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”.
Paul Embery – " We are in danger of the public losing faith completely in the criminal justice system ".
— Patriots Of Britain (@HoodedClaw1974) December 16, 2024pic.twitter.com/F30zCfXjW2
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Please can we lose this obsession with whether lockdowns “worked” (whatever that means- something that people who talk about them never explain)? It’s a rabbit hole and a largely irrelevant distraction
I have decided that on lockdowns the science, not ‘The $cience,’ is settled – they don’t and cannot ever work to control a respiratory virus. A point the esteemed Dr Mike Yeadon is always keen to reiterate.
BINGO
Indeed. They were utterly useless. In fact, they were worse than useless.
Lockdowns concentrated more people in fewer places for more of the time.
So if they achieved anything, it was probably to increase disease transmission.
It’s all completely twisted up and ridiculous.
Spot on MAk.
The excuse was “we can’t overwhelm the NHS”….But what with the Nightingales! Also, the NHS wouldn’t be overwhelmed everywhere at the same time FFS!
It is of course irrelevant to talk of the effectiveness of a lockdown in the absence of a real pandemic!
And on the topic of rabbits. In Tibetan Buddhist debate, the ‘horn of a rabbit’ does not exist but can still be discussed as a mere imputation that has no referrent.
The cost of lockdown on the economy, public debt, social breakdown and mental health mean it will never be irrelevant.
The consequences of lockdowns are indeed highly relevant, but I don’t think that proving they don’t “work” is necessary or desirable. For a start I believe they are morally wrong. Secondly I don’t think the state should ever have any such power, regardless of the “emergency” – too easily abused. Thirdly the costs – financial and otherwise, including a consideration of a gazillion £s per day to compensate people for losing the ability to lead a normal life – are so gigantic that any benefits can never come close to justifying them. Fourthly, no-one ever defines what they mean by “work” or “don’t work”. People use words like “saving lives” but what exactly does that mean? People quote “covid deaths” – a nonsense phrase. Let’s assume “working” means it significantly reduces deaths from some deadly “virus” WITHIN A GIVEN TIMEFRAME (important) compared to if you didn’t “lock down”. What does that achieve? What are the exit strategies? There’s only one that I can think of that would make “lockdowns” an option with some point to them, and that is if you use the time it buys you to develop a “vaccine” that significantly reduces the threat of the virus. So the whole idea of a lockdown is predicated on a miracle “vaccine” – what happens if you don’t find one, or you can’t test it in some reasonable timeframe? Well, we know what happened – a miracle “vaccine” was “developed” which is neither safe nor effective, and it was rolled out to enable lockdowns to finish, because people were getting less compliant.
The onus is NOT on us to “prove” or even “argue” that lockdowns don’t “work”. Engaging in such an argument accepts all sorts of assumptions that I do not accept (there was a pandemic, saving lives at all costs is desirable, etc).
Except tof, “vaccines” ordinarily take 10-15 years to gain approval before being allowed to market. The suggestion thst the C1984 “vaccines” brewed up in six months could be even remotely ‘safe and effective’ is bullshit of the highest order – outright lies actually.
That’s my point – if you for a moment accept that there was a “pandemic” and that “lockdowns” “work”, the only logical reason for doing one is to buy time until you have a vaccine (or a treatment – wonder why we didn’t get a miracle treatment instead of a “vaccine”….?) and as you say they take 10-15 years (Vallance himself said that covid was too mild to justify a mass rollout, in a text to Hancock) – so logically as soon as you “lock down” you are committed to a rushed “vaccine”, so they cannot be justified even if they “work”. Of course this is all hypothetical and assumes good faith etc, which we are convinced is not the case.
I was forced to defend Boris today, at least in my head after seeing the placards outside the enquiry stating “Boris killed my Mother”….No he did not kill your mother. If on the other hand your mother died from the jab, that is more plausible with the Mandates that violate the Nuremberg Code.
I was forced to defend Boris today, at least in my head after seeing the placards outside the enquiry stating “Boris killed my Mother”
The lows to which people stoop to further party politics keep amazing me …
“Boris killed my mother”
Bloody hell there are some deranged people in the world. Try going onto the zero-covid subreddit. Bonkers!
