Tommy Robinson jailed
One view:
Ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson jailed at Leeds court, from BBC News
Former English Defence League (EDL) leader Tommy Robinson has been jailed for potentially prejudicing a court case, it can be reported.
Robinson, who appeared in the dock under real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was arrested in Leeds on Friday. The 35-year-old was broadcasting on social media outside the city’s crown court where a trial was ongoing. A ban on reporting his 13-month sentence at the same court was lifted after being challenged by the media.
Robinson, from Bedfordshire, pleaded guilty to a charge of contempt of court. A judge told him his actions could cause the ongoing trial to be re-run, costing “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds”…
…Robinson was convicted of contempt for interfering with a trial in Canterbury.
His attempts to film defendants on that occasion could, the judge said, have “prejudiced” the jury, leading to an unfair verdict – and he was warned he’d go to jail if he did anything remotely similar again.
Why couldn’t we initially report Robinson’s arrest and jailing? Reporting restrictions are a long-standing part of the British legal system. In this case, the judge ordered a temporary media black-out because he feared reporting Robinson’s conviction could influence the jury in the very case Robinson was targeting.
Another view: “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that …an’ Tommy go away”, by Mark Steyn:
[…] On Friday, Robinson was livestreaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week’s Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for “grooming” – the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance (as I pointed out to the Sky guys) of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media. Me last year, on my time in a certain municipality about thirty miles south of Leeds:
Tracking down the victims of Rotherham required a bit of elementary detective work on my part, but it’s not that difficult. What struck me, as my time in town proceeded, was how few members of the British media had been sufficiently interested to make the effort: The young ladies were unstoppably garrulous in part because, with a few honorable exceptions, so few of their countrymen have ever sought them out to hear their stories.
You can say a lot of things about Tommy Robinson, but he’s one of the embarrassingly small number of Britons who recognizes the horror inflicted on those young and vulnerable girls on the receiving end of “diversity” and seeks to do something about it.
So on Friday he was outside the Crown Court in Leeds. He was not demonstrating, or accosting or chanting, or even speaking. He was just pointing his mobile phone upon the scene from a distance. Within minutes, seven coppers showed up in whatever they use instead of a Black Maria these days, tossed him inside it and drove off. In other words, these were not “investigating officers” called to the scene: They showed up with the intent to take him away. Within hours, he was tried, convicted and gaoled – at HM Prison Hull, a Category B chokey, or one level below maximum security. The judge in the case, one Geoffrey Marson, spent all of four minutes on trying, convicting and sentencing Robinson. It is not clear whether that leisurely tribunal included his order expressly forbidding “any report on these proceedings” (the case is Regina vs Yaxley-Lennon because that’s Robinson’s real name).
Watch: Douglas Murray on how politicians concentrate on secondary rather than the primary problems
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