I attended the demonstration outside the Central Criminal Court in London on Tuesday 23^rd October to give my support to Mr Tommy Robinson who was supposed to go on trial for contempt of court that day. This is my account of the background to this case and my personal impressions of the demonstration outside the CCC. I was hoping to get this piece up here earlier, but life and a long journey home, got in the way and also I wanted to write a more considered and less ‘newsy’ piece than I would have otherwise have written.

For the second time in just over a month, Old Bailey in London, the location of Britain’s most prestigious and well known court, the Central Criminal Court, echoed with the repeated chants of ‘Oh Tommy Tommy, Tommy Tommy Tommy Tommy Robinson;. The crowd of approximately 2.5 to 3000, by my own estimation, of pro Tommy supporters were there to give succour and support to the human rights activist and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson.

Mr Robinson, as many will know, was appearing in front of the Recorder of London Sir Nicholas Hilliard QC, to answer a charge that he showed contempt of court whilst covering the trial of twenty Islamic sex beasts at Leeds Crown Court. Mr Robinson was arrested in May 2018 outside the court and railroaded into a very speedy trial for contempt by the trial judge Geoffrey Marson QC and sentenced to a total of 13 months. Mr Robinson was already on a suspended sentence for a similar matter which occurred at Canterbury Crown Court in 2017 and his prison term reflected both Judge Marson’s view of the alleged contempt and the previously imposed suspended gaol sentence.

This gaoling of Mr Robinson was earlier on this year quashed on appeal by the Lord Chief Justice sitting with two other High Court Justices. The Lord Chief Justice ordered that this matter, the Leeds conviction, be retried at the Central Criminal Court. This trial was what was supposed to have happened on Tuesday and was scheduled to have taken place before the Recorder of London the most senior of the Central Criminal Court judges, Sir Nicolas Hilliard QC. Prior to the trial I looked up Sir Nicholas’s record as a judge and as a Crown Prosecutor, and was pleased to see that this was a member of the judiciary who had an impressive back story as both a prosecutor and a judge. If there was any judge who would try this case properly or come to a judgment based fairly on the law, even if the law declared Mr Robinson guilty, then it would be Sir Nicholas.

It seems that the majority of people either waiting at court, or those more intimately connected to Mr Robinson, expected this case to be tried today and ultimately disposed of today. I’d pencilled in the need to be around the Central Criminal Court locale until about 4pm and had gone there with Mrs Fahrenheit and our son Laughing Boy, however they departed early on due to LB getting bored and chucking his shoes around* and he was therefore removed to somewhere more entertaining for him. However in a stunning development that I certainly didn’t expect, at about 11 O’Clock-ish or just before, there were rumours and then a statement that Rebel Media chief Ezra Levant had reported that the matter would not be heard in full today but would be referred on to the Attorney General. The Attorney General is the Government’s chief law officer and a non Cabinet Government Minister who by convention does not sit with the Cabinet. It is the Attorney General who must now decide how this case will proceed or even if it is dropped. The post of Attorney General is currently held by Geoffery Cox QC MP, who has a record as a very successful and very well rewarded Barrister. As a counsel he’s represented the good the bad and the ugly in both the criminal and civil courts and although as can be seen from accusations of Parliamentary expenses piss taking, conflict of interest over landlord legislation, he may not have a spotless moral or political record, there can be little doubt that this is a man who knows the law inside out and back to front.

It appears that Mr Robinson’s written statement contained much within it with regards claims by Mr Robinson that he had acted in good faith with his reporting and that he was unaware of the particular reporting restrictions in the second of three linked trials of Islamic sex beasts being held at Leeds. The Recorder of London, after considering this lengthy defence statement made by Mr Robinson decided that the matters needed to be argued in court with counsel on both sides. There is plainly a considerable amount of doubt whether or not Mr Robinson really did commit an act of contempt of court.

