This week I went on the BBC and argued that Lucy Connolly is a political prisoner. I must confess I was somewhat surprised to be asked to discuss this most hot button of issues on the Beeb, never known for giving airtime to narratives prominent on the populist Right. The programme was Anti-Social, an hour-long Radio 4 show which bills itself as “peace talks for the culture wars”, hosted by Adam Fleming. After Allison Pearson’s heartbreaking Telegraph exposé on Connolly’s plight went viral last week (the mother and childminder was imprisoned for 31 months for a tweet on the night of the Southport massacre) I was there to argue that she had been treated unfairly in yet another example of two-tier justice. Putting the opposing view was Chantelle Lunt, a criminologist, Labour councillor and founder of the Merseyside Alliance for Racial Equality. Two neutral professors of criminology also made some pre-recorded remarks about sentencing.
One of the interesting things about this debate is the fact it was happening on the BBC at all. After all, ever since Southport establishment voices have been insisting that the very idea of two-tier justice is a ‘myth’. Think of prickly Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, slapping away a reporter’s microphone when pressed on it during the unrest, or Sir Keir Starmer declaring that it is a “non-issue”. Yet clearly, even for our often head-in-the-sand media-political establishment, public anger about this issue is becoming difficult to ignore. In an internal Home Office report leaked earlier this year, officials felt moved to denounce “claims of ‘two-tier’ policing” as a “Right-wing extremist narrative” – while also lamenting it is now “leaking into mainstream debates”. Last month, Sir Andy Marsh, Chief Executive of the College of Policing, admitted that accusations of two-tier policing have become “almost impossible to defend against”. Just this week, a report by the Home Affairs Select Committee – seven out of 11 of whose members are Labour MPs, as I pointed out on the programme – had furiously denied that there was any two-tier policing in relation to the Southport riots. (A myth I hope I put to rest by noting that while the police rightly came out in force against mob violence outside asylum hotels and elsewhere, Muslim sectarian mobs were allowed to run around unpoliced in places like Birmingham, attacking pubs and passersby.)
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