for long on remand. But when people are remanded into our crowded prisons, it’s supposed to be because they’ve been charged with violent offences, have prior convictions, or pose a danger to the public.

Certainly, none of this could be said of someone like 23 year-old Cameron Bell. On 4 August, six days after the Southport attack, a mob attempted to set a migrant hotel on fire in Tamworth, Staffordshire. Petrol bombs were thrown, windows were smashed, and one officer was left with a suspected broken arm. This was ugly, stupid violence that ought never to have happened, needless to say. Later that evening, however, after the riot had died down, Bell was walking home after a long shift as a care worker. Witnessing the aftermath, she decided to try her hand at some citizen journalism and livestream what she was seeing on TikTok. She was “on the periphery”, according to her lawyer, of a group of about 20, some in hoodies and masks and some armed with bits of wood, who were walking about in the town. The group had not confronted anyone. During the livestream, she swore and called the migrants “tramps”.

Bell had committed no violence. But she soon found herself arrested, charged with violent disorder and remanded in custody. The experience was “awful”, she has told journalist Dan Wootton — “never in a million years” did she expect to find herself in prison. Remanded prisoners generally find themselves in a local reception jail, and as David Shipley, who writes on prison reform, has explained to the Daily Sceptic, these are invariably the worst prisons in the system: chaotic, violent and unhygienic – terrifying for a new inmate.

Before her plea hearing (itself more than a month later), Bell was told by her solicitor that, were she to plead not guilty, she faced remaining on remand until May 2025 awaiting trial — the best part of a year. She duly pleaded guilty to violent disorder and was sentenced to nine months. This does at least mean she has already been released; but she now has a criminal record. Had she endeavoured to protest her innocence, she would still be behind bars.

Others have been no less ill-served by this blanket remand policy. Former boxer Derek Heggie originally pleaded not guilty to making “grossly offensive” online comments for YouTube videos during the unrest, in which he said (not untruthfully) that “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the Prophet Muhammad”. After being held on remand for four months he pled guilty last month, was sentenced to 10 months and two weeks, and was out within days. 

In the view of the Free Speech Union, it was probably “unwise” for Lucy Connolly to have pleaded guilty to intending to stir up racial hatred for her “raging” tweet sent on the night of the Southport attack (though, it adds, it was more than understandable given the stress of being held on remand). She received 31 months, after being reminded by the judge who sentenced her: “It is strength [sic] of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive.” The wife of a Tory councillor, Connolly is set to appeal her conviction, which her husband says was “political”. Having petitioned to appeal in October, Connolly still awaits permission.

Large numbers may have pleaded guilty, but it’s clear that many of these convictions are far from safe

Peter Lynch held a sign and shouted at disorder at a Rotherham asylum hotel, but he seems to have gone home before any of the violence that later took place. Held on remand, however, he pleaded guilty to violent disorder and was sentenced to two years and eight months. 

Large numbers may have pleaded guilty, but it’s clear that many of these convictions are far from safe. Shipley notes that many will only have had access to legal counsel, in the form of a duty solicitor, for a few minutes before pleading, and will have been advised to plead guilty for a reduction in their sentence; a trial will have been a distant prospect. 

It hardly needs saying that the post-Southport crackdown is ruining lives. It was an open secret that many of those being fast-tracked into prison, their “far-right” and “Islamophobic” offences having been loudly publicised, were being fed into a meat grinder of Islamist prison gangs. Cameron Bell, for instance, reports being “intimidated” by ethnic-minority inmates who accused her of being racist and ended up being placed on suicide watch by the prison authorities. Others have doubtless fared worse. Now released, Bell has lost her job as a care worker, and her dream of becoming a paramedic. Lucy Connolly, a child minder with no prior convictions, had suffered mental health issues in the past and she has a young daughter who will be “missing her terribly”, the judge admitted. The fact that grandmother Julie Sweeney was the sole carer to her elderly husband did not spare her a 15-month sentence for her rash and obnoxious Facebook post; last week, cruelly, she was denied parole. Watching the cleanup of the riot in Southport, she had told a local Facebook group to instead “Blow the mosques up”, which was reported to the police. Sweeney had suffered a “mental breakdown” after the Southport attack, her husband says, her granddaughters being the same age as the murdered girls, but she was not deemed eligible for early release because her “threat to kill” places her in the same criminal category as murderers and terrorists. Most heartbreaking of all, though, is 61-year-old grandfather Peter Lynch, a “family man” in poor health, and who in October, in HMP Moorland, South Yorkshire, was found hanging in his cell. His son, speaking at an inquest, wondered “whether [his] dad should’ve been there in the first place”.

Home Office figures as of 2 December show that 916 defendants had been received by the courts in connection with Southport. To be sure, there are plenty of these who probably ought to have ended up behind bars. Someone like Connor Whiteley, for instance, who pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer at an incident in Hull — he “kicked [her] to the ground”, reports the BBC — and received three years.

Yet it’s far harder to be comfortable with the sentence of someone like Bradley McCarthy, who, amid disorder in Bristol, shouted at police and a police dog and engaged in “racist football-style chants”, and received 20 months in prison for violent disorder. Many others were similarly sent down on this charge essentially for shouting. Contrast that with the case of Mohamed Osman, who threw a can at protesters amid the same disorder as McCarthy, later pleaded guilty to violent disorder and received only community service. Lucy Connolly’s 31 months is an outrage in itself. But it feels especially egregious given that the judge who sentenced her gave only 20 months to a man, Haris Ghaffar, who, during disorder in Birmingham, led a knife-wielding sectarian mob in attempting to batter down the barricaded doors of a pub as terrified customers sheltered inside. As for Cameron Bell, it’s astonishing to think that her TikTok livestream could even be considered a crime. And let us not forget that as all these people were being frogmarched into custody — never raising a peep from the human rights brigade — we were facing a prison overcrowding crisis that would see the PM releasing thousands of inmates early, many of them career criminals.

Keir Starmer’s government smeared them all, demonised them all, and had them thrown in prison without trial

In the months since, the fallout from this single-minded crackdown has been often described as two-tier justice, and it is indeed difficult to see what has happened as anything else. Starmer wanted the dissent punished and an example made, and the state responded eagerly to his political direction. No Labour partisan can now seriously resort to the technocratic excuse that the police, the courts and the justice system are wholly independent of politicians. Even Starmer himself later sought to take personal political credit for the way he had defended “law and order” and our “communities”.

This month, in the aftermath of Axel Rudakubana’s guilty plea, the reckoning over what happened during that summer fortnight will start anew. The country will again be confronted by the vicious inhumanity of what took place inside that children’s dance class. As this happens, one thing must not be forgotten. That there were those who, seeing this, felt moved to express their rage and their anger: at what had happened, and at a system they perceived as having allowed it to happen. Some of them resorted to violence, which was wrong; many, however, committed no violence. But Keir Starmer’s government smeared them all, demonised them all, and had them thrown in prison without trial. As the Southport trial takes place, we must not forget the likes of Cameron Bell, Lucy Connolly, and Peter Lynch.