It is now up to the Attorney General to decide how this matter is to proceed or even if it is to proceed. It may well be that this matter does get tested in court in five or six months time with the Crown being represented by Treasury Counsel and Mr Robinson also suitably legally represented. As I read the situation this referral to the Attorney General could go two ways: Firstly that this matter could be properly prosecuted by senior counsel for the Crown in order to test Mr Robinson’s claims that he didn’t commit contempt of court during the Leeds trial, that he was working from information that was already in the public domain, was not privileged information gained from the Courtroom and that the nature of the reporting restrictions imposed by Judge Marson were not properly communicated. The second scenario as I see it is that the Attorney General decides after considering the case files and the Recorder of London’s report, to recognise that Mr Robinson did indeed take all reasonable precautions not to breach reporting restrictions that were put in place to ensure that all the trials were fair and that pushing this prosecution is not in the public interest and could drop the case altogether.

My own view is that although it could be considered right and proper that the option of gaol exists for serious cases of contempt of court, Mr Robinson seems to have been treated more harshly than others have been when they have been proven to have broken Contempt of Court Act prohibitions or reporting restrictions. Mr Robinson in his post court appearance speech outside the court, named several journalists and news organisations that had been found in contempt of court but where the cases had not resulted in gaol time for the offenders. Even if it was indeed the case that Mr Robinson had been proven to have broken the law of contempt, his sentence was excessive and has given the impression that he was sentenced on the basis of who is is rather than on the facts of the case before Judge Marson. Even if it eventually turns out that Mr Robinson is found to have contravened contempt and reporting restrictions, something about which I have grave doubts that he did, then he should be considered ‘time served’ when it comes to disposal of this case. He’s done the time, far more than others have done for similar breaches.

Although I can see the legal reasoning for the reporting restrictions being imposed in some cases especially those which are imposed to protect the integrity of future trials a series of trials and to prevent challenge to sentences or convictions on appeal, Tommy Robinson seems to have been treated extremely disadvantageously by Judge Marson. He really did not appear to properly examine whether a contempt of court had actually taken place. While it’s understandable that a judge would want to protect the integrity of linked trials, Judge Marson my well have let the fact that it was Tommy Robinson before him cloud his judgement and by doing so may have stirred up an avoidable shitstorm which may yet reverberate into other areas of law, politics and society. Let us hope that at the end of the day that justice and equity prevails in this case and Mr Robinson is exonerated and there is more clarification to the public about what is and what is not contempt of court. Like Gerard Batten the UKIP leader who spoke in Mr Robinson’s support at the Old Bailey demonstration, I have faith in British justice, it doesn’t always get things right and sometimes its wheels can move at a snails pace, but it is an arena where there are enough decent people working within it to ensure much better justice for Britons than may be obtained in some jurisdictions.

I move on now to the sizeable demonstration that was put on in support of Mr Robinson outside the court. This demonstration was clearly not a neo-fascist one and was predominantly made up of ordinary people, not all of them white, not all working class and not all by any stretch of the imagination communicants of the Church of England. Taking a look around I estimate that about between 3-5% of the pro-Tommy supporters were not white but were Black or Asian or mixed race, there were also a few Jews there some identifiably so and me, my wife and child were obviously not the only Jews in this village, far from it. To describe this as a ‘fascist’ or a far right demonstration as the Left and some on the mainstream media have done is a monstrous falsehood. I’ve marched against the real far right and the real neo Nazis back in the day when I was on the Left and I know what this particular political current looks like and feels like, I did not get this feeling from the pro-Tommy demonstrators. I must admit that I would have felt safer identifying myself as Jewish at this demonstration than I ever would on the now heavily Islamised area I was born in.

The speeches made by Mr Robinson and others such as Shazia Hobbs and Gerard Batten were excellent and I would advise readers to search these out online and listen to them. I also found myself concurring with Mr Kevin Carroll who spoke from the stage and said, quite rightly in my view, that the many police officers who were guarding the court and policing the demonstration were not the enemy. He’s right on this point. The ordinary front line police officer is not the cause of the undoubted rot and especially politically correct rot that is destroying both police forces and the public’s confidence in them, it is the senior officers which are doing that.

I wandered around this demonstration and from what I could see the behaviour of those attending to support Mr Robinson was exemplary, especially bearing in mind that this event was not stewarded and people were being expected to be self disciplined and communally disciplined when it came to Leftist interlopers or other actual or potential troublemakers. I saw very little trouble and only one incident when a guy rode his bike into the crowd annoyed a few people but got gently but firmly removed. At demonstration dispersal I saw this guy again on Ludgate Hill and he was whining about something or other to police officers who seemed intent on ignoring him.