There were people in masks with the placards, no doubt part of the cult. They will get their wish, the collectivist nightmare that is the WHO treaty, we’re all doomed.
Why do you believe this is genuine? This whole quiry (they’re not asking any questions) is nothing but a carefully stage-managed rearguard action to keep The Narrative™ alive despite it’s patently absurd. Nobody really knows anything about actual COVID deaths, assuming there were any, because a COVID death has always been died within X days after a positive test. Originally, these people were aiming for 100% IFR by simply counting every death after a positive test as COVID death. Later on, this was restricted to a month, thereby statistically guaranteeing a healthy number of deaths while being somewhat less obviously absurd.
People waving placard with statements like “Boris killed my mother!” on them have probably been leaked from a lab and never had one, ie, there’s doubtlessly a Just stop COVID! alliance somewhere which is, not the least due to the enormous amounts of taxpayer money these people managed to extract, extremely well-funded and arranges for such demonstrations as required.
During the first lockdown, a large traveller camp got established on a Reading car park (Hills Meadow Car Park, to be precise). I usually walked past that once per day (or rather, night) and there were always people socialising around open camp fires there. The whole site was a pandemic exclave were COVID simply didn’t happen. The council was doubtlessly aware of that because portable toilets appeared all over the place after a few days but they just let it happen. It’s only travellers, after all, and nobody cares about what they’re doing. The same kind of Labour politicians and pandemic profiteers are behind all manifestations of the Hallet show, both inside and outside of the building.
It’s part of the psyop. The question, repeated over and over, rests on the premise that an extraordinarily dangerous disease hit us all. If you engage with the question you accept the premise.
Like climate change. If you debate whether net zero is effective or not, workable, more harm than good and all the rest of it, you are implicitly accepting that there is a problem in the first place.
The only proper answer to any lockdown questions is one of your favourite phrases: what pandemic?
And with climate change, the same. What climate change?
“It’s part of the psyop.”
100%
The prof is still lying by omission. The very fact nowhere, including Sweden, Belarus, Tanzania, South Dakota, had the wave of death predicted by Ferguson means the whole farago was never remotely justified. Prof is still saying authority can manage virus evolution when it cant, thus he is no more of a scientist than yr average astrologer. I’d rather therefore take advice off Russell Grant than this prof.
Absolutely.
The two examples of this which should really be flying flat into everyone’s face are:
The 2021 Ahrtal floods in Germany leading to widespread devastion and (because of a real emergency caused by an environmental catastrophe) complete breakdown of all COVID measures right at the height of the COVID hysteria. Had these measure been anyhow necessary or effectice, all COVID hell should have broken out in the region where people suddenly had to live in cramped, collective accomodations. Of course, absolutely nothing happened.
The war in Ukraine. As a side effect, the health system in the war zone broke down due to bombing/ shelling and loads of soldiers and civilians were forced to spend their time much closer together than they usually would. COVID immediately faded from everybody’s list of priority issues because of real problems and never managed to make a comeback on its own.
Nevertheless, we have the Hallet panto where people are still dancing around the golden lockdown and the high quality facemask which must have saved us all from a terrible fate. A surreal spectacle which would be more entertaining if it wasn’t to be feared that the reality deniers will again gain the upper hand and force as all to partake in another great pandemic festival of absolutely no real substance.
We also had our Plan – B that never materialized. Will the Enquiry ask why the modelling was way out, doubt it.
But we already knew that, way back. WTF?
Are we still talking about so-called ‘covid deaths’? Dare we not mention the excessive midazolam prescriptions that preceded the huge number of excess deaths? The ‘covid deaths’ with an average age 3 years later than all-cause mortality? The ‘covid deaths’ that appeared to be similar to a real pandemic’s Gompertz curve?
It was a contrivance from start to finish. There never was a pandemic. The majority of deaths were due to infliction not due to infection.
Sorry to disagree with the author, but I’m not impressed. My interpretation of listening to Spiegelhalter in the early days was that he was a master of what is now known as the ‘limited hangout’. He was careful to pick and choose which issues he would address and studiously avoided straying too far into the realms of actually listening to the people who at the time were screaming from the rooftops about the damage lockdowns would cause, the dangers of decanting the sick elderly to care homes and the genocidal Liverpool Pathway protocol, the obscenity that was Test and Trace, etc. If he was so wise and knowledgeable, why didn’t he ever refer back to existing guidance on dealing with pandemics, which was and remains relevant? He was and remains a first class govt shill.
