Arrogance without consequence
What really comes across with Tommy Robinson is his arrogance. Bussing to court again for the untoldth time, he clearly doesn’t care. Prison holds no fear for him, and if he’s getting funding for his defence not just from the gullible but richest man in the world, why fear a a fine or indeed days in prison – that he’s already been convicted and incarcerated adds to his fearless, anti-establishment appeal.
Martyrs
The mainstay of the job it seems is lawlessness, like it was joked that ASBOs were for too many recipients a badge of honour. Lucy Connolly, having pled guilty and being jailed for inciting racial hatred, steps out of prison into the warm embrace of Reform and the right-wing media who mention only that’s she a mum.
Steve Bannon stepped out of prison and into the White House, and as Trump stepped into the Oval Office the dungeon doors for his 6 January insurrecters swung open. A bit like how Hitler used his obviously extremely lenient prison sentence to write his manifesto and appear the martyr for the common man.
Violence in the name of ‘loyalty’
Anti-migrant protesters openly harass the women they purport to defend, with many at protests and riots having convictions for domestic violence. Far-right supporters of whatever ‘loyalty’ openly travel to places just to battle the police. They grow in number, in boldness, and the actions of a few thugs here or there goes viral and provides the inspiration for others to rally around the flags draped on lampposts.
The prisons are more than full, and the court system stowed out – first by by years of Tory underfunding, and now Robert Jenrick promising to rid the judiciary of ‘activist’ judges who engaged in ‘lawfare’ by upholding laws concerning migration, ‘activist’ being the derogatory term vis-à-vis antifa, and taking the Brexit-era headlines about judges being ‘enemies of the people’ for stymying Brexit to the next stage.
This is deliberate, collapse the system and if you can’t be tried you’re de facto free to continue, and we are truly lawless, as Simon Kuper argues in his brilliantly pithy book about how the UK got so corrupted, ‘Good Chaps’), then argue as Robinson and Musk do that it’s a two-tier system of justice being applied.
Towards a lawless state
And yet we have the prospect of a Reform government in which not only will the European Convention on Human Rights be written off, but our obligations per international treaties on torture, with global links to ship anyone they don’t like to outsourced camps in Rwanda and El Salvador. Under the hollow calls, the veneer of order that fascism promises is this absolute jungle of power plays by serious thugs at every level backed by serious money. We are in great, great peril.
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