Midweek 3rd December 2025

3 Responses to Midweek 3rd December 2025

1. Up2snuff says:

   December 2, 2025 at 9:06 pm

   Goal hanging pays off again, Jimmy Greave’s stylee. The BBC are biased as are the MSM, against Conservatism, against Nigel Farage, see today’s Guardian for example. The BBC are biased against Israel along with the MSM. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. See today’s Metro for a Lineker:Robinson spat. The BBC are overmanned and overwimmined. We should just make the BBC over. Defund the BBC. Cancel your TellyTax!

   The BBC are biased in favour of Socialism, as Fed says in his header.

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2. tomo says:

   December 2, 2025 at 9:23 pm

   Seventeen minutes. That’s how long it took a jury at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court to acquit Jamie Michael, a 46-year-old former Royal Marine, charged with stirring up racial hatred. Seventeen minutes. The piping hot coffees in the jury room hadn’t had time to cool down before 12 good men and women delivered that unanimous, you might say contemptuous, verdict on the inadequacy of the case against Jamie, who had been painfully aware of the various incentives in the system to plead guilty.

   “Thank God for the jury,” Jamie tells me from his home in the Welsh valleys. Reflecting on his trial back in February, he says: “I honestly think if I hadn’t had those normal people to basically say, ‘You gotta be joking, no way did this guy do anything wrong’, I’d be finished.”

   Under the so-called “reforms” announced today by Justice Secretary David Lammy, the fate of that brave Welsh Marine who served his country well could have been very different. Jury trials are going to be scrapped for thousands of cases including “violent disorder” which means defendants like Jamie Michael and Lucy Connolly, both arrested for social media posts after the Southport massacre of little girls, would not even be able to apply to be tried by their peers. If his case had been heard by a single judge, a member of the liberal elite that despises the views of ordinary people like him, Jamie reckons he would now be behind bars.

   That great big lummox Lammy insists that limiting the use of juries for less serious cases is a “bold but necessary” measure to clear the 80,000 backlog in criminal trials waiting to go to court. It’s a bit like saying prison overcrowding can be sorted out by the sensible expedient of shooting inmates. After the Southport riots, Sir Keir Starmer managed to arrange weekend courts for largely fictitious “far-Right thugs” – why isn’t that same solution possible in this “emergency”?

   With his patent brand of bumptious pomposity – seldom has a man been so pleased with himself with so little cause – David Lammy brushed aside concerns from know-nothings like the Law Society that he was trampling on the 1,000-year-old rights granted to the British people under Magna Carta. (Clause 39 of the original 1215 version of the Charter guaranteed all the king’s subjects protection from arbitrary arrest or restraint and a right to trial by a jury of his peers).

   Writing for The Telegraph, he insisted that justice delayed was justice denied. Jury trials may be “the cornerstone of justice”, he conceded, but “a strong justice system is not one that clings to tradition for its own sake. Instead, it delivers for the people it serves. The public deserves a system that protects them.”
   I couldn’t agree more. The public definitely deserves a justice system that protects them – protects them from an increasingly authoritarian government hellbent on imposing its Marxist student views on a small-c conservative country. Little by way of historical literacy is to be expected from a man who, when he was asked on Mastermind, “Who succeeded Henry VIII?”, confidently answered “Henry VII” (yes, he really did). Ignorance of why tradition matters – indeed, of how tradition acts as a bulwark against idiot novelty and tyranny – is a defining characteristic of this lowdown, lying Labour Government.

   Observing the Justice Secretary’s weaselly sophistry as he tried to justify an attack on the foundations of democracy and fair trials had me thinking of other options. Surely it would be better to just scrap David Lammy?

   By the way, this is the same Lammy who, in 2020, tweeted: “Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea…” and, “You don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair.”

   Like Groucho Marx, David Lammy has other principles if the first lot prove unpopular or inconvenient. Announcing he was scrapping jury trials for so-called “either way” cases, in which the defendant has the right to be tried in the magistrates’ or Crown Court, Mr Lammy said he was concerned that many people were “playing the system” by delaying guilty pleas until the last moment. He has a point; some cynical career criminals do just that. More worrying, I think, is how the system plays the system to coerce guilty pleas from scared people in a fashion familiar from North Korea and the Soviet Union.

