Tag Archives: trials

Alt-Right, Brexit, daily blog, diary blog, Farage, free speech, historical, Ian Millard, immigration, Laura Towler, MPs, Party Politics, Russia and Russian relations, Sam Melia, Sam Melia, society, Starmer, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 5 January 2025

19 Comments

Morning music

[view of Oxford]

Appalling miscarriages of justice

https://twitter.com/NicholasGarnett/status/1710162452481012043

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66928735

“Each year, thousands of people in England and Wales are accused of crimes for which they are later acquitted. While their names may be cleared, they are often left emotionally and financially devastated – as Brian Buckle, who was wrongfully convicted of sexually abusing a child, discovered first-hand.

Rebecca Whitehurst, 47, from Greater Manchester had to find tens of thousands of pounds to pay for her defence after a pupil at the school where she taught made claims that they had engaged in sexual activity and exchanged inappropriate messages.

“Financially, it’s been the best part of £50,000,” she says. Rebecca adds that after she was found not guilty, she was awarded costs – but at the legal aid rate, which is much lower than the expense of instructing a defence barrister privately.“

[BBC]

Acquitted (in the first case noted above, only after 5+ years in prison, a successful appeal, and then a retrial), but left £50,000-£500,000 out of pocket.

All because Chris Grayling, a stupid arrogant man made a Cabinet minister by David Cameron-Levita, made stupid decisions which have even now not been corrected (though due to be, belatedly, corrected in 2026, apparently).

Not only has Grayling not been punished, he now sits in the House of Lords! Rewards for failure, yet again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Grayling.

Starmer-Labour

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14250615/Keir-Starmer-No-10-poll-predicts-verdict.html

“Sir Keir Starmer will be ousted as Prime Minister within a year, an exclusive poll for The Mail on Sunday has predicted – with furious voters attacking his poor handling of the economy, the NHS, immigration and the cost-of-living crisis.

Nearly a third of all Britons polled in the ‘state of the nation’ survey expect the Labour leader to last another year at most, with more than two thirds (68 per cent) saying he is doing ‘badly’, just six months into the job.

And in news that will worry both Labour and the Conservatives, one in five voters thinks that Nigel Farage will be Britain’s next Prime Minister.

Last night, one Labour MP said privately: ‘If this poll doesn’t ring alarm bells in No10, then we really are doomed.

‘Sadly, it confirms what I and other Labour colleagues are now finding on the doorstep.

‘There never was much support for Keir. But after a catalogue of blunders – from scrapping winter fuel payments to hiking taxes – what little support there was for the Prime Minister has collapsed‘.

The exclusive Deltapoll survey reveals that 69 per cent think the country is heading in the wrong direction, with the cost-of-living crisis and the state of the NHS topping the list of concerns.“

[Daily Mail]

“Labour” is dead, the “Conservative” Party is dead, but the only straw at which the electorate can clutch is the very underwhelming Reform UK. Still, “all roads lead to Rome”…at least the System is crumbling, and the “Overton Window” moving.

Patriotic Alternative

Patriotic Alternative’s “2024 Year in Review”, with Mark Collett, Laura Towler (Laura Melia) and others, covering the waterfront, including material about now-released Sam Melia, Sven Longshanks (James Allchurch) etc.

While I do not belong to Patriotic Alternative, they are (as far as I know) the most active social-national org in the UK at present.

If the broadcast cannot be seen or heard on this blog, it can be found via www.odysee.com

Well worth a listen.

Covid scamdemic/panicdemic “vaccine” dangers

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14136613/disabled-diagnosed-cancer-Covid-vaccine-heartbreaking-experiences.html

“Patients whose health has been ravaged after taking Covid-19 vaccines are calling for more support as the Government faces paying out tens of millions of pounds in damages.

Almost 17,000 claims for disability damages have now been submitted after new information emerged about the potential risks including blood clots.

