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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Why are you conflating anti-war, anti-Israel policies as anti Semitic? This is extremely dangerous misattribution. So Jews against bombing Gaza are antisemitic?
Clearly not.
Israel has a BIG problem and it’s not aided by trying to adopt a victim narrative and abrogating the historic Jewish pain all to itself in order to execute more historic pain on the local populations.
If you have fallen for this leftist victim strategy, you are the one with a problem.
You may want to look up, ‘abrogate’.
Or (s)he may want to look up arrogate, which I think was intended (trying to be helpful rather than critical).
I did not use the word, AYM did. I was trying to be helpful rather than critical.
I meant arrogate.
Why are you conflating anti-war, anti-Israel policies as anti Semitic?
Because that’s – since ever – the standard tactic of the government of Israel to deal with any criticism. Preferably while both taking German money to support its policies and claiming the Germans aka Nazis are somehow involved with it, which they’re both doing at the moment.
You’re right that Israel has a big problem, tens or, more likely, hundreds of millions of Muslims plus their supporters on the left who refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist.
If you’ve fallen for the lies that demos are only, or even mostly, about a humanitarian ceasefire your the one with, and part of, a problem.
Actually its the Zionists who refuse to recognise Palestinians have a right to exist.
It’s a small minority of Ultra Orthodox Jews that want to see all Palestinians removed from Israel and the occupied territories. Their numbers are insignificant compared with the number of Muslims who want to cleanse Israel of Jews. They generally aren’t armed and have carried out a terrorist attack since the Hebron massacre in 1994.
Don’t try and avoid the issue and compare the 2 sides in a struggle between civilization and barbarism.
I am not avoiding any issue I speak as I find, and Israel is occupying land it has no right to in Gaza as well as stealing Palestinians gas and oil too. I’ve seen the videos of IDF forces beating up the Orthodox jews as for barbarism what Israel is doing is a crime against humanity!
There’s no gas or oil deposits in Israel or the occupied territories.
A justified war against a barbaric enemy is not a crime against humanity, the slaughter of 1,400 civilians could be classed as one.
I suggest you do a bit more research as you seem a bit light on facts!
OK they have a tiny amount of oil reserves, in round numbers 0.0% of global reserves.
http://www.worldometers.info/oil/israel-oil
If these reserves are within the internationally recognised borders of Israel they can’t steal what belongs to them.
Are you saying that even if they were stealing it that would justify 7 October?
Are you aware that the media told lies about what actually happened and the media had to walk back on their claims? Do you believe Mossad, and the western intelligence services didnt know what was being planned, Egypt even gave out an alert about it! Going back to oil and gas – I am not talking about ‘reserves’ there are oil and gas fields off of Gaza – Sunak’s inlaws have even signed a contract with Israel!
If there are known oil and gas deposits off Gaza these are reserves. Look up the definition of oil or gas reserves.
What lies have the media told and where have they walked them back?
Obviously there were failings somewhere that allowed Hamas to carry out their barbaric attack.
Are you saying it was justified?, yes or no.
You seem to be trying to justify the slaughter of 1,400 innocent civilians you sick b*****d.
Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005.
Good point, although in the light of what happened last month it could be seen as a mistake not to do so.
Well this did gladden my heart today, especially because I was there. I passed by and saw all of these Israel flags ( ‘Bring Them Home Now’ are the organizers ), took a closer look and there’s approx 60 boats sailing along the canals of Amsterdam and many people supporting from on dry land. So refreshing to see a completely different dynamic and vibe. And you know what? Not a single face muzzle did I see. I guess the lack of hate-fueled hostility, demented fervour and zero mental illness on display will do that..
https://twitter.com/eurojewcong/status/1725920147892752659
I’m so pleased being amonst the cattle of humanity gladdend your heart.. nothing quite like being around deluded folk who believe every narrative is there… You must have certainly felt at home Mogs..
Nice try but much like my other hater/stalker/troll on here, you obviously think I came down with the last shower. The fact you just started your account today and this is your first and only post isn’t overly smart is it?🤷♀️ Same M.O, same broken record…😴
But I guess it’s slightly more original than your last username, eh?😆
I won’t deign to engage with somebody of your ilk again so go ahead and knock yourself out. Floor’s all your’s.👋
Whose the other hater?
Elon Musk is not an antisemite for the simple reason that the antisemites where a political pressure group (or a set of political pressure groups) in Germany in the 19th and early 20th century. They actually used the term for themselves as it – in their opinion – communicated something positive, namely, opposition to integration of the (considered to be) racially different Jews into the German societies of Germany and Austria which had occurred in the early 19th century as they were seen as valuable source of soldiers¹ for armies based on mandatory military service of all citizens of a state.
¹ To a degree. For instance, while Jews nominally had equal rights in the German Empire, they couldn’t generally become reserve officers as they were considered to belong to the non-officer-worthy classes.
Words can change their meaning over time. Today everyone accepts that an antisemite is anyone who hates Jews. Using this definition and not trying to be clever, Musk isn’t an antisemite.
Words can change their meaning over time.
Yep. Humpty-Dumpty already said so.
You’re correct about Humpty-Dumpty, but what’s your point?
That this term hasn’t changed its meaning but is intentionally abused for propagandistic purposes: Arab/ muslim hostilty to Israel and people believed to support it has zero relation to historic antisemitism, but is the direct outcome of the politics of Israel since 1948, especially, the large number of successful wars it conducted against its present day enemies.
Israel is the militarily dominant power in the region and has acted aggressively towards all of its neighours in the past. Yet, the government of Israel keeps trying to play a Still victim of Nazi persecution! card by inappropriately using the term antisemitism to link its present-day enemies to the persecutors of the past.
Isn’t this the usual M.O. for these people, name calling and ‘labelling’ to shut people up? Brexiteers were called racists, now anyone not fully cheering on the genocide in Gaza is an anti-semite.
Guess that makes me an antisemite. I’m not cheering on genocide in Gaza because there is no genocide.
Hamas invades Israel, murders 1200 people, rapes women, kills babies, kidnaps people, uses civilians and hospitals as shields, makes up fake civilian casualty figures for propaganda purposes, has ruled Gaza for many years and has done nothing to lift Gaza out of poverty, their leadership has become very rich, they take aid money and use it to enrich themselves and for military purposes instead of helping the people of Gaza, and who gets blamed – Israel.
Proof that Hamas lied about civilian casualties in a previous conflict.
http://www.camera.org/article/reporting-of-casualties-in-gaza/
I can’t see much in the way of argument here. “Musk is not an anti-semite” because… There follows nothing about Elon Musk.
The rest of the post is about identity politics. Sikh Lives Matter. Sikhs Don’t Count. Anti-Sikh mobs wearing Sikh-like headgear. Or some such ethnic-religious group or other.
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/columnist/365220/the-inside-story-of-how-palestinians-took-over-the-world/
this article describes how the alliance between easily duped American college students and Islamist radicals was created. Be sure to read down far enough for Ameer Makhoul’s statement to the author.