Delingpole: This Tommy Robinson Verdict Is a Travesty of Justice

Tommy Robinson
TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images
James Delingpole

Tommy Robinson has yet again been found guilty of contempt of court and now faces up to two years in prison.

Islamists, the mainstream media, and the left-liberal establishment will be delighted to see the man they like to call “Stephen Yaxley-Lennon” crushed, humiliated and put in his proper place.

But the feeling among many ordinary people will be that justice has not been done. The judges at the Old Bailey may have concluded today that Robinson was technically guilty of contempt of court when he livestreamed outside the Leeds trial of a Pakistani rape gang. As far as his many supporters will be concerned, though, Robinson is really being punished for being a member of the white working class who had the temerity to draw attention to a national scandal — Muslim grooming gangs — which the Establishment has long sought to play down.

Ezra Levant is the Canadian reporter who has done more than anyone to expose the injustice of Robinson’s predicament. Levant has repeatedly flown from Canada to report on Robinson’s trials with a diligence, fairness, and attention to detail entirely lacking from the mainstream media’s coverage.

The case dates back to 2018, when — in his role as citizen journalist and crusader against the grooming gangs which have preyed especially on white working-class communities around Britain — Robinson filmed and tried to interview some of the defendants outside one such trial.

Robinson’s case was and is that he had never had any intention of breaching court reporting restrictions. On the contrary, he had taken great pains to check — both with court officials and police — that he was not potentially in contempt of court.

There is no evidence to suggest that Robinson jeopardised the outcome of the trial, or let guilty men go free. Nor, it’s clear, was he aggressive towards them when he filmed them. Robinson’s view is simply that such people should not be permitted to commit a crime as heinous as grooming and raping often underage girls and then blend back into their community, unnoticed, when they may still pose a threat.

But the prosecution took a different line — and it was one that the court clearly found more persuasive. Far from doing the public a service, the court decided, Robinson’s actions amounted to a “serious interference with the administration of justice”.

With what might strike some observers as the most extraordinary double standards, the prosecution lawyer laid into Robinson for causing distress to the rape gang trial defendants — while pointedly overlooking the appalling nature of the crimes which had landed them in court in the first place.

Obviously, the prosecution lawyer was doing no more than his job. What’s disappointing, though, is that court actually endorsed this disingenuousness.

Yesterday, Ezra Levant tweeted:

I never shared his optimism. Two months ago, when Robinson was standing as a candidate in the EU elections, one Establishment insider confidently told me that there wasn’t a chance Robinson would ever take up his place at Brussels, even if he was elected. Decisions had been made at the highest levels that Robinson was an inconvenience and that, if necessary, he would have to be put back behind bars.

You can dismiss this as conspiracy theory if you will. But it is certainly the case that no one has done so much time — ten weeks, most of it in solitary confinement for his own protection from the Muslim prison gangs which would happily have killed him — on such a flimsy contempt of court pretext as Tommy Robinson.

UK government policy, certainly under Theresa May, has been to avoid all confrontation with problematic elements in the Muslim community and instead to try to persuade the public that the threats of terrorist incidents or predatory rape gangs are overblown; and that furthermore the threat from the “far right” is at least as dangerous.

As the mainstream media’s favourite example of the “far right”, Robinson has long been considered fair game for all manner of vicious criticism.

I’ve argued before that Tommy Robinson is the Establishment’s Emmanuel Goldstein: unfairly selected as the state’s officially sanctioned target for the public’s righteous hatred, regardless of anything he has or hasn’t done wrong.

Yet again, justice has not been done. Nor, in the eyes of many unbiased observers, has it been seen to be done.

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