...more people are coming forward to report that have suffered a severe impact, with some linking their vaccines to major problems such as blood cancer, myasthenia gravis and heart disorders.

Almost all of these payments were related to the AstraZeneca vaccine Vaxrevia which triggered a blood clotting complication so rare it was missed in original clinical trials.

That vaccine was once heralded as a ‘triumph for British science’ but came under increasing scrutiny for a very rare complication that causes blood clots and low blood platelet counts.

The jab, developed with Oxford University, can no longer be used in the European Union after AstraZeneca voluntarily withdrew its ‘marketing authorisation’ in May this year.

AstraZeneca’s withdrawal comes months after admitting in legal documents its jab can cause thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), also known as VITT.“

[Daily Mail]

I have myself seen examples, though I did not, of course, allow myself to be fooled into taking any of the System’s “vaccine” injections.

Talking point

Look at that. It is admitted that 3.6M or more immigrants have arrived even since “free movement” within the EU ended! That was in December 2020, so that number have arrived in only 4 years! In rough terms, a million a year. Unsustainable. Catastrophic.

“Net” immigration “only 2.3M (or more, in fact more) in about the same time period, but what that means, mainly, is that about 100,000-200,000 (real) British have left every year, trying to get to places such as Australia or New Zealand, or retiring to Spain and other countries. Also, many of the more useful/skilled EU nationals have left.

Incidentally, those Brits going overseas are mostly either genuinely skilled or qualified persons, or have capital and intend to open small businesses, or (and/or) are retirees, who bring money into the countries where they settle, and mostly do not constitute a drain on resources. Quite different to most of the migrant-invaders coming to the UK, who are mostly poor, unqualified, unskilled, and who are a huge drain on resources of every kind, from shelter and housing, through education, hospitals and GP services, to police services (many migrants are petty or not so petty criminals) etc; all that and right through to alien hostiles who may be terroristic.

As to Brexit as a whole, it was deliberately sabotaged.

Tweets seen

https://twitter.com/DalrympleWill/status/1874503024133177570
https://www.change.org/p/suspend-raffi-berg-from-bbc-for-pro-israeli-bias-in-reporting?recruiter=365008188&recruited_by_id=c139d640-481e-11e5-a9b1-45c85e0658ab&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_medium=copylink&utm_content=cl_sharecopy_490358388_en-GB%3A10

More tweets

“Former Tory adviser“? Good grief. Just look at him. Just listen to him…

However much Labour is now already hated under Starmer, and despite the inherent absurdity of the “two main parties” binary political fix in England, I really cannot see the “Conservative” Party regaining much if any of its one-time support-level; in fact, I can see it declining further.

That, in turn, may give the uninspiring fake nationalism of Reform UK wings, despite the unexciting nature of most if not all of its 5 present MPs. It may be regarded by many angry/disenchanted voters as the only (protest) game in town.

Very much to the point in contemporary Britain.

Diary Blog, 16 March 2024, including an account of my recent free speech trial and sentencing
Diary Blog, 17 March 2024, including the aftermath of my sentencing hearing
https://twitter.com/BScot6772313/status/1875555246648537206

My popular (and occasionally updated) assessment of Rory Stewart from nearly six years ago:

Will Rory Stewart MP Be Prime Minister?
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1875822845856772192

Re. Victoria Atkins, take a look at her photo, below. Hard-faced careerism made manifest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Atkins

Late music

[El Greco, The Purification of the Temple]
immigration, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

First, Steal A Chicken

4 Comments

This post is one in the line of reminiscences of my life at the English Bar. More exactly, it is another story of my days of pupillage (“on the job training”) as a newly-minted barrister in 1992-93, still under the control of a “pupilmaster” (though, as explained in other posts, my “pupilmaster” was in fact the same age as me, a consequence of my “rolling stone” or “wander-bird” youth). It tells the story of a fairly minor series of thefts, but at the same time says something about UK and even European society generally.

