Juno News - July 08, 2019


Former Ukip leader Gerard Batten reacts to Tommy Robinson verdict

Mentioned
Tommy Robinson Jared Batten Winston Churchill
Justice is supposed to be blind. Not in Canada it seems. Two Canadians are being held hostage in China

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

159.34

Word count

883

Sentence count

59

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Jared Batten, former leader of the UK Independence Party, speaks outside the Old Bailey after Tommy Robinson was convicted of contempt of court for allegedly contempting a court order banning him from speaking in public. He tells the BBC's Nick Davies outside the court that he is shocked by the verdict.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm outside the Old Bailey with Mr. Jared Batten, the former leader of UKIP.
00:00:14.360 Mr. Batten, thanks for being with me today.
00:00:16.160 You're welcome. I'm pleased to be able to speak to you.
00:00:18.240 Well, what can I say? I keep thinking I can't be surprised by what happens in this country,
00:00:22.020 and then we get another big surprise.
00:00:23.640 I followed this case. I was here at the last hearing in the Old Bailey
00:00:26.900 when Tommy gave a submission to the judge.
00:00:30.040 Well, it was obvious that no offence had been committed.
00:00:33.200 The judge then obviously didn't want to deal with the case
00:00:35.820 because he knew there was no case to answer,
00:00:37.800 so he put it upstairs to the Attorney General, the government's pet lawyer.
00:00:42.740 And several months later, we come back on trumped-up charges of contempt of court.
00:00:46.980 And what's he been convicted of today?
00:00:48.720 Essentially, because as the convicts were going back into court,
00:00:54.060 he said to them, how do you feel about the verdict?
00:00:57.320 And that is what he's been convicted on.
00:00:59.360 It's unbelievable, but unfortunately not unbelievable.
00:01:03.360 We had a trumped-up charge, and we've had a political verdict.
00:01:07.820 I'm so sorry to be standing outside the principal court of the country, the Old Bailey,
00:01:14.080 and having to say now that we have a corrupt legal system. 0.99
00:01:17.260 When you were standing before the European elections,
00:01:21.340 you stood up and very defiantly supported Tommy Robinson, even then, as the leader of a party.
00:01:26.180 And it takes a level of fearlessness for that, and some would say insanity, given the media climate.
00:01:31.380 But in all seriousness on this, where did you get the fortitude to stand up for that,
00:01:37.000 knowing that it would put the media against you, it would put the political elites against you,
00:01:40.620 even more than they were already? 1.00
00:01:41.900 Some might say it's stupidity. 1.00
00:01:43.820 You know, I have lived a privileged life. 1.00
00:01:49.200 During my lifetime, I've never had to go to war.
00:01:52.740 I've earned a good living.
00:01:54.740 Standard of living have risen.
00:01:56.120 I've had a comfortable life built on what my father's generation did in the Second World War
00:02:01.200 and what generations of Englishmen and women have done in the previous hundreds of years. 0.94
00:02:07.000 Defended this country and worked to keep it free and independent.
00:02:11.900 So what courage does it take to stand up and defend a man
00:02:15.580 who has stood up and tried to defend our country
00:02:19.000 against one of the greatest threats that faces Western civilisation now,
00:02:23.920 which is literalist, fundamentalist, extremist Islam, the ideology of Islam.
00:02:30.820 My God, if I haven't got the guts to stand up and just speak and defend somebody like that
00:02:35.260 and speak out against this evil, then I don't deserve to live in a free country.
00:02:40.740 And I think, who was it one of your American founders of the Constitution said,
00:02:44.620 you know, people who want security but are not prepared to defend it don't deserve it.
00:02:50.140 Let's talk then about the forecast of the country here.
00:02:54.600 Do you believe that this will serve to further cement the lack of free speech in the UK
00:03:00.020 or do you think this could actually have a galvanising effect, what happened to Tommy,
00:03:03.540 and really start moving the pendulum the other way perhaps?
00:03:06.120 You're Canadian, aren't you?
00:03:07.360 Yes, but it's okay.
00:03:08.780 I know the quote.
00:03:09.400 It's a very good one.
00:03:10.360 Stuck your accent. 0.96
00:03:11.360 I'm sorry.
00:03:11.760 I don't know what's going to happen because now you can be convicted
00:03:16.460 for reading what Winston Churchill said about Islam in 1898
00:03:22.280 when he said he wrote a foreword to a book that he'd written
00:03:26.160 and he said, 1.00
00:03:27.380 Islam in a man is as dangerous as rabies in a dog. 1.00
00:03:31.700 So if you quote that in public, 0.98
00:03:33.760 you can be found guilty of hate speech or some other Trump's up charge, I don't know.
00:03:39.480 You are not allowed now to have freedom of opinion about things.
00:03:44.420 I'm not talking about inciting hatred or inciting violence or whatever against individual people.
00:03:50.600 I'm talking about the ability to address ideas and ideologies.
00:03:54.780 You can now be convicted of crimes for doing that.
00:03:57.940 We're living in a very, very dangerous place now in our country.
00:04:02.140 And how do I think this verdict is going to affect free speech?
00:04:05.060 Well, for one thing, all the lying smear merchants of the mainstream media
00:04:09.200 won't now be able to go up to people going into court and saying,
00:04:12.440 how do you feel about the verdict?
00:04:14.000 Will they?
00:04:15.200 So they can't do their job.
00:04:16.880 Except, of course, they'll be exempt because it doesn't apply to them.
00:04:19.860 It only applies to people like Tommy Robinson
00:04:21.640 and people who the establishment and the media don't like.
00:04:24.900 I think what's happened here today is sickening.
00:04:27.340 And what the aftermath of this will be sickening,
00:04:29.480 because you'll see the political establishment saying he's a convict, 0.89
00:04:32.520 with all the people that support him are thugs, 0.55
00:04:34.520 and you will have that message amplified and repeated over and over again 0.96
00:04:39.320 by our rotten, lying, smear merchant mainstream media of the BBC and Sky and Channel 4. 0.65
00:04:45.280 We are sleepwalking in this country towards a police state, a dictatorship, 0.62
00:04:51.100 a gulag of the mind where you're not allowed to speak your opinions.
00:04:55.640 And that's very dangerous.
00:04:56.740 Thank you for speaking yours.
00:05:02.520 Thank you.