Today, OnlyFans ‘model’ Victoria Thomas Bowen was sentenced at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for throwing a milkshake at Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage as he left a pub in Clacton earlier this year, days into the General Election campaign. She had pleaded guilty to assault by beating and criminal damage at an earlier hearing.
Farage told the court he “felt humiliated” by the incident and was left fearing for his safety in public. He added he had worried “for some time afterwards that next time it may not be a milkshake”.
Thomas Bowen has been spared jail. Deputy Senior District Judge Tan Ikram handed down a 13-week jail sentence, suspended for 12 months. She must pay Farage £150 in compensation, and complete 120 hours of unpaid work, as well as paying £450 in court costs.
Deputy Senior District Judge Tan Ikram, who handed down the sentence, has a long history of eyebrow-raising rulings and comments, which, like today’s ruling, have often sparked claims of two-tier justice. Here are some of them.
PC James Watts
In 2022, in an unprecedented ruling, he jailed police constable James Watts for 20 weeks for WhatsApp memes mocking George Floyd, the black 46 year-old whose death in May 2020 sparked the Black Lives Matter riots.
“The hostility that [Watts] demonstrated on the basis of race,” Ikram explained, “makes this offending so serious that I cannot deal with it by a community penalty or a fine.” He added: “A message must go out.”
Later, he boasted about this publicly to a group of U.S. students, airing woke talking points about alleged institutional police racism and how he apparently sees it as his role to change this, saying, “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
“This was a [former] police officer bringing the police service into disrepute,” he told the College of DuPage in Illinois, in a lecture titled, ‘Diversity in the Judiciary‘. “So I gave him a long prison sentence. The police were horrified by that.”
Lord Wolfson KC, a former Justice Minister, is among those to have suggested that these comments may violate the judiciary impartiality rules which state that “judicial office holders cannot talk about the cases they or colleagues hear”.
Six police officers
Last year, Ikram sentenced six former Met officers for improper use of a public electronic communications network under the Communications Act 2003. The officers each received a suspended sentence of between eight and 14 weeks’ imprisonment and were ordered to undertake community service lasting between 40 and 140 hours.
They had exchanged “racist, sexist and homophobic” messages, and though the WhatsApp groupchat “Old Boys Beer Meet”, was private, Ikram ruled the messages were “offensive to many good people in this country and not only people who might be directly offended”.
While this is an extraordinary way for the law to work, one must note that this ruling is consistent with a recent High Court ruling on how the Communications Act is to be interpreted. The Law Society Gazette explains: “Whether an electronic message is ‘grossly offensive’ within section 127(1)(a) ‘is a question of fact to be answered objectively by reference to its contents and context, and not its actual effect’.” Which is to say, no one needs to have been offended for something to be “grossly offensive”.
Some people send themselves texts as reminders. If a comedian did this over WhatsApp with some of his or her edgier material, and Tan Ikram considered it to be “offensive to many good people”, this could be a crime.
Michael Chadwell’s Boomer meme
One of those officers had pleaded not guilty. Michael Chadwell shared an image showing parrots of different colours and children of different ethnicities, with the words, “Why do we cherish the variety of colour in every species except our own?” Below this was a Facebook comment: “Because I’ve never had a bike stolen out of my front yard by a parrot.”
The image contained no racial slur, nor did it mention any specific ethnicity. But Ikram rejected Chadwell’s argument that it was a joke, (“Dadaist, surreal and a little bit Monty Python”), and convicted Chadwell for the meme’s content alleged racist “implication”. “It’s a clearly racist generalisation and characterisation,” he said, “and caricature of ethnic people.”
“Sarah Jane Baker”
Ikram doesn’t always rule harshly on speech, however. Last August, he heard the case of “Sarah Jane Baker”, a transwoman (i.e., a biological male) who had been out on licence while serving a life sentence for attempted murder, kidnapping and torture. That July, Baker told an audience of trans activists in London, “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.” Ikram nevertheless ruled that this was not criminal speech, and even appeared to endorse the Trans+ Pride march that day, saying, “you wanted publicity for your cause”.
