The latest from Tommy Robinson's legal battle for freedom of speech in the United Kingdom, where he is fighting a sentence of 18 months in prison for a charge of conspiracy to commit terrorism, which carries a maximum penalty of nine months in solitary confinement.
00:12:28.560So there is some hope, but it's an uphill battle.
00:12:31.560I'll be there to live tweet the proceedings.
00:12:33.560That is, to write on my Twitter account as fast as possible what happens, and I'll have little breaks.
00:12:39.560When the court is on a break, I'll go outside and I'll film a video.
00:12:44.660I'll put all of that up on the website tommyreports.com, that's where you can see all my reports about Tommy Robinson.
00:12:51.660The reason I do this insane night flight to London every few months, it's such a long journey.
00:12:57.660It's seven hours in the air, an hour on each side for taxis, is because I believe that Tommy Robinson, not only does he not get a fair shake in court,
00:13:06.660but he definitely does not get a fair shake in the court of public opinion.
00:13:10.660That is, the journalists who cover his case are extremely partisan and frankly hate him.
00:16:21.660And it reminds me of when the prime minister here, Keir Starmer, met with J.D. Vance and Donald Trump in the White House.
00:16:28.660And Vice President Vance raised the issue of freedom of the press and freedom of speech and free expression here in the UK.
00:16:36.660And Keir Starmer babbled and bumbled a bit about how precious it was.
00:16:40.660It sounds like he was caught off guard, but cases like Tommy Robinson's are what I think is motivating the United States to take great concern and to, in fact, link freedom of expression with the proposed free trade deal.
00:16:54.660I should say that the Times of London had an article just a week or so ago that reported that every single day in the United Kingdom, there are 30 people arrested for what they say on social media.
00:17:08.660Let me say that again. Every single day, 30 people in this country are arrested for some tweets or Facebook posts.
00:17:16.660I don't have the facts from the Russian Federation, but it would not surprise me if the numbers here in the UK were actually greater than under Vladimir Putin's Russia.
00:17:26.660I just can't even fathom 30 arrests a day for mean tweets.
00:17:30.660Tommy Robinson, of course, is the leading edge of that free speech movement, and that's why they want to pound him down.
00:17:38.660Tommy Robinson's autobiography was called the Enemy of the State, and I think it's apropos.
00:17:43.660Anyways, enough perambulations by me. I'm going to get in there to make sure I have a good seat on these important legal occasions the mainstream media attends.
00:17:53.660And by that I mean the BBC and the Guardian and even some of the tabloids who are generally friendly to the working class and might even call themselves conservative.
00:18:02.660They all have editorial direction from the top to disparage Tommy Robinson and criticize him.
00:18:08.660It always boggles my mind how a newspaper like the Daily Mail that has a conservative base can turn a working class base can turn against Tommy Robinson.
00:18:22.660They still write about him because they like the clicks, but they disparage him.
00:18:27.660That's really the reason I've come from Canada, a seven hour flight each way, because I feel that my journalism will be more independent.
00:18:36.660I'm obviously sympathetic to Tommy Robinson, but unlike the BBC's Dominique Cassiani or the other regime journalists there, I'm not paid to smear the man.
00:18:46.660I'm going to go in and get my seat. If you want to follow my reports, I'll be live tweeting throughout the hearing at my name on Twitter, which is simply Ezra Levant.
00:18:57.660And I will be posting videos like this to Tommy reports dot com.
00:19:01.660Hey, can you do me a favor? If you think what I'm doing here is valuable, can you go to Tommy reports dot com and chip in a few dollars?
00:19:07.660I've got to pay for my flight over from Canada because unlike the BBC, I don't extract money from Brits by force.
00:19:14.660All right. I'm going in now. Ezra Levant here. I'm outside the Royal Courts of Justice.
00:19:18.660As you can see, there's a bit of a crowd out here. These are some of the folks who were in the courtroom for today for the Court of Appeal hearing of Tommy Robinson, who was challenging the sentencing that he received last year for contempt of court.
00:19:35.660It was one hour and 15 minute hearing today. Alistair Williamson, King's counsel, led Tommy Robinson's appeal.
00:19:45.660And there was another King's counsel on the government side rebutting. I think the government had six lawyers in the court today, if I count it properly.
00:19:54.660And of course, Tommy Robinson, besides he had actually two kings, two barristers and a number of solicitors.
00:20:03.660It's just an enormous industry battling over Tommy Robinson is a cottage industry in this country.
00:20:10.660And as I mentioned in an earlier video, holding Tommy Robinson in prison is an industry, too.
00:20:18.660He is in a unit with 16 cells. They emptied it out just for him and another eight cells.
00:20:27.660They've emptied it out so he can work there. Literally 25 cells in his majesty's prison, Woodhill, have been cleared out to hold Tommy Robinson, a civil prisoner.
00:20:38.660He's not even in there for a crime. He's in there because he wouldn't take down a Twitter tweet. And that's not a crime.
00:20:44.660The fact that 25 violent criminals were set free is astonishing. Anyways, I don't want to repeat that story.
00:20:51.660Let me get back to what happened in court today. So there were two things happening.
00:20:56.660On the one hand, the Tommy Robinson lawyers wanted to bring new evidence before the court of appeal.
00:21:05.660And the reason why that's important is that an appeal, by definition, is not a rehearing.
00:21:10.660It's not another kick at the can. It's not another trial. It's reviewing the record that was before the lower court and reviewing if that lower court was correct or correct enough.
