What has happened to British justice and will our Church speak out or continue its descent into two-tier Catholicism?

My family is peppered with lawyers. Many of us read law, some going on to practice it, others not. Those non-practitioners may have lost touch with the niceties of changing legislation, but an eye for justice – or the lack of it – remains sharply focused.

When I was enjoying a family BBQ in Clapham a short time ago – we were celebrating that fact that my niece had just graduated from carrying a judge’s bag around for him, to getting a place in chambers to continue her training to be a barrister – I wanted to hear from my brother-in-law and my sister about how their practices were going.

Specifically, I wanted to know about justice. Why there wasn’t any. And so we found ourselves talking about what kind of barristers are promoted from the bar and appointed as judges to the bench. It’s all changed. That’s why there’s no justice and, consequently, as the social activists pithily put it, no peace.

The rules have changed. Now, if you are to be considered for promotion, you firstly have to submit a portfolio demonstrating your commitment both ideologically (as in what you believe) and practically (as in what you have done) toward actively promoting the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI) social agenda.

It means that our judges are appointed exclusively out of a pool of barristers who are ideologically committed to the politics of the Left and to the suppression and replacement of what goes for “the Right”.

This would never be a healthy place for a judicial system to be in, but it’s particularly dangerous at this juncture in the UK’s history.

For some time, the public have been aware that the approach to public order offences by the police was becoming a matter of some complexity, if not contradiction.

The Black Lives Matter marches, the destruction of the statues of white men, the blocking of ambulances during the disruption to roads by Green eco-protestors and the screaming for the genocide of the Jews by pro-Gaza protestors have been treated with indulgence and kid gloves by the police.

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In parallel with our law enforcement, the British judiciary have gone out of their way to compound the impression and the practice that non-Caucasians are treated differently from the indigenous English.

Social media has been awash with examples alerting the public to the leniency of the courts, while the wider and darker backdrop to all this has of course been provided by the raping of white girls in northern English towns by grooming gangs on an inconceivable scale.

The researcher Angie Heal, hired by local official themselves, warned the authorities of the extent and scale of the criminal activity. Her report estimated that over 1,400 white girls were raped by these grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013.

Later evidence indicated that she may have underestimated the numbers. The Guardian published the findings of a later independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation (IICSE) report in 2022 estimating that over 1,000 girls were victims in just Telford alone.

But the numbers of men arrested and charged were minimal, hence it went on for so long. It became more important to disguise the Muslim religion of many of those involved by describing them as of “Asian” background and skirting around the Pakistani heritage of many of the perpetrators (about 96 per cent of Pakistan adhere to the Muslim faith).

The long litany of injustices perpetrated by the judiciary continued. In August this year, Aimen Touati, a civil servant in Sunderland, and of Asian background, was given a suspended sentence of twelve months after being convicted of possessing pornographic material on his computer involving children as young as six months old. 

Then there is the case of Suleman Maknojioa, an Islamic teacher who sexually abused an 11-year-old child but was spared a jail sentence because he pleaded that his Pakistani wife didn’t speak English well enough, meaning his family were espeically dependent on him as a result.

The list of soft, indulgent, unjust sentences imposed by a left-leaning judiciary, while causing astonishment and resentment for many, grew ever longer.

And then came the stabbing to death of three young girls in Southport.

The authorities immediately did all they could to obscure the facts. The attacker was at first described as “Welsh”. Many people subsequently felt that all trust had been broken. And the patience of some broke too.

The writer and commentator Douglas Murray, who had been warning about the dangers of this with consistency for a number of years, recently commented that, as a result of all this, a pent-up fury and resentment within the white working class – whose children were typically the ones being abused or killed – was unleashed and spilled out dangerously onto the streets.

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The response of the Establishment was to urge the police and judiciary to punish with a forcefulness and a viciousness that took everyone by surprise. So, it turned out, protestors and people breaking the law could be arrested after all. They just often had not been before.  

During the unrest that followed Southport, protestors were seen on video being grabbed and beaten up by the police as part of a strategy of intimidation, and not even as a response to any criminal activity.

