The Old Bailey, London (Tuesday, October 23) — Tommy Robinson is free.
This was by no means certain when he walked into the courtroom at London’s Old Bailey this morning, That’s why he brought along his prison bag and why he had said goodbye to his wife and children, just in case.
Happily, instead the judge did what Robinson and his lawyers had hoped: he referred the case upwards to the Attorney General. Some call this buck-passing. I disagree. From where I was sitting, Nicholas Hilliard QC — the Recorder of London presiding over the case — appeared a decent, thoughtful sort, who considered the evidence carefully and without prejudice and reached the only sensible decision.
What moved Hilliard to this judgement was a long submission he had been given beforehand by Tommy Robinson. I suspect Hilliard was impressed by Robinson’s obvious integrity but more importantly by the rigour of his arguments. While I think it’s perfectly true that there are elements within the Establishment — up to and including the Prime Minister herself — who are out to get Tommy, it’s just not fair to say that the British legal system is broken altogether. Today it was working perfectly.
Robinson read his submission afterwards to the 2,000 or so well-wishers who had gathered outside the Old Bailey to cheer on their hero.
You can read it here.
Essentially it is an explainer of all the things you never saw reported in the mainstream media. It describes, for example, the lengths to which Robinson went not to have himself had up for contempt of court.
When I arrived at Leeds Crown Court that morning I could not obtain any specific details of the reporting restriction order. I do not believe there is a website which holds such details, so I researched online and reviewed the reporting restriction guidelines provided. They state that the court should include details of reporting restrictions on the court listings both online and in court and also provide a notice on the door of the court. My solicitors have photographic evidence to show that the court did not follow these guidelines that day and had no details listed anywhere of a reporting restriction for that case. This is also in the bundle. The only time the notification about reporting restrictions was available was later that afternoon after the Court had convicted me and sent me to prison. Only then did the Court follow the guidelines and list a reporting restriction against the court listings for both the grooming case and my subsequent case.
After my previous experience with contempt of court in Canterbury I went out of my way to ensure I would not fall foul of the law again. I privately paid for training with one of London’s leading law firms, Kingsley Napley, to cover all details regarding contempt of court. There is documentation in relation to this in my bundle.
On that morning at Leeds Crown Court I had knowledge of the verdicts of the first phase of this grooming trial and many of the specific details discussed in court for this particular trial. I did not talk about these in my livestream on that day. I had understood based on my training that the specifics of the case and the verdicts were off limits for reporting restrictions.
It also details the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut sentencing Robinson received from the previous judge. This was so severe and unprecedented, it is hard not to form the suspicion that it was more a political decision than a strictly legal one.
It is my understanding that there is no individual in the last 60 years that has been sentenced to prison for a publication breach of a reporting order. It would appear to me that my punishment is exceptional. I would ask that I am treated in the same manner as every other journalist who has been charged with these allegations. The journalist Rod Liddle was writing for the Spectator magazine in relation to the Stephen Lawrence murder trial, and when he was sentenced for breaching the section 4 order, and risking prejudice to the trial, was given a fine. Journalists at the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror published highly prejudicial material on the trail of Levi Bellfield who abducted and murdered an 11-year-old child. This contempt of court led to the collapse of the entire case and discharge of the jury and robbed one of his victims of the chance for justice. The reporters in this instance were not prosecuted and instead their employers were found guilty of contempt and fined £10,000.
In short, having read this, the Recorder of London Nicholas Hilliard — who has a reputation as one of Britain’s most brilliant jurists — decided there was sufficient merit in Robinson’s arguments for them to be heard either under the adversarial conditions of a full new court hearing or, at the Attorney General’s discretion, for the charges to be quashed altogether.
This was the statement Robinson’s previous lawyers had advised him not to make — which is one reason why they are no longer his lawyers. Robinson had been told that if he pleaded guilty to the contempt of court charges laid against him he would not go to prison. But Robinson wasn’t interested in bargaining for his skin. What he wanted was justice.
Robinson wanted justice for himself. But even more, he wanted justice for the many thousands of British girls who have been “groomed”, drugged, tortured, pimped, and raped by successions of mostly Muslim gangs over a period of several decades.
This, remember, was how he got into trouble in the first place. In his role as citizen journalist, he had gone to report on the trial of the Huddersfield 20 — the latest gang of child rapists to be brought to book, in the wake of numerous similar cases from Rotherham to Telford to Oxford and beyond.
In Robinson’s view, this is a national scandal which is still not getting nearly the attention it deserves.
His supporters outside the court appeared strongly to share this view. Perhaps it’s because the majority of them hail from the white working class communities which, along with Sikhs, include the people who’ve been hardest hit by the rape gang phenomenon.
They have long felt ignored by the authorities. Had it been middle-class girls who were being abused, drugged, multiply raped by these thugs it’s unlikely that this practice would have been allowed to continue for so long. Working class girls, on the other hand, appear to be acceptable collateral damage in the Establishment’s apparently much more important campaign to make us all comfortable with “diversity” and “cultural enrichment” regardless of the actual consequences.
This is wrong.
It amazes me — more on this later — that so few people are prepared to put their heads above the parapet and admit that this is wrong.
Perhaps it’s because they find the scale of the problem so frightening that they find it easier to shoot the messenger — Tommy Robinson — than they do to face up to its implications.
No, rape jihad is not a pretty concept. But it’s real, it’s happening now and instead of facing up to it honestly huge sections of our liberal establishment — including senior police, politicians, local authorities, and the vast majority of the media — prefer to duck the issue by blaming Tommy.
As an example of this extreme media bias, here are some of the things that Canadian journalist Andrew Lawton overheard in the courtroom from news reporters from supposedly apolitical, neutral organisations:
Standing among the ordinary, decent people in the crowd as Tommy Robinson spoke I was struck by how completely at odds their behaviour was with the way they are portrayed in the media, especially at viciously partisan organs like the BBC and The Guardian, but even across much of the right-wing press.
These people are constantly being described as “fascist” or “far right” or “extremist”.
But I saw and heard no evidence of this whatsoever. They were vocal, yes, but peaceable and friendly. They were angry, yes, but it was controlled anger and intelligently directed. There was, for example, no hatred of Muslims — only of the creed that drives some of them to rape and murder.
How weird it is to think that we live in an age so blinkered that the man doing more than anybody to raise awareness of what’s going on receives more widespread censure from the Establishment than the actual monsters perpetrating these ugly deeds.
We need to wise up.
As one of the other speakers on the stage Ezra Levant pointed out, though of course, it’s not easy standing up against this menace — too often you’ll be accused of racism or marginalised as an “extremist” — it’s much easier to fight in the first ditch than it is in the last ditch.