The ‘paraglider girls’ trio
At a central London pro-Palestine march the week after the October 7th attack in Israel last year, Heba Alhayek, 29, and Pauline Ankunda, 26, had attached images of paragliders to their backs, while Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, had attached one to a sign. Paragliders, as had been reported widely in the media, were how Hamas terrorists crossed the Gaza-Israel border to carry out their barbaric pogrom against Israeli civilians.
The trio were found guilty of appearing to show support for a terrorist group after a two-day trial.
Convicted under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, they faced a possible six months in prison. But Tan Ikram said he had “decided not to punish” the defendants, instead handing the trio a 12-month conditional discharge each.
“You crossed the line,” he said, “but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue.” This reasoning that will strike many as bizarre: the defendants’ apparent glee at the massacre of hundreds of Israelis apparently being mitigated by the fact that, er, they felt it strongly.
It then transpired that, weeks previously, Ikram had liked an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn, adding further question marks to the lenient ruling. He was subsequently disciplined for allowing a “perception of bias” in the judiciary.
PC Perry Lathwood
In May, Ikram found PC Perry Lathwood guilty of assault for handcuffing a black woman who was refusing to show her bus ticket at a ticket inspection. While conceding that “it was not through bad faith”, he said Lathwood had “crossed the line and got it wrong” in this widely publicised incident and fined him £1,500. This would also have cost Lathwood his career as an officer.
In September, however, the judgment was overturned at appeal, and Lathwood’s reputation restored. Rick Prior, Chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation, called the overturned judgment “erroneous and perverse”. He said of the case: “It is my view that this is yet another Independent Office for Police Conduct-led, politically motivated witch-hunt against a decent, honest and diligent police officer who was simply doing his job.”
Many people, looking at these apparent disparities in sentencing, see it as two-tier justice. However, this does not necessarily mean any of Ikram’s rulings are indefensible from a strictly legal point of view. The fact is that a considerable amount of discretion is baked into our legal system. It is in Ikram’s gift to sentence James Watts to prison time for private messages because “a message must go out”. Similarly, a potential judicial review of Ikram’s paraglider girls ruling was dropped after being deemed unlikely to be successful. A scan of the sentencing guidelines doesn’t suggest he necessarily got anything wrong with Thomas Bowen by the letter of the law.
Ikram could, however, have used that discretion to make an example of Ms. Thomas Bowen. Think of all those currently languishing in our prisons for social media offences, less because they had materially contributed to disorder than in order to ‘punish and deter’. In visiting violence on a politician, her ‘milkshaking’ was an attack, not just on an individual political candidate but on democracy itself – but this doesn’t seem to have merited extra seriousness in this case. Instead, as Farage notes, “We now live in a country where you can assault a Member of Parliament and not go to prison.” What message does that send?
Finally, one must note that Ikram is well embedded in the British judicial establishment. He is among contributors to the Equal Treatment Bench Book, which advises judges on how best to uphold the “fundamental principle” of the judicial oath, “fair treatment”. The diversity guidance, which every judge in the country receives on taking office, has employed Critical Race Theory concepts like “systemic” or “structural” racism, “unconscious bias,” and “micro-aggressions”, as well as transgender ideology. When trans-identified males in the dock for sexual offences are referred to by the court as “she”, for instance, courts are following the ETBB’s injunction to show “respect for a person’s gender identity”. Ikram is also currently a year into a three-year appointment to the Judicial Appointments Commission, the body that decides who becomes Britain’s judges. And at the 2022 New Year Honours – i.e., under Boris Johnson – he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for “services to judicial diversity”.
Stop Press: Paul Embery has told GB News that due to cases like these, “We are in danger of the public losing faith completely in the criminal justice system”.
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