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Where the Law is weak, it must be cruel

Julie Sweeney had spent a ‘quiet, sheltered life in Cheshire’ for most of her 53 years, living in the village of Church Lawton caring for her sick husband the past decade. 

She had never been in trouble with the law before, but reading the news on July 31 about the clear-up at Southport mosque, Sweeney posted on Facebook: ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. Don’t protect the mosque. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’

For this she will spend 15 months in HMP Styal, a prison notorious for its menace, violence and self-harm. She cried as she was taken down, saying only ‘thank you, your honour’.

As he jailed Sweeney, Judge Stephen Everett said: ‘You should have looked at the news with horror, like right minded people. Instead, you chose to take part in stirring up hatred. It was a truly terrible threat.’ Although she had no intention of taking part in violence, ‘so called keyboard warriors like her, have to learn to take responsibility for their inflammatory and disgusting language’. A letter from her husband did not sway the judge’s heart.

The recent disorder has provoked widespread disgust across the country, with a large majority of those polled saying that the purported ‘patriotic’ protests don’t speak for them. Yet the harshness of some of the sentences is starting to cause unease, and risks furthering the claim of ‘two-tier justice’ and a ‘regime’ intent on punishing opponents.

Sweeney’s case is not unique. Father of three Tyler Kay received 38 months after tweeting ‘set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards’. Kay had actually copied and pasted part of a tweet originally posted on the day of the Southport killings by Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Tory councillor. Connolly had been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred and Kay had repeated her post and added the hashtags #standwithlucyconnolly #lucyconnolly #f***northamptonshirepolice #conservative #FaragesRiots #RiotsUK and #Northampton.

Bizarrely, after being warned by another Twitter user that he could face jail, Kay tweeted: ‘I can categorically tell you now, I will not be arrested by Northants Police’, tagging the police force in!

He told the court: ‘I disagreed with somebody [Mrs Connolly] being arrested for their opinion and so I copied and pasted the tweet into X – kind of as a protest. At the time I didn’t expect a lot to come of it.’

He also urged people to ‘mask up’ during a protest outside an immigration law firm, and tweeted to his 127 followers: ‘That’s 100% the plan, plus gloves. No car either so no number plate to trace and a change of clothes ready nearby.’

Kay had a previous conviction for theft from his employer in 2020, and his post was incendiary. But the length of prison time is disturbing.

Far more troubling is the case of Sellafield worker Lee Joseph Dunn, who shared three Facebook posts, all of which were hostile to immigrants but not calling for violence or rioting. Dunn had removed the posts, had no previous convictions, but was still sent to jail for eight weeks.

Some of the sentences for those who took to the streets also seem excessive. David Spring, a 61-year-old man from Sutton in south London, made threatening gestures at police in London, calling officers ‘c****’ and joining in chants of ‘you’re not English anymore’ and ‘who the f*** is Allah’. 

On the same day Spring was jailed for 18 months, elsewhere in non-riot related justice a woman was convicted of punching a police officer and received a suspended sentence. But she had not insulted Allah.

Some of the people sentenced for these riots are pitiful, including one man with learning difficulties and a homeless man who had drunk 10 pints of cider and claimed that he thought he was at a football celebration (which seems slightly implausible, as the football season hadn’t started yet).

As with many of these convictions, one wonders if the real root cause of these disturbances is not really immigration concerns or online misinformation but alcoholism. Following trouble in Plymouth, Gary Harkness was sentenced to a year in jail even though the judge stated that he was the ‘least involved’ in disorder, after Harkness had shared ‘18 cans and a bottle of tequila’ with a friend.

Many Twitter users are commenting on the fact that Harkness is a veteran, while not mentioning that he also has nine previous convictions, since it’s always ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’ when it suits the Right. In fact, many of those convicted of rioting are repeat criminals who shouldn’t have been free in the first place. 

Phil Hoban, a self-styled paedophile hunter, was jailed for eight months ‘after admitting racially abusing pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ in Leeds on August 3. He had been taking place at a non-violent demonstration outside the city’s art gallery, where ‘climbing on a barrier, Hoban was pictured “rubbing your lips towards a person of colour”’.

He had also imitated the way that Muslims pray in a mocking manner, and made slurs referencing Allah, although Hoban denied this, insisting he was chanting about a man called ‘Alan’. Well, you have to laugh.

Alongside him, 35-year-old James Gettings was jailed for eight months for making a similar gesture about Muslim prayer, and admitted causing ‘religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress’.

Both bizarre sentences, yet Hoban has 66 previous offences and Gettings 35 – they should be in jail, just not for this.

Similarly with John Cann, 51, of Plymouth, who was sentenced to three years after launching a firework or flare at counter-protesters before ‘falling off his mobility aide’, another tragicomic detail of protests so often involving the prematurely infirm. While sentencing, Judge Robert Linford read out a long list of Cann’s previous convictions and pointed out how much he’d cost taxpayers down the years, but the official then said an extraordinary thing to him: ‘you have no right whatsoever to say who should or should not be in this country’.

Revealing, and perhaps just as revealing was the case of Wayne O’Rourke of Lincoln, who was charged with posts ‘alleged to contain anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.’ Anti-establishment?

I suppose in some ways the riots are anti-establishment, in that both the rioters and what they supposedly rioted for go against everything polite society believes in. They certainly don’t attract much sympathy, and even Private Eye seemed to have more concern for the Just Stop Oil protesters. These aren’t really comparable, since while the JSO sentences were harsh, their offences involved actual harm, concerted attacks on critical infrastructure, by people with previous convictions who said they would do so again. In such cases, deterrence is a significant consideration, as it is during periods of public disturbance.