A timeworn joke says that the first line of an old Hungarian recipe for chicken goulash starts, “First, steal a chicken”…Well, in this story there was no chicken but what there was was an Arab Gypsy woman in East London who was expecting a baby. Well, a baby needs all kinds of things and especially clothing, so the family of that woman– a man, a boy of 14, the pregnant woman, our defendant (an exceptionally beautiful girl aged about 18 who was a cousin of the pregnant woman), and another woman– set out one fine morning to steal the requisites. Their chosen emporium was British Home Stores, Ilford, part of East London.

The aforesaid shopping expedition was initially successful, but came to an abrupt end when the “shoppers” were arrested by police as they were getting into their car, laden with their “acquisitions”. A woman store detective had noticed them and had alerted her colleagues and the police.

It is at this point that the story becomes interesting from the “crime and punishment” point of view. The man arrested was not charged, on the basis that he had not entered the store, not handled the goods and had not admitted knowing anything of the thefts. The 14 year old boy, having admitted acting as a look-out (a pretty poor one, as it turned out), received a police caution. The other women admitted theft in the magistrates’ court and were fined £50 each. So that left our defendant, who was called something like Maroush or Marousha.

Now it transpired that Maroush was also going to be sentenced for being part of a gang which had visited towns in Dorset and Somerset and had stolen quite large amounts from shops by distracting the cashiers while the tills were open (in fact, they could somehow get them open, silently and in seconds, even when the tills were closed). Maroush was a minor player in that game but would be sentenced with several others, they like her having pleaded to those offences, after the conclusion of her shoplifting trial.

Now the point was that theft is an either-way offence and Maroush could have pleaded guilty in the “mags”, in which case she would no doubt have received a £50 fine like the others. Why she had decided to elect Crown Court trial, God knows. We only got her case at the Crown Court stage.

So it was that we all appeared at Snaresbrook Crown Court one day. Snaresbrook is a large rambling building near the end of the Central Line in Essex, and which even then had, I believe, 26 courtrooms (Wikipedia says 20, but that was in 1988; trial was in 1992; it’s pretty big, anyway…). One thing that struck me was when pupilmaster and I were provided (by the Crown Counsel) with a copy of a short Home Office report marked “Restricted”, all about Maroush’s clan origins.

It seems that Maroush came out of a clan of Arab Gypsies who lived (no doubt in poverty and on the margins of Arab society) in pre-WW2 Libya. The Second World War dislocated the states and colonies around the Mediterranean. The clan took the opportunity, after the war finished, somehow to get to Italy. They were eventually granted residency, and some, citizenship. The EEC/EC/EU arrived, with its “free movement” provisions. The clan then moved to somewhere where they could live off the host population more easily– the UK. The Home Office report was fairly direct, which perhaps was why it was “Restricted”: one would not want the British people or Press to see the truth…In fact, the report made it clear that few if any of the 5,000 Arab Gypsies of that clan then living in and around London had remunerative work. They all lived from theft, begging and State benefits.

The trial itself should have taken a day, but in fact took three, to the irritation of the judge. Pupilmaster was usually extremely long-winded, almost absurdly so. In fact, because the trial only ended late on the third day, sentence had to be put off to a fourth, because the other “£50 note trick” defs would be sentenced alongside Maroush. In the event, she was –almost inevitably– convicted of the Ilford shoplifting, and was sentenced to, if memory serves, 22 months’ imprisonment, though most of that was for the Dorset/Somerset offences. Still, she would have been better off pleading to the shoplifting, in the mags. She cried in the dock. I felt sad (I was younger and perhaps more sensitive then).

Not sure why that trial has stuck in my mind: the Home Office report? The youth and beauty of the defendant? The manifest silliness of her decision both to fight the shoplifting charge and, far worse, to do so in the Crown Court? All was put to one side over a few beers in the nearby Spread Eagle pub (if I recall the name aright) not long after. Life went on.

Note:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snaresbrook_Crown_Court