THE BIG NEWS that dominated social media this week was Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s magnetic and explosive appearance at a Senate hearing. If you ever saw a man going into political battle, it was him. Here is a taster, but here’s where you can watch the full video of his hearing. Another fight back caught my eye, less newsworthy but I bet no less fraught: that parents at a Secondary School in British Columbia had forced the school to re-open single-sex bathrooms. So what, you may say? Well, in gender-neutral, trans-mad Canada, where the odds are totally stacked against any dissent, it must have taken courage, organisation and persistence.
There’s a lesson in it, I thought: moral courage. President Trump’s one signature sweep executive order to end gender ‘indoctrination’ and critical race theory in US schools was a message to the world, like his very effective tariff threat to Columbia when they refused their deportees. It was like an adrenalin shot; all the human rights excuses shown up as balderdash.
But the idea that this Trump magic is somehow going to waft our way and eventually bear down on the Starmer administration – that all we have to do is wait – is wishful thinking. Zealots like Starmer don’t listen; they double down, just as they have, again, on hate crime. We must have the courage to withstand them.
The cult of ‘true believers’, as Laura named them, have four more years to do their damage before they can be kicked out. Where will Starmer’s ruthlessness end, John Hale wondered? How frightened are people already?
When I confided in a friend on Thursday that I’d be speaking at Saturday’s Stop the Isolation March and Rally to call for Tommy Robinson’s release, his response, ‘Gosh Kathy, that is brave!’, made me wonder. Why should it be brave? I realised that I was a bit nervous and hadn’t slept that well thinking about it. But why? Not for being treated like a leper socially (nothing new there) but for an amorphous fear – about the State being out of control, weaponized against those of us who oppose it; about police in which I no longer trust, a State apparatus that wants to crush dissent, that can arrest you for a tweet or just for turning up at rally. I would be putting my neck above the parapet.
Of course, I don’t have to worry about losing a job or clients or becoming, in whatever industry you work in, a persona non grata. Most people have that to think about too, which is exactly why so many decent people tell you privately that the decision to sentence Tommy to eighteen months’ solitary confinement for a civil offence was and is obscene, yet they dare not shout it out aloud. It also made me think of the very real fear (by comparison with mine) that Robinson had to face coming back to England last year in the knowledge of his likely arrest and solitary confinement. You don’t have to think for long to know what a courageous man he must be, and indeed a principled one, every ounce of which he must be drawing on as he endures one of the worst tortures of all – being locked up and kept in isolation, visitors now banned I understand, all his autonomy removed; no choice about anything; not knowing when that solid metal door closes on him and locks whether anyone will come back to open it.
I don’t think I would have the mental strength to deal with it, and I really fear for his, which is why this rally is so important. It terrifies me that the State doesn’t care if they break him. Indeed, they may want to.
It’s salutary that the last time that any journalist was imprisoned for contempt of court in England was 1963. Sentences of three months’ and six months’ imprisonment, for a Mr. Reginald Foster and Mr. Brendan Mulholland respectively, were condemned at the time by MPs as being totally out of proportion to their offence. How out of proportion, then, is 18 months’ solitary, when the breach was admitted some 60 years later? Why ever not a suspended sentence, since the prison estate couldn’t guarantee his safety without condemning him to solitary confinement?
When the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror were found guilty for breaching contempt of court laws in their coverage of the conviction of Levi Bellfield for the murder and abduction of Milly Dowler, they were fined; their editors did not get a prison sentence.
It is hard not to see that contempt of court has been weaponized to silence him, the sentencing to get him out of the way, all in the knowledge that fear of ‘TR contamination’ (so successfully driven by the Daily Mail’s demonising and labelling) would stymie any high-level outrage at the sentence. Whatever happened to the principle ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it’?
That’s why those of us who can, must assert it. If we don’t, specious ’excuses’ for his imprisonment will carry on being made. He’s a thug, a hooligan, far-right, etc, as though those labels somehow justify it. They don’t; not liking someone, disapproving of what they say or how they say it, is no justification for banging them up.
One ray of hope for the UK this week was a politician, who came out stronger than before on some of these issues of principle. Can you guess who it was? Here are three quotes. (Answer below.)
‘The Pakistani men who were involved in this abhorrent behaviour were targeting white girls for a specific reason—that they have an outdated, unacceptable view of women. And the authorities failed to act because they were scared of the charge of racism. It’s one of the biggest national scandals in our history.’
‘We’ve got this problem in the U.K. of hate marches, where extremism, antisemitism, and Islamism can be paraded on our streets, and the police won’t take any action. And it’s caused a real increase in antisemitism, and it’s made parts of our streets and our public realm no-go zones for Jewish people.’
‘We have a crisis of free speech in the United Kingdom, and I use that word deliberately… a situation where the police have the powers to record your information and log your details, if you’ve said something that might be offensive to someone. It doesn’t matter about the objective nature of what you’ve said. If someone, somewhere, happens to be offended by what you have said, and it relates to a personal characteristic, race, gender, religion, or sex, then that’s it. The case is closed. You will be considered guilty of what we call a ‘non-crime hate incident.’
Suella Braverman MP speaking to Jan Jelielek of American Thought Leaders
I will be publishing my speech at Saturday’s Stop Isolation Rally, words and video hopefully, early next week. I have never addressed a crowd of that size before – of thousands of people who love their country despite all, and want to protect it – and I found it a deeply moving experience.
