Juno News - March 09, 2019


Tommy Robinson might be headed back to jail

Topics
Tommy Robinson case
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Tommy Robinson Jeffrey Cox
Is Canada's top ＂non-partisan＂ official shilling for Trudeau？ Who was the best Prime Minister of the past 50 years？

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

178.71

Word count

915

Sentence count

67


Summary

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

Tommy Robinson may be headed back to jail. After being released from prison in August of 2018, Robinson went on to launch an appeal against his 13-month sentence for a charge of contempt of court. But now, the case has been referred back to the UK Supreme Court for a new hearing, and a new contempt charge could be brought against Robinson.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Tommy Robinson may be headed back to jail.
00:00:05.660 Tommy Robinson is, of course, the anti-Islamism activist in the United Kingdom
00:00:09.500 who last year was sentenced to 13 months behind bars
00:00:13.140 for running a Facebook live stream outside a courthouse in Leeds.
00:00:17.860 Tommy Robinson was filming the arrival of several men
00:00:21.580 who are now convicted sex groomers, part of a sex grooming gang in Britain,
00:00:26.180 and the judge who was overseeing this case looked out the window
00:00:29.820 saw that Tommy Robinson was doing his stream
00:00:32.480 and had him arrested, charged, convicted, sentenced, and thrown to jail
00:00:37.700 all within a matter of about five hours
00:00:40.300 without so much as a chance to say goodbye to his wife and kids.
00:00:44.720 Now, the Tommy Robinson case has been a contentious one
00:00:47.840 and I've said myself that I'm not necessarily a fan
00:00:51.140 of a lot of the things that Tommy Robinson has said and done.
00:00:54.040 But at the same time, I'm a fan of due process
00:00:56.400 and more importantly, I think that when it comes to the cases
00:00:59.440 of the rape and grooming gangs, Tommy Robinson has been the only person in Britain
00:01:04.020 who's really been prepared to speak about them honestly,
00:01:06.780 especially at times when the mainstream media was nowhere to be found on the issue.
00:01:10.960 So I'm sympathetic to what he's tried to do in this case in shining the light on it.
00:01:15.780 Now, back in August, after Tommy had been spending much of his time incarcerated
00:01:19.920 actually in solitary confinement, getting the same treatment
00:01:23.280 that some of the most vicious offenders in all of Britain get,
00:01:26.500 he was actually released.
00:01:28.220 He fought an appeal, won his appeal,
00:01:30.520 when the appellate judge determined that the earlier judge
00:01:33.640 who treated him with very little regard for due process had made errors.
00:01:38.740 So in August, Tommy Robinson was freed
00:01:40.820 and that case was referred to have a new contempt of court hearing
00:01:45.040 supposed to be scheduled for last October.
00:01:47.600 Now, you may remember I was in the United Kingdom for that case.
00:01:50.780 In October, I covered it, went all the way to London to the Old Bailey
00:01:54.280 to sit down and ultimately the case never happened.
00:01:57.500 The most senior judge at the Old Bailey decided that it was too complex to be heard
00:02:02.280 without reference from the Attorney General.
00:02:05.640 So what the judge did is referred the case to the British Attorney General
00:02:09.240 to decide whether contempt of court proceedings should continue.
00:02:13.520 Now, it wasn't a wasted trip because I learned a great deal about Tommy Robinson,
00:02:17.320 about the English justice system, and more importantly, about the English media.
00:02:21.340 One story that I broke, which was worth the plane ticket to get there,
00:02:24.960 was certainly that the mainstream British press were conspiring
00:02:29.220 not just to manipulate and lie about covering Tommy Robinson,
00:02:34.200 but they had also already made up their minds about his case and his guilt.
00:02:38.580 And they spoke about this candidly in front of me,
00:02:41.320 not knowing that I wasn't one of them.
00:02:43.820 But at the same time, it's not just about the media.
00:02:46.780 Tommy Robinson's life and liberty hang in the balance
00:02:49.740 depending on what happens in the case.
00:02:52.180 The Attorney General has decided to order a new contempt of court hearing.
00:02:56.360 At this point, it's scheduled for March 22nd,
00:02:59.140 coming up in just a couple of short weeks.
00:03:01.660 Now, if schedules permit, I plan to be there to cover this case
00:03:04.760 because the issues facing Tommy Robinson really are global issues
00:03:08.960 that we see elsewhere in the Commonwealth and indeed in the Western world,
00:03:12.480 in Canada, in the United States.
00:03:14.920 But the most important question that I think a lot of people need to ask here
00:03:18.240 is whether their personal opinions of Tommy Robinson
00:03:21.320 are getting in the way of their opinions about due process.
00:03:24.800 And indeed, for a lot of the press, that certainly seems to be the case.
00:03:28.760 My interest in this has always been about free speech
00:03:31.680 and whether someone is, in the name of political correctness
00:03:34.920 or a prosecutorial witch hunt,
00:03:37.240 being treated differently than the law suggests.
00:03:40.540 A few weeks ago, I was actually trying to get an update on this case
00:03:43.520 and I sent a couple of inquiries
00:03:44.960 to the Office of the United Kingdom Attorney General
00:03:47.540 and the office would not respond.
00:03:49.740 There was no transparency,
00:03:51.260 not even a casual,
00:03:52.880 I got your email but I can't comment,
00:03:54.920 nothing whatsoever.
00:03:56.540 And of course, with the news this week
00:03:58.020 that Jeffrey Cox, the AG,
00:03:59.900 has ordered a new trial,
00:04:01.020 it's no surprise why they didn't want to comment
00:04:03.400 when I reached out a few weeks back.
00:04:05.960 We'll be covering this case no matter what,
00:04:08.300 but remember that the themes facing this
00:04:10.580 are universal themes.
00:04:12.620 And the idea of due process, of free speech,
00:04:15.280 of having the right to cover cases
00:04:17.300 even when they are controversial
00:04:18.700 is an important value that True North is standing up for.
00:04:21.920 Whether it's covering Tommy Robinson
00:04:23.640 or covering the battles that are taking place on Canadian soil,
00:04:26.760 we do need your help.
00:04:27.820 Please head on over to truenorthinitiative.com
00:04:30.540 and you can support us with a monthly contribution
00:04:33.340 or even a one-off contribution.
00:04:35.240 We greatly appreciate it.
00:04:36.700 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:04:38.360 But thank you very much for everything.
00:04:45.960 So thank you.
00:04:46.900 Cheers.
00:04:47.320 Cheers.
00:04:48.160 Cheers.
00:04:48.220 Cheers.
00:04:49.220 Cheers.
00:04:49.280 Cheers.
00:04:49.700 Cheers.
00:04:50.440 Cheers.
00:04:51.540 Cheers.
00:04:52.660 Cheers.
00:04:57.180 Cheers.
00:04:57.560 Cheers.
00:04:58.220 Cheers.
00:05:00.680 Cheers.
00:05:00.760 Cheers.
00:05:01.280 Cheers.
00:05:01.340 Cheers.
00:05:01.660 Cheers.
00:05:02.240 Cheers.
00:05:02.480 Cheers.
00:05:02.580 Cheers.
00:05:03.880 Cheers.
00:05:04.100 Cheers.
00:05:04.740 Cheers.
00:05:04.760 Cheers.
00:05:05.120 Cheers.
00:05:05.340 Cheers.
00:05:05.720 Cheers.
00:05:06.200 Cheers.
00:05:06.540 appeal soon.
00:05:06.820 Cheers.