David Spring, a 61-year-old retired train driver in London, was arrested and imprisoned for nothing more than making “gestures” at the police and chanting ribald songs about “Who the [expletive] is Allah”.

He was sentenced to eighteen months. The judge sentencing him made it clear that this sentence was not just a response to his actions. It was intended to act as a deterrent. It’s purpose was to “discourage others from public disorder”.

Writing in the Spectator, Brendan O’Neill posed the question: “Is justice turning into vengeance against the rioters?”

He gave the example of Stacey Vint, a 34-year-old woman who had recently been living homeless after leaving an abusive relationship, and who was handed a wheelie bin by others in the crowd to push towards the police line. She tottered incompetently towards the police before she fell flat on her face at their feet.

They picked her off the pavement and arrested her. She was sentenced to twenty months imprisonment for falling over and failing to control her wheelie bin. O’Neill reminds his readers that the knife man who terrorised staff at a kosher supermarket in Golders Green earlier this year in January, demanding to know their views on Israel and Palestine as he threatened them, was given a suspended sentence.

Judge John Thackray in Hull became quite energised on behalf of the disapproving Establishment as he made strident calls to prosecutors to consider charging the public with the more serious offence of “riot” instead of “violent disorder”.

He had just sentenced 26-year-old Connor Whitley to three years in prison for kicking a female police officer to the ground – she reportedly sustained injuries to her elbow and forearm – and he was frustrated that it could not be more. If prosecutors would only charge these people with riot, instead of violent disorder, which carries a maximum of five years, he could sentence the accused to prison for up to ten years!

The newspapers rubbed in the injustice and institutional partisanship through what appeared to be a coordinated editorial shaming of the white working class, running headlines like “Nailed and Jailed” accompanied by mugshots on the front pages.

Douglas Murray suggested that the fury of the establishment, which was expressed in both two-tier policing and two-tier sentencing, was in fact an expression of near desperate fear.

He noted that although the so-called far-right were constantly blamed for the violence and frustrated anger of the white indigenous working-class English, they didn’t in fact exist.  

There is no organised political far right. The media were reduced to pointing to the English Defence League – which ceased to exist ten years ago.

The frightening implication for the Establishment was that it was actually facing a genuine spontaneous uncoordinated uprising from the people; caused in part, Murray observed, by the refusal of the political class to either control mass immigration or allow any discussion of it.

He also notes how Americans that he speaks with are astonished and perplexed that the British police have set up specialist units to patrol social media with the intention of arresting people for hate crime or racist tendencies.

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution makes such a response both inconceivable and illegal. Hence Americans, like many Brits, are finding it difficult to digest the destruction of both freedom of speech and democracy in Britain today, as well as the implications. No justice, no peace.

Catholics, however, might not be as surprised as others.

We have watched as the police have initiated their anti-thought-crime strategies on people worried about the mass murder of babies by abortion clinics.

For simply standing on the pavement praying in silence, Catholics have been arrested in what became the first thought crimes in the UK for centuries.

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Catholics were once known for their commitment to Peace and Justice. Student groups and committed Catholic chaplains could quote Amos and Isaiah at the drop of a hat.

Jesuits would lead the charge against political injustice with a practiced steely glint in their eyes; though there had been a slight suspicion amongst some that the target too soon and too easily became the economic and political Right; suggesting that the passion for justice and peace was driven more by socialism than by a well-informed theology and spirituality.

Either way, where is the collective Catholic voice raised in defence of freedom of speech today?

Where are those Catholic voices raised against the injustice of two-tier policing and two-tier sentencing?

Where are there voices raised in favour of the dispossessed when they happen to be unfashionably white and working class?

If the Catholic Church is going to defend its claim to speak with a prophetic voice, rather than just as a partisan and political voice, this would be the moment for the socially activist clergy and intellectuals to raise their practiced voices in protest.

Wouldn’t it? 

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Photo: Conceptual graphic depicting a protest outside the UK Houses of Parliament with the Union flag being burned; screenshot.

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