A two-tier justice row has erupted after an engineer was jailed for half as long as Lucy Connolly over a near-identical tweet, while a Labour MP who punched a constituent to the ground was spared jail completely. The Telegraph has more.
Joseph Haythorne, 26, posted “Go on Rotherham burn any hotels with those scruffy b——s in it” on August 4th last year as violence erupted in the South Yorkshire town.
At Sheffield Crown Court on Wednesday, the engineer from Surrey, who admitted inciting racial hatred, was jailed for 15 months.
His jail term is less than half the 31 months handed to Connolly, a mother of one who is married to a Conservative councillor.
Critics claimed the sentence was “a clear example of two-tier justice”.
She was jailed in October last year after posting an online message on the day of the Southport murders, that read: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the b——s for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government politicians with them.”
The 42 year-old, who lost a child of her own in tragic circumstances, deleted the post fewer than four hours later, but not before it had been viewed 310,000 times.
Her husband, Ray Connolly told the Telegraph: “He can thank his lucky stars his partner isn’t a Tory councillor.”
Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary said: “There are a lot of inconsistencies in sentencing. A rapist recently received only 28 months and the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, refused to allow that sentence to be reviewed.
“It cannot be right that Lucy Connolly got a longer sentence for a tweet than someone convicted of rape.”
Speaking about the sentence handed to Haythorne, Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, said: “Another ludicrous jail sentence. Fifteen months for a nasty offensive tweet lasting 17 minutes.
“On this basis, if justice is consistent [and] not two-tier, then Bob Vylan could face being jailed for over five years for his vile singing at Glastonbury.”
Lord Young, the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, said: “No one should be sent to prison for a tweet. This is not a good use of valuable prison spaces that should be kept for thieves, muggers, stabbers and drug dealers.
“How can it be right that a Labour MP who repeatedly punched a constituent, knocking him to the ground, received a suspended sentence, but a 26 year-old should be jailed for 15 months for one ill-advised tweet?
“It’s a clear example of two-tier justice and risks undermining public confidence in our criminal justice system.”
Worth reading in full.
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The problem with organisations that are created to tackle a problem is that they don’t really have an incentive to solve the problem. If they solved the problem once and for all they’d be out of a job. And it isn’t in the nature of people to work against themselves.
A bit like the EU and other bureaucracies like all central and local government, and the NHS. On the contrary the motivation is to grow the bureaucracy, requiring and acquiring ever greater budgets and power.
Which might go some way to explain the apathetic culture that’s now deeply rooted within the NHS. I’ve never had an issue with the idea of a publicly funded health service, my issue has always been the superiority and patronising attitude of most of the NHS staff. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that they are providing a service to paying customers (well, many are paying customers). The customers (the tax paying public) also have this strange sense of gratitude towards them, which simply exaggerates NHS staff sense of superiority. It’s difficult to see how you resolve that in a publicly funded model. And once that deep rot has set in it’ll be almost impossible to remove without a complete replacement.
All bureaucracies* after a certain a point stop serving those who fund them and serve themselves. When you have a hyper-bureaucracy such as the NHS (now nearly 1,900,000 employees) is is by definition unmanageable, all the more so as the managerialism that the bastard Blair introduced into the public sector has in effect destroyed its purpose – of serving the public.
*Nurse of over 20 years experience, RUH in Bristol, when I asked her about management said this. Or rather, spat it out
“Management? Dickheads with clipboards who stop me working”.
Yup.
They also act in silos. They do not think through the consequences of their, no doubt, honourable intentions.
The populations of African countries has exploded because improved health, especially at childbirth and in early years has not taken away as many of the multiple births women there were / are used to having. I read some statistic about the projected population of Nigeria, and their growth was not due to immigration like ours.
Work should have been done and now should be put in hand to teach them how to reform their economies so they can support themselves. It is not a solution to allow continued mass migration to Europe where the people involved are too often un able to earn enough. Very often they miss “home” so much they visit relatives often and for extended stays and send what little cash they have to family so further reducing their ability to pay their way in Europe.
A good analysis. The development of WHO into a supranational structure is not desirable, and undemocratic. However, it does create a lot of opportunism and financial benefit to some corporations, masquerading as a provider of public health benefit. Recently I posted this public display by a local authority and it’s mates; worth plonking it here as well.
All very well but what the author does not tell us is that donors to the WHO get to decide how their money is spent. So what should be the very welcome money from the philanthropath Gates, which could be spent on clean water, sanitation and hygiene, MUST be spent on jab, jab, jab.
As with the UN, the original motivation for the formation of the institution was excellent. Not both have been captured, and we should not be giving them a penny.
https://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/annlsurvey/vol22/iss1/6/
The above paper points the finger at the Gates Foundation for human rights breaches in Africa and India
I must agree and also recommend reading Robert F. Kennedy’s “The Real Anthony Fauci”.
RFK Jr is a bit of an Environutter but the section of his book concerning WHO / BMGF/ BigPharma’s activities in Africa, very well researched and referenced, is absolutely jawdropping.
Those implicated should spend the rest of their worthless lives improving clean water and education projects, on ‘the ground’ in Africa.
And, I must add, how many mosquito nets could be purchased and distributed for the cost of an armour plated Mercedes Maybach?
Have read it. Fauci is evil, and I mean that in the biblical sense. Kennedy has been excellent all through Covid. Climate nutter, yes, but the rest of his work has been uplifting.
“Those implicated should spend the rest of their worthless lives improving clean water and education projects, on ‘the ground’ in Africa.” rather than jabbing them…
Even in a high trust society a bureaucracy will experience mission creep and start putting its fingers into pies where they don’t belong.
A better system is for polluting corporations and their ilk to be dealt with through the tort system, but with criminal penalties attached.
For example, I’d consider it reasonable for Purdue pharma executives to face the death penalty for their role in the Oxycontin scandal. With a high evidence burden of course.
Well-said. Let’s not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Public health, properly understood, is indeed a very good thing. And it is a legitimate function of government, insofar as it respects and doesn’t trample individual rights. What we have seen in recent years is not really genuine public health, but a perversion of such used to justify tyranny and evil.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/arrest-them-a-bold-attack-on-genevas-covid-cabal/
Hopefully this can appear in tomorrow’s News Roundup. Powerful stuff from a Davos insider.
A very interesting article.
Just a few comments.
PHE also lost sight of QALYs (quality life years) during this Covid debacle.
Each and every one of us lost QALYs to some extend. Some more than others.
As well as the funding, the goals should be looked at (like the UN SDGs). Having a focus on one achievable goal makes much more sense both in terms of cost and result than trying to pump money into multiple complex and unsolvable problems.
If all the pandemic money had been spent on improved sanitation and nutrition, the outcome on human mortality would have been so much better.
The problem is not so much the WHO but how and who controls the WHO.
Currently there is too little outside control of WHO and it seems to be a power unto itself.
It should be controlled by democratic forces, subject to the control of the people.
The government/authorities should be the servant of the people, not its master.