David Renton is a barrister at Garden Court chambers and a professor at SOAS.
The hope that every fascist is a future liberal or leftist just waiting to escape their present life is a form of naive and self-defeating optimism. ‘It’s terrible advice,’ says Joan Braune, a lecturer in philosophy at Gonzaga University. It can be dangerous for minority communities to show compassion to people who have expressed hateful ideas, or forgive people who haven’t given up the politics of hate.
At the end of October, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, began an eighteen-month jail sentence, following contempt proceedings for breach of an injunction. This is the fifth time Robinson has been sentenced to prison since he began to play a leading role in the far right including his imprisonment for ten months in 2018 for breaching reporting restrictions on a trial in Leeds.
The Queen’s Speech in May included proposals for a new Public Order Bill intended, according to the government’s briefing notes, to deal with ‘highly disruptive protests’, such as those by Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion, and against HS2. It will resuscitate clauses from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that were rejected by the Lords, such as...
For ten years Horatio Bottomley had been an MP, for thirty he had fought his way through the court system without significant reverse. People stopped laughing at Bottomley’s jokes only when they grasped the source of his money. It was not enough that he lied or that he enriched himself. They needed to see that he was rich because he stole from them.
Under Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn was a tolerated and ignored backbencher. Today, he is denied even that freedom. And yet his followers have behind them the force of a simple argument. The Labour Party’s last year and a half is a familiar episode in the long decline of social democracy, in which leaders demobilise their supporters and see their vote shrink. But as recently as four years ago Labour was able to increase its support faster than at any time since 1945. Many of Corbyn’s supporters are young, black or Muslim, and these are social constituencies in which the Labour Party is now losing support sharply. If Labour wants to appeal again to those voters, it will need to make some sort of compromise with Corbyn.
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