“I mean, look, several years on now David, we talked to you all the time during the pandemic, sort of on-the-go commentary. What have you reflected over the years about what might have been done differently, better, or how you think about it?”
This comment from Evan Davies is the big giveaway and particularly “we talked to you all the time during the pandemic, sort of on-the-go.”
The BBC don’t talk to anyone regularly unless they are providing the ‘correct’ responses.
Yup that is why Hitchens and Sumption was only on the BBC once…Once bitten twice shy.
Yeah, the problem is the fundamental premise.
You don’t’ need evidence to NOT do something. You need evidence to DO something.
They took all sorts of action without evidence. These people act like gods, considering they have a right to act and hey, if they get it wrong, well, honest mistake, because something had to be done.
No. Nothing had to be done. Nothing ever has to be done, certainly not when it comes to telling others what to do. The default should be don’t tell other what to do unless you are pretty damned sure. And even then, if it’s so obvious, then just present your evidence and let people make the “right” choice.
My reply is to WyrdWoman.
Apologies.
Remember politicians are worshipped as god’s so they’ll do stuff without evidence. This is inevitable when you abolish god and worship the establishment instead which is what moet ppl do.
These hucksters are all politicians, only paid a bit better.
This particular bovril, as I recall, kept changing his tune (and has changed it once more!):
‘Some people seem to be interpreting this article as suggesting that COVID does not add to one’s normal risk. I should make it clear that I am suggesting that it roughly doubles your risk of dying this year.’ 21 March 2020
‘Back in March (2020) I pointed out that Imperial infection fatality rate estimates closely matched average annual mortality risk. Based on 200,000+ deaths, their latest estimates show an even closer match!’ 16 Nov 2020
‘In good King Charles’s golden days,
When loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous High-Churchman I was,
And so I got preferment;
Unto my flock I daily preached
Kings were by God appointed,
And damned was he that durst resist
Or touch the Lord’s anointed.
And this is law, I will maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir,
That whatsoever king shall reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir.’
The whole thing was an experiment – from lockdowns to phycological conditioning to ‘vaccines’. The whole damn thing was one giant experiment. For what reason can be disputed, but not that it was a giant experiment carried out on billions. As the absolute reverse is true, that single sentence tells me this guy is part of the machine.
Infections peaked because infections always peak. Perhaps human behaviour contributes to that as well as what the virus itself does, but if so it’s not a “soft lockdown” but “normal human behaviour.”
“There should have been far more experimentation..” Ha ha ha, ha de effing ha.
They banned, deplatformed, denigrated and as far as I can recall sacked, persecuted and prosecuted anyone that dared recommend ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin C, vitamin D, quercetin, zinc etc etc etc. If it had been a REAL EMERGENCY, and if our government cared one iota about us, we would have been encouraged to try any damned thing and the cops would have been handing out multivitamins instead of arresting and tasering people for being out walking.
The whole enquiry and all these blasted interviews is an ar$e covering episode of elephantine proportions, and an opportunity to promulgate yet more lies.
From the ONS mortality statistics , 17th April marked the high water of the first wave . Given the trajectory of Covid from infection to death , he is probably correct about the effects of self induced social distancing . I did think his revelation about the average age of mortality which he declared in April 2020 was also very important because it should have led to a conclusion that Lockdown was an Economical nonsense , never mind a Social Disaster . The opinion that it was justfied because younger people would infect the old had no relevance . The fact that more people died during the second wave despite lockdowns prove it was all a waste of time .
The faster the young get it (whatever it really is) the faster we reach herd immunity. The 99.97 IFR and average death age was known about by Even and Sir Keir after Keir got thrown out of The Raven pub in Bath. I remember him pointing that out for all to see.
Update for him and Toby:
I think an analogy would be helpful here:
If you wanted to convince a crowd of dim-witted onlookers that the tide was receding because you waved a magic wand in the direction of the sea, you would have to be sure the tide was actually starting to recede at the time you cast your spell.
An astute observer might chime in: “But the tide has already been going back out for the past half-hour!”