00:21:24.660Higher courts like the Court of Appeal are reluctant to overturn lower courts unless there's a really important error that they made.
00:21:33.660So, deducing fresh evidence was an important application made by Tommy's lawyers.
00:21:42.660And one of the main things that they wanted before the court is a 39-page psychological report done of Tommy Robinson in recent weeks.
00:21:53.660And that psychological report diagnosed Tommy with not only PTSD, but also ADHD.
00:22:02.660And I won't get into the technicalities, but it basically said that prison is causing Tommy to become more and more mentally ill.
00:22:12.660And that that's not only a problem now, but God forbid, could lead to a catastrophic incident once he's released.
00:22:19.660I hate to even say it, but it was brought up in court, including the risk of suicide. May it not happen.
00:22:25.660But this psychological examination of Tommy Robinson was not disputed by the government.
00:22:35.660That is, they do not challenge it. They do not disagree with it. They do not say it's incorrect. They do not have a counter expert trying to defeat it.
00:22:46.660Basically, the argument made by the government today is, so what?
00:22:52.660Their argument is the sentencing judge knew enough about Tommy's mental state and referred to how rough prison is in his sentencing.
00:23:02.660And Tommy already got a modest discount for mental health reasons.
00:23:07.660So basically, the Crown is saying, even if this fresh evidence is put before the Court of Appeal, it is not enough, they say, to reduce a sentence.
00:23:17.660Now, Alistair Williamson, on behalf of Tommy, said that the challenge here is to realize that this is a civil prisoner, not a criminal prisoner.
00:23:26.660And so when we think of a prisoner doing a hard time in segregation, in solitary, having his privileges removed, as Tommy has had done to him,
00:23:35.660we're used to thinking about a criminal context. I mean, this Woodhill Prison is a place where murderers are kept.
00:23:43.660But Tommy Robinson is in there because he wouldn't take down a tweet.
00:23:47.660So to compare the treatment of a civil prisoner with murderers is absurd and insane.
00:23:56.660The judges were attentive, especially the Chief Justice.
00:23:59.660And at the end of it, they announced that they were not going to make their ruling immediately,
00:24:04.660but rather were going to review the voluminous written statements and the arguments made by the lawyers today.
00:24:12.660I don't know how quickly they're expected to rule. I don't know how quickly the UK Court of Appeal normally issues rulings.
00:24:21.660It wouldn't surprise me if they took at least a week or two.
00:24:25.660And they may just issue a written ruling and send it electronically to the lawyers,
00:24:30.660or they may convene again here in the court. I do not know.
00:24:34.660I want to lower expectations because I think it's important to know that most appeals fail because higher courts want to defer to the trial judge.
00:24:46.660Higher courts only want to overturn a lower court if there was something dramatically wrong.
00:24:53.660Now, Tommy Robinson is the first British journalist to be jailed for contempt of court nearly a century.
00:24:59.660The length of his sentence is extraordinary.
00:25:05.660So perhaps the extreme nature of a sentence does merit a reduction by the court.
00:25:12.660But there was one point that the government lawyer made that may have resonance with the judges,
00:25:18.660and that is some of Tommy's ability to get out of prison rests with him.
00:25:24.660Because during the sentencing, the judge essentially said to him,
00:25:29.660if you take that Twitter video down now, we'll lop off months from your sentence, and Tommy refused to do so.
00:25:37.660And today, again, the government lawyer said that if Tommy Robinson were to purge his contempt by taking down the tweet,
00:25:45.660that that might reduce the prison sentence immediately, even without the judges having to do anything unusual,
00:25:55.660because that's sort of what the sentencing judge said.
00:25:58.660And by the way, I did go to Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed, and at least during the hearing, the video was not his pinned tweet.
00:26:06.660Anyways, I'm getting a little bit lost in the weeds, and I think part of it has to do with my lack of sleep.
00:26:12.660I flew overnight, and I maybe slept an hour on the plane, and I did my best to be attentive in the courthouse.
00:26:18.660I apologize if I'm a little bit rambling here.
00:26:21.660I'll try again a little bit later, maybe once I've had a snooze.
00:26:24.660But it is funny, I left Canada, there was snow on the ground when I left Ottawa some 15 hours ago,
00:26:30.660and here it is, 20 degrees Celsius in the UK today.
00:26:34.660I should say there's one more thing that caught my attention.
00:26:37.660When the government lawyer was reading out what he called facts from the prison warden,
00:26:47.660the prison governor, Nicola Marfleet, a DEI affirmative action hire, a very sadistic woman.
00:26:53.660Tommy Robinson objected, and you can see he was on the video screen, and he was waving,
00:26:58.660and he was writing notes on a piece of paper, calling Marfleet's facts lies.
00:27:03.660And some of them I know are lies, for example.
00:27:06.660The point that Tommy Robinson has a large number of visitors.
00:27:11.660I know from personal experience that I was accepted as a visitor and then cancelled twice.
00:27:16.660So I know that the prison governor cannot be trusted.
00:27:20.660But I'm not sure if those points really are going to move the needle in this case.
00:27:24.660I don't know if that's really where the front line in this battle was.
00:27:28.660I think there's a chance, because of Tommy's mental health deterioration,
00:27:34.660and because of his unusual and cruel treatment in the prison system,
00:27:38.660there is a chance that his sentence will be reduced.
00:27:41.660But frankly, if that were to happen, you would think it would have been done in the judicial review a few weeks ago
00:27:47.660that was specifically about his treatment in prison.
00:27:50.660The judge in that case didn't have it.