As far as I could make out the vast majority of those attending this demonstration were ordinary people now dyed in the wool political activists and as such made a stark contrast to the opposition demonstration that was confined behind police barriers at the junction of Old Bailey and Newgate Street. This group seemed very much to occupy the description of ‘non player character’ or NPC. There was no sense that this group had researched this issue at all and they were merely mouthing the words that had been fed to them by whichever left wing groups had bussed them in. There definitely seemed to be Socialist Workers Party backing for the counterdemonstration which at about 100 attendees, was dwarfed by the size of the pro-Tommy Robinson demonstration. This SWP involvement is not surprising as they have a long and undistinguished record of backing Islamic causes over other maybe more worthwhile ones. We should never forget for example that the pro-Islam RESPECT party vehicle that formed had significant SWP involvement when it first started out over a decade ago. RESPECT is of 2016 defunct as a political party but as we can see from the anti Tommy demonstration on Tuesday these SWP Lefites are still promoting Islamic causes. The opposition demonstration gave me the distinct impression that there was much more of a mono-thought group-think attitude among them than could be found among the pro-Tommy demonstrators.

Were there unpleasant or objectionable people or extremist views held by some of those at the pro-Tommy demonstrators? I reckon that there were, but all demonstrations, whether they are put on by the Left, the Centre or the Right, attract the occasional extremist nutter. I recall when I was a man of the Left in the 1980’s seeing the ‘brew crew’ of crusty anarchists disrupt quite a few CND demonstrations with their chants of ‘Bombs Not Jobs’, sometimes whilst atop the fountains in Trafalgar Square. I’ve also been at lefty demos where members of the Stalin Society have turned up but were plainly not representative of those behind such demonstrations. As regards the pro-Tommy demonstrators I did not pick up any overt fraggles or extremists and even those who turned up to promote their own pet tin foil hat causes found that their exhortations to chant for them was neither widely picked up nor sustained. The whole focus of this demonstration was on Mr Robinson and the widespread problems of Islamic Rape Gangs that he has spent an awful lot of time and energy uncovering.

If you wanted a word to describe the media coverage of this case then I think the mildest word to use would be ‘dishonest’. The mainstream media coverage played down the number of attendees and the BBC’s coverage on the PM programme on Radio 4 could best be described as ‘sneering’ and allowed a representative of the left wing Hope Not Hate group to describe Mr Robinson as a ‘fascist’ without any decent challenge from either the presenter. The Evening Standard, the local paper for the London area initially told its readers that ‘hundreds’ of people had attended the pro-Tommy demonstration and similar to other mainstream outlets did not fairly describe the demonstration nor the motivations for Mr Robinson’s activism. The Standard later put out a corrected story which although still downplaying the numbers, said that 1000 attended. I was particularly disturbed, as an ex media person myself, to hear allegations that were made by Andrew Lawton that news agency reporters at the court were colluding to downplay the size of the demonstration in favour of Mr Robinson. Although I do not see anything ethically wrong with journalists working together to establish a set of facts and even coming to a consensus on things like demonstration sizes etc, what is alleged to have happened here is journalists from ostensibly reputable agencies allowing their agendas to influence the way that this event was reported. This is to me neither ethical nor acceptable. The constant misrepresentation of Mr Robinson and his causes from those within the mainstream media bubble is wrong and although I cannot condone the abuse that these MSM journalists got from some pro-Tommy demonstration participants, I can understand these individual’s frustration with the often dishonest reporting that is put out about Mr Robinson.

This was a really odd demonstration really, it was part support group for Mr Robinson, part angry protest and part festival of freedom to be quite frank. It was certainly bigger and very much different from many similar demonstrations that groups of all political shades have held outside court buildings. It was remarkably good natured and by and large seemed to be attended by those who had indeed read up on the subject of the nature of Islam and the danger that this ideology poses for the futures of our children and grandchildren. No matter how some, whether they be biased press or mendacious Islamic grievance mongers, portray this demonstration, I have little doubt that it was a success and it, along with the Robinson case itself, may be the catalyst for much needed changes in how society deals with an ideology that all too often prays for our deaths or enslavement.

* LOL We are still missing a pair of toddler socks that Laughing Boy has lobbed ‘somewhere’ in Old Bailey.