Stories of two-tier justice are back. On Monday, Victoria Thomas Bowen, the model who doused Nigel Farage with milkshake on the Clacton campaign trail earlier this year, received a three-month suspended sentence for assault at Westminster magistrates’ court (plus 120 hours of unpaid work and a compensation order.) Farage was very unhappy: ‘We now live in a country where you can assault a Member of Parliament and not go to prison,’ he said, calling this ‘the latest example of two-tier justice’.
One might think the occasional attack like this showed the political process in rude health
Is he right? The judge who sentenced the assailant, Tan Ikram, is already known for his eclectic sentencing record. At the start of the year he gave a conditional discharge to Palestinian protesters openly glorifying the banned terrorist group Hamas, yet a couple of years earlier imprisoned a policeman for five months for a meme mocking George Floyd. Those whose memories go back five years may also remember that Jeremy Corbyn fared rather better when faced with a similar incident; another judge in the same Westminster court sent a Brexit supporter down for 28 days for having thrown an egg at him when he was electioneering in London.
There is another side to this, however. Consistency aside, do we actually want the kind of clampdown demanded by Farage? True, throwing milkshakes at politicians (or for that matter anyone else) is illegal: it amounts to assault. But there is a respectable case for dealing with such actions either with a good-humoured warning not to do it again, or at the most a fine and an order to pay for cleaning.
A lot of people will cavil at this suggestion. Violence against MPs, they say, can be deadly – witness the murders of Jo Cox and Davis Amess – and must be firmly nipped in the bud. Judge Ikram also expressed a fairly common view that any interference with politicians had to be stamped on because, he said, it threatened ‘not just’ Nigel Farage, but ‘our parliamentary democracy’.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Unfortunately neither of these cavils is very convincing. It’s all very well to say that the liquid thrown at the Reform leader might have been poison, or acid, or something seriously deadly. But the fact remains that it was not. Using this to justify throwing the book at the person who threw something ultimately innocuous is like insisting that we must severely punish anyone slightly over the speed limit to discourage others, and to make the point that driving like Toad of Toad Hall can kill and needs to be stamped out.
Nor, seriously, is it easy to see what Thomas Bowen did as an attack on democracy. We have a long tradition of rambunctious elections: recall the Eatanswill poll in the Pickwick Papers (‘a troubled sea of heads … from whence arose a storm of groans, and shouts, and yells, and hootings that would have done honour to an earthquake’). 19th century would-be politicians expected to have to field anything from an egg to a dead cat: no one suggested that this was in any way undemocratic.
So too more recently. When a yob threw an egg at John Prescott in 2001 he famously retaliated physically rather than call for prosecutions. In 2009, Lord Mandelson made light of having custard thrown over him by a green activist, and no prosecution ensued: the same thing happened when David Cameron was egged in 2010 on a visit to Cornwall, in 2013 when Ed Miliband suffered a similar fate in South London, and last year when Keir Starmer found himself enveloped in glitter at Brighton. (Starmer, in a rare demonstration of humour, later donated his bespangled jacket to the Jo Cox Foundation to be auctioned.) Actually one might have thought that the occasional attack like this showed not so much democracy on the ropes as the political process in rude health.
Indeed, if one really believes in democracy there is a strong argument that we, and Reform in particular, should take pride in insisting on a seriously radical idea: politicians deserve no better treatment than anyone else. Throwing eggs or rotten fruit at other speakers normally attracts fairly lenient treatment; why should the fact that the victim is running for office make any difference?
Unfortunately, we seem now to be doing exactly the opposite by marking down any attack on a politician, even a relatively minor one, as something calling for wholly exceptional measures. An interesting feature of the Farage case was that although the entire affair happened in Clacton, it did not go to any of the numerous local courts, as it almost certainly would have had the victim been, say, a local hot-gospeller. Instead it was heard at Westminster magistrates’ court, a court semi-officially designated for appearances in terrorism and high profile political trials.
Presumably this was deliberate. If it was, then there may indeed be some two tier-justice being dispensed that we should worry about, though perhaps not quite the kind that so concerns Nigel Farage.
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