Prison has four purposes: deterrence, incapacitation, punishment and rehabilitation, although only incapacitation is proven to succeed by keeping persistent and violent criminals away from the population for as long as possible.

Rehabilitation is popular among some experts, but recidivism levels are high almost everywhere (yes, including Norway) while deterrence is effective but especially required when unrest is a risk.

Yet the punishment should also be proportionate, and the contrast with the state’s approach to what the security services in Northern Ireland used to call ‘ordinary decent criminals’ is startling. While the Labour Government aims to prepare an extra 500 places for rioters, they also plan to release thousands of prisoners from our overcrowded jails, including many violent criminals.

People reading about these Facebook jail sentences will note the incredibly lenient punishment already given out to repeat offenders. As Neil O’Brien points out ‘Since 2007 there have been over 50,000 occasions on which people have been spared jail despite having over 50 previous convictions, including 4,000 people who had over 100 previous convictions.’ The data shows that prolific offenders cause huge amounts of misery.

This contrasts sharply with what we have seen in the past week. I’m not a free-speech maximalist, although I’m not sure who is by what definition. Using social media to call for an attack on a mosque is a crime, but Sweeney’s sentence feels grotesque and cruel, and will only fuel suspicion of the system.

Niall Gooch recently argued that: ‘Julie Sweeney’s remarks were not a serious threat, by any stretch — a point conceded by the prosecution — and have since been deleted… The Starmer state is determined to manage the discourse, in quite unpleasant and brutal ways if necessary. The threat of jail time for crude expressions of anti-immigration or anti-Islamic feeling is the iron hand in the velvet glove of the “Don’t Look Back In Anger” sentimentalism that follows mass-casualty terror attacks or knife rampages. While many of the convictions related to the recent disorder are reasonable and just, it’s hard to escape the impression that the establishment is flailing wildly in its response, with the result that miscarriages of justice are occurring.’

Many will point out that response to the 2011 riots was harsh, too. It is is true that the custodial sentences then tended to be twice as long as the typical punishment for similar offences. There was the student jailed for six months for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50, and the sixth former who received 10 months for stealing two trainers – both left-footed. There were also two men who received jail for Facebook posts.

Certainly, those latter sentences set a precedent, but as barrister Adam King is quoted as saying in today’s Sunday Times, ‘to imprison significant numbers for their social media activity feels like something new.’

It is also worth pointing out that the violence of 13 years ago was also far worse: no one died in this year’s rioting, while five people were killed in 2011, almost 200 police officers were injured, as well as ten firefighters, 100 serious fires were caused, 12 cars set alight and four buses, two completely destroyed. In terms of scale, 2011 and 2024 were not really comparable, and I still recall the shock of seeing police with HEDDLU on the back and realising that they really were calling out the entire realm.

Not all of the sentences handed down in 2011 were excessive, either. During the disorder, elderly man Richard Mannington Bowes was killed after being punched to the ground; the mother of the killer, convicted of perverting the course of justice by destroying her son’s clothes, was sentenced to eighteen months. About the same as a Facebook post.

The 2011 riots were not political in nature, so perhaps a better comparison is with the ongoing Palestinian demonstrations, and the anti-Semitic calls to violence that have frequently followed that cause. These demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, although they have been menacing enough to change parliamentary procedure.

Still, it is notable that the men who allegedly drove around north-west London in 2021 making threats were never charged. A man who waved a knife at a kosher supermarket in Golders Green recently received a suspended sentence. (He is free to walk around the neighbourhood while, in contrast, bad-poaster Lucy Connolly has been placed on remand, which is usually only the case when someone is likely to commit further crimes or is a flight risk.) A man who was convicted of wearing a Hamas head scarf – something sure to cause alarm and distress to a lot of people – received a conditional discharge.

I don’t believe that merited a jail sentence, and if a 53-year-old Muslim woman with no previous convictions tweeted ‘lets blow up a synagogue’ in a moment of anger, I would absolutely be outraged if she was sent to jail for 15 months. That would be tyrannical.

Although many of the 2011 sentences were harsh, it also served as a dragnet, and of the 2,000 people convicted for riot-related offences, 80 per cent had previous convictions; unsurprisingly crime in the year following fell a great deal as lawbreakers were taken out of circulation, which I also imagine will happen in some towns after these convictions.

Many of the current sentences serve neither to punish proportionately, nor in cases like Sweeney do they incapacitate wrongdoers. They are entirely driven by the principle of deterrence, a legitimate tool during periods of unrest, and a secondary motivation must surely be to send out a signal to pro-Palestinian protesters to watch their behaviour, by making an example.

Yet many of these punishments are cruel, excessive and embarrassing to our reputation, and not even popular - unlike in 2011, half the British public are opposed to tougher sentences for rioters, a significant number for a population who usually embrace authoritarian justice in polling surveys.

Most of all they signify a state which is weak, not strong. It is a state which doesn’t have the capacity to keep order, and if these riots had provoked significant counter-protests by young Muslim men, the authorities wouldn’t have been able to control the streets. Indeed, due to relentless police cuts since 2010, it’s unlikely that the Met could contain a riot such as 2011 again, even with help from across the country. Where the Law is weak, it must be cruel.