Heading For Two Tier Trouble

People are running out of patience with the blatant double standards that now dominate politics and the law. If nothing changes, serious unrest is now inevitable.

On Friday, to nobody’s great surprise, Labour councillor Ricky Jones was cleared of incitement to violence by a Birmingham jury. He was acquitted despite the entire country having seen video of him calling on a crowd to “cut all [“far right” activists’] throats and get rid of them all.” Whatever the rights or wrongs of this specific case, in the current circumstances it could almost have been calculated to inflame maximum resentment.

Inciting violence. OK when the left do it, apparently.

Within minutes of the verdict the Jones case was being compared with that of Lucy Connolly, who’s still in prison serving a 31-month sentence for sending an irate tweet in the aftermath of last year’s Southport murders. Equally quickly, dozens of people popped up on social media to insist that there was no comparison. Most of this came from the left, but there was a smattering of it across the political spectrum. Basically the argument goes “Lucy Connolly pleased guilty; Ricky Jones pleaded not guilty and was cleared by a jury. Therefore this isn’t two-tier justice.”

Yes, This IS Two Tier Justice

Well, that’s definitely an argument, but it’s a very simplistic one. It’s true that Connolly pleaded guilty, but that wasn’t exactly an unforced choice on her part. She was denied bail, and told that if she pleaded not guilty she could be held on remand for up to a year before her case went to trial. On the other hand, she was advised, if she pleaded guilty she’d be out of jail by Christmas 2024.

Ricky Jones of course was not denied bail, despite his alleged offence being much more serious. He was able to take legal advice and spend a year preparing the list of excuses he would later use in court - for example, that he was traumatised because, 50 years ago, he had to do primary school PE in his underpants. Is anyone supposed to take this rubbish seriously?

Lucy Connolly would almost certainly have been acquitted too, if she’d pleaded not guilty and faced a jury. After all, she had somewhat more convincing grounds for mitigation than Jones did - the fact her child had essentially been murdered by the NHS, for example, and she was extremely distressed that three other children had just been stabbed to death by someone whose identity the establishment seemed very keen to conceal. But she never got her day in court; faced with the prospect of rotting in a cell for a year, she took what she’d been assured by her lawyer was the sensible option. And then she got jailed for 31 months.

The question is, why was Lucy Connolly denied bail while Ricky Jones wasn’t? Was it perhaps because Keir Starmer stood up in the Downing Street briefing room and told the nation that those arrested for anti-immigrant protests “will be held on remand”? Jones, of course, was a Labour Party member and involved in a counter-protest, so it seems the judiciary interpreted Starmer’s remand order as not applying to him.

So while it’s true that Lucy Connolly pleaded guilty and Jones didn’t, that doesn’t erase the stench of two-tier justice that hangs over this issue. She pleaded guilty because she had been put under immense pressure to do so - pressure which was not applied to Jones. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Connolly was punished in line with the prime minister’s instructions by a left-wing pro-immigration judge, while Jones was spared because his politics align with the government’s.

At this point, by the way, I’m going to break ranks with the otherwise admirable free speech advocates who’re saying neither Connolly nor Jones deserved jail. Connolly certainly didn’t; she said on X that she didn’t care if someone burned the asylum hotels, and the last time I checked, indifference isn’t actually a crime. Jones, on the other hand, told a mob of angry left-wing protesters that they should cut the throats of the “far right”. There’s a real difference here, and if only one of them went to jail then, in my opinion, it should have been Jones.

It Gets Worse

Anyway, back to the two-tier treatment that’s now fuelling real anger in the country. Whatever you think of what Lucy Connolly tweeted, at the end of the day it was just a tweet. She didn’t actually hurt anyone; she just said something angry and unpleasant, then calmed down and deleted it. It was an act committed, as Ricky Jones successfully argued in court, in the heat of the moment. It certainly wasn’t a violent act. She didn’t knock someone to the ground, then punch them repeatedly as they lay there helpless.

Mike Amesbury did that, though. Last October Amesbury, who at the time was the MP for Runcorn and Helsby, launched a drunken assault against a constituent who had dared to challenge him in the street. In February Judge Tanweer Ikram, who has an atrocious track record of handing out lenient sentences to far-left and pro-Hamas activists, sentenced him to just ten weeks in jail - less than one thirteenth of the sentence Lucy got for typing a few words on social media. Even that was too much for Amesbury, though. He appealed his sentence and, before he’d spent even a single day in prison, the already laughable jail time was suspended for two years and he walked out of court a free man. Amesbury, of course, was a Labour MP. Is it any wonder that 53% of Britons have “not very much confidence” or “no confidence at all” in our once world-renowned justice system?

Now, two-tier treatment is spreading beyond the courts. A couple of weeks ago a group calling itself the Weoley Warriors started to decorate lamp posts in the Weoley Castle area of Birmingham with English flags. Although I’m not English myself, I thoroughly approve of this; it makes for a patriotic and colourful display. Birmingham City Council, however, were not amused. They immediately claimed the flags were “dangerous” and “put lives at risk”, then started removing them.

Birmingham City Council, remember, is bankrupt. The city is vanishing beneath piles of rubbish because the council can’t pay its bin men. And yet it has money to waste tearing down flags that local residents put up? Well, some of the flags local residents put up, anyway. Specifically, British and English ones. Palestinian flags, on the other hand, can stay. Why? A leaked email from the council admits that it’s too dangerous to take down Palestinian flags without police protection, a nice admission that pro-Palestinian activists are in fact violent thugs. But if the council can leave those up despite the “risk to life” do they have no idea how bad it looks to take down British ones?

Maybe they don’t. After all, this is the same council that just lit up Birmingham’s main library on consecutive nights to celebrate the independence of Pakistan and India. Notably, they didn’t light it up for St George’s Day in April or the commemoration of VJ Day on Friday. Britain’s history is ignored, while foreign events get celebrated. Two-tier commemoration.

Breaking Point Is Near

Frankly, people are getting sick of this. They’re tired of being told to celebrate every culture but their own. They’re fed up watching violent islamists and leftists get let off with derisory sentences while a stressed English housewife sits in a cell for a tweet. They’re losing patience with a political class that fawns over Palestinian and Pakistani flags, but tears down British ones. The mood has shifted - but the left don’t seem to have realised it yet. For years they’ve been used to pushing multiculturalism and foreign celebrations, while the British just accept it all with resigned tolerance.

That tolerance is almost exhausted now. A tide of resentment is rising, symbolised by the cross of St George flying from a thousand lamp posts and women in pink shouting “Protect our kids” outside asylum hotels. Kipling’s chilling poem, The Beginnings, is on the verge of becoming reality. If politicians, judges and activists don’t stop doing things that seem deliberately calculated to enrage the native people of these islands, there is going to be an explosion. And explosions hurt people.

Two-tier treatment of the British people in our own homeland needs to end - and it needs to end now, before the growing native anger bursts into open rebellion.