A 61-year-old English man has been jailed for 18 months in relation to an anti-migration protest-turned-riot in London in which he was filmed shouting, “Who the f*** is Allah?”
Despite not being accused of engaging in any actual violent actions himself, David Spring, of Longfellow Road in Sutton, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for comments he made during a Downing Street anti-mass migration protest that descended into a riot in the wake of the Southport mass stabbing that left three young girls dead.
Spring, a 61-year-old former train driver, pleaded guilty to “violent disorder” after the court was shown footage of him making “threatening gestures” towards police and chanting, “Who the f*** is Allah?”
The local Sutton & Croydon Guardian newspaper reports that upon his arrest on August 8th, Spring told officers: “I didn’t go up to London to riot. I went to complain about people put up in hotels.”
Defending Spring, Piers Kiss-Wilson told the court that his client wished to express that he was embarrassed by his behaviour and that he was sorry to his ill wife and his family, “who don’t deserve this.”
Even though Spring did not commit any violent acts, Judge Benedict Kelleher said that an 18 month sentence was justified as his chants “could and it seems did encourage others to engage in disorder.” Kelleher also argued that prison time for Spring was appropriate as it would serve to deter others from engaging in similar acts.
The decision has sparked widespread debate in the UK, with many on social media claiming that Spring’s sentence demonstrated that there are backdoor “blasphemy laws” against Islam in Britain.
Former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney described the decision to jail Spring as “jackboot justice,” lamenting: “We’ve gone from #TwoTierJustice to de facto blasphemy laws in less than a week!”
“18 months prison for an offensive chant? Except if it’s ‘Nazi scum, off our streets!’ to war veterans or “From the river to sea” to Jews,” Daubney noted.
Spring’s imprisonment for a speech crime comes as Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces calls of hypocrisy over his government’s hardline approach to the riots, with over 1,000 arrests, some of whom were not even involved in actual rioting but were nonetheless arrested over posts on social media.
This week, resurfaced comments from Starmer’s time as the Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013 showed that he had previously argued against launching too many criminal investigations over social media posts, warning that it would have a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech.
The jailing of Spring also came as another man was sentenced to prison over the anti-mass migration riots, despite the court finding that he did not actually engage in violence.
Army veteran Gary Harkness, 51, was sentenced this week to a year in prison by the Plymouth Crown Court for being present and “making a nuisance of himself” during disorder in Plymouth’s city centre, the Daily Mail reports.
Harkness, who suffers from PTSD from his time in the Army, was reportedly drunk during the riot, however, Judge Robert Linford admitted: “You are the person that provides me with the most difficulty because it cannot be levelled that you hit anyone, neither have you thrown anything, neither is it said that you spat at anybody.”
The veteran told the court that he was “not a racist” and claimed to have no political affiliation. Yet, the judge ultimately determined that “anybody party to this disorder has to receive a custodial sentence.”