Posted on 06/04/2018 10:33:07 PM PDT by OddLane
An explanation of what happened to Tommy Robinson, and what it portends for the West.
I get the feeling that the smearing of TR isn’t working anymore. He represents many working class people, he’s their hero. Nothing had better happen to him, the country would burn - our stock market with it.
It is hard to listen to the fellow. He is painfully inarticulae.
bkmk
As he himself says, he is working class and left school at 16 to become an engineering apprentice. He doesn’t have the snooty language codes of the middle and upper classes and the snobbery over his accent and vocabulary tends to irritate his fans who know that he speaks for them and understands their lives because he is one of them, much like Trump avoids patronising and talking down to his fans by spewing a thesaurus at them.
It is not the tone or the language. It is the halting and repetition and taking 10 minutes to say what could have been said in two. It is why I prefer to read transcripts rather than watch videos.
Not sure if you use this app, but here's my Goodreads List, which I haven't updated in a while.
From other sources I have heard that there were other media present at the courthouse but Tommy was singled out.
Also, is it usual practice to bar media from a trial? Does this happen in the United States?
They’re doing the trial in three separate phases. The media restrictions were put in place so that the verdicts of the earlier ones don’t prejudice the later ones. Once the third phase is over the restrictions will be lifted.
The UK allows selective media bans, which is against what we expect here in the USA. The media’s job is to be a check and balance against the State and to monitor its behavior. This flies directly into the face of how the UK is behaving.
I’m not sure about other media present, I don’t recall seeing them in Tommy’s video. That said, he was only repeating what had already been published and this was a sentencing hearing - so he wouldn’t be influencing the trial.
This whole concept of secret trials, away from the media, along with arresting him, sentencing him, and issuing a gag order on his arrest is what I’d expect in communist countries, not the UK. It wouldn’t happen here.
Which is complete nonsense. You do not make a trial more “fair” by having secret proceedings out of the view of the media.
Notice it was prosecutors that push these orders. Not sure gag orders belong in a free society.
I agree with you. Gag orders in general make me ask what does the state have to hide?
But secret trials are worse, and I haven’t heard one defender of what they did to Tommy explain to me why this was done as a secret trial.
They don’t.
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