   If this were a normal government, the trials-without-juries proposal would be plain wrong. However, because this is a government with a track record of singling out for punishment anyone who threatens its preferred ideology, and calling their criticism “hate speech”, it is not just wrong, it’s sinister. No matter how flawed human beings are, nor how imperfect a jury, they have to be better than some smug Lefty judge who was a barrister in the same chambers as Keir Starmer when he was taking his hols behind the Iron Curtain.
   Judges, like police officers, are now promoted for showing commitment to diversity and they are likely to bow to pressure from their sanctimonious fellows; two-tier justice will only get worse – and we all know who the convicted will be.

   Jamie Michael’s story is a case in point. A father of a little girl, Jamie was deeply upset by the murderous rampage of Axel Rudakubana at a Taylor Swift holiday dance class. In the aftermath of last summer’s heinous attack, he posted a passionate 12-minute video on Facebook in which he lamented the “scumbags” coming ashore illegally in the UK and called for people to come together peacefully to protest the threat to children’s safety and to raise the issue politely with their councillors and MPs. (Jamie had served in Afghanistan and Iraq so he had knowledge of the kind of men who were breaking into our country – none of it good).

   An unnamed member of staff working in the office of Buffy Williams, a Labour member of the Senedd, reported the video to police and Jamie was arrested at work by an officer who appeared to have very little clue what law the ex-Marine had broken.

   At the police station, despite incentives such as a lighter sentence, Jamie refused to plead guilty. “I’d done nothing wrong. I’d put my life on the line for my country many times and I wasn’t going to let them do that to me.” Finally, the lawyer persuaded Jamie to go “no plea”, something he deeply regrets but he was made to feel there was no alternative.

   Like Northampton childminder Lucy Connolly (who did plead guilty having been promised she’d be out of jail in time to spend Christmas with her daughter), Jamie was denied bail for no good reason. He was then remanded in a cell for an outrageous 17 days, during which time his resolve to plead “not guilty” hardened.
   Friends advised Jamie to apply to the Free Speech Union (FSU) and, overnight, his fortunes changed. Luke Gittos, the FSU solicitor (also my marvellous lawyer in my encounter with Essex Police) got Jamie’s tag removed and his curfew lifted straight away.

   His defence team believed his comments were protected under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the former Marine had every right to express his anger and distress, and his views on immigration. And he had certainly not incited hatred. The jury at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court agreed – within 17 minutes.

   I can’t tell you how much I love that 17-minute verdict. What a slap across the chops for the pious Starmer cabal, the identity-politics zealots who hate the white, working class and their vulgar freedom of expression. Those Merthyr jurors were the common sense of the British people in excelsis. It’s a point made with fervour in a video released today by Lammy’s ministerial shadow, Robert Jenrick. Praising the ordinary men and women “pooling their combined wisdom and experiences”, Jenrick asks: “Would Lucy Connolly really have been given 31 months if she too had appeared before a jury?”

   Almost certainly not. I think a jury would have acquitted Lucy because she is a good, caring person who posted one really nasty thing on a traumatic day, and ordinary mums and dads would have known how she felt – and forgiven her. And that is a problem for a Labour Government which wants juries to deliver the “correct” verdict, one that supports their multicultural ideology, and to jail the Jamies and the Lucys who dare to challenge it.

   But normal people don’t agree with Labour’s warped progressive values so juries must be scrapped and replaced with judges who can be trusted to reach a guilty verdict. It’s political, and it stinks.
   Jamie Michael’s barrister, Adam King, sums it up in his best KC manner: “Jamie’s case largely depended on whether his video was ‘likely to stir up racial hatred’. His political views – critical of illegal immigration and the Labour Government – are commonplace amongst ordinary citizens but objectionable to a large proportion of the educated classes.

   “He would have been much more likely to have been (wrongly) convicted if tried by magistrates or a judge sitting alone. His trial is a prime example of why we need juries – and, perhaps, why this Government wants to remove them for cases like his.”

   Precisely, m’Lud. Jamie told me had PTSD after Iraq, and it still gives him bother from time to time, but the strength of character it took to earn that green beret enabled him to fight the legal system’s attempt to put him away. Just for expressing views held by millions of us.

   Allowing a single judge to take the place of a jury and decide guilt is a betrayal of our shared values – add that to the list of reasons this will be the last ever Labour government. Jamie “17 minutes” Michael, cariad, we salute you.

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   • atlas_shrugged says:

     December 2, 2025 at 9:44 pm

     CPS and plod scum who brought the case should be personally sued for 10 times the total court costs. Plus they should all be given criminal records.

     They won’t like it up ’em.

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