“Well”, you claim, “Had I not used my wand to push the tide out, it would have come back in again!”
It’ll be the same with the climate travesty; there’s strong evidence that we are shortly to start a cold period. Unfortunately, should that happen, the climate alarmist will say “there you are our hubristic management of the climate worked”! …and of course will continue to do whatever doesn’t work.
I’m sure Prof Spiegelhalter knows that the cases/deaths curves for the first wave of covid follow typical Gompertz distribution, ie it was decelerating from the start. There would not appear to be any inflection at the point where people took “voluntary action”, or otherwise.
Remember C19 was already in UK in 2019….Blood & stool samples confirm this according to antibodies.
Dude, two words, “Michael” and “Levitt”
Voluntary measures means Government trying to terrorize people into compliance (by bombarding them with vastly exaggerated reports about the dangers of COVID). And they were quite effective at doing so. I remember that I was actually afraid of it when the shitshow started. OTOH, I then said to myself that trying to hide in the cupboard from an airbourne virus was certainly absolutetely pointless and hence, that the only realistic option would be “Carry on and chance it.” I remember being the only patron in a pub the day before lockdown was formally announced. Nightclubs had already closed ‘voluntarily’ by that time because there were simply no customers. That was the last day of my normal life. Next day, the jelly-mop issued his “You must stay at home!” order and things would never be the same again.
Normal life has since sort-of bounced back but it’s really new normal life. All people I knew before lockdown are gone and the crowd which replaced them is much less easy-going, rather spooked out and aggressive. And this includes doormae who’ve become accustomed to being superios and not servants of customers and who seem to have adopted a punch first, ask question later (if at all) attitude towards any kind of behaviour which deviates from the crowd (such as – in my case – men who are and mostly prefer to stay alone). Because of this, I’m still ‘voluntarily’ staying away from any crowds (precisely four attempts at going to two place where I used to be a regular before COVID led to absolutely uncalled for outbursts of violence on each second attempt).
Sometimes, I’m thinking that I’d really like to have my life back from the Covidians. OTOH, I’ve meanwhile mostly come to the conclusion that you just cannot win. Play by the rules as good as you again, well, lad, that’s not good enough, we’ll change them!
They KNEW infections were falling and also that Covid wasn’t dangerous to the vast majority long before the first lockdown.
The Government DOWNGRADED Covid from a High Consequence Infectious Disease on 18 March 2020, 5 days before the first lockdown because they had that data which showed it had low mortality rates.
If it was downgraded on 18 March (which it was) then they must have assessed the data over several weeks leading up to it; discussed and reached agreement; approved the Statement and announced it. I reckon that’s 3 weeks minimum.
So they KNEW in very early March. Yet neither the QC nor any of the witnesses want to know about that.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
I have posted this before – the C1984 was downgraded from High to Low Consequence because if the virus was considered High C. then ALL potential prophylactics have to be made available which would mean Ivermectin and Hydroxichloroquine and if these were available and as we know they demonstrably worked, then the emergency “vaccine” could not be justified.
That is exactly why they will gloss over that little fact.
Still the assumption that infections started falling because of mass house arrest (lockdown). Just a debate about whether “hard lockdown” was needed or whether people’s voluntary lockdown was enough. A debate about whether scaring everyone into shutting down their lives was enough, or whether they had to be threatened with arrest as well.
The epidemic peaked because that’s what epidemics do. Lockdown had nothing to do with it.
The international evidence is that lockdown had no effect on covid death rates.
A debate about whether scaring everyone into shutting down their lives was enough, or whether they had to be threatened with arrest as well.
I think this was more of a debate for how long the charade could be maintained while those voluntarily hiding at home could still have done something else, ie, before hospitality, schools and most shops were forcibly closed and the outcome was Reality will assert itself long before we can vaccinate anyhing unless we do much more to prevent that from happening. Hence, the almost total abolishment of public life. Afterwards, people still wouldn’t obey the rules but could only do so ‘responsibly’ in private, ie, without this being easily recognizable from the outside.
I’m no scientist but didn’t Michael Levitt (Nobel prize winner and of Diamond Princess fame) produce a Bell shaped graph showing how all “pandemics” play out i.e. they rise, hit a peak and then decline. So by definition it negates the need for any lockdown as they make no difference.