Am I getting soft in my middle age, or are some of the sentences being handed down to the rioters a tad stiff? Justice must be served, of course. Everyone who took part in the riotous violence of recent weeks should feel a copper’s hand on their shoulder. But I’m worried that justice is turning into something like vengeance. That this isn’t just law and order but also a kind of centrist revenge against the lower orders. Am I wrong?
Stacey Vint has been jailed for 20 months for pushing a wheelie bin at a line of riot police before falling flat on her face. She’s an idiot, clearly.
As far as I’m concerned, many of the rioters should be banged up for a long time. Those who joined in the bigoted savagery we saw outside mosques and at hotels housing asylum seekers deserve especially harsh punishment. You cannot inflict terror and alarm on innocent people and expect to waltz back to your old life. No, a cell awaits you, and you deserve the privation and humiliation such a fate brings.
And yet other cases have made me feel not outrage as such – I’ll save my outrage for more deserving individuals – but certainly concern. Like Stacey Vint from Middlesbrough who has been jailed for 20 months for pushing a wheelie bin at a line of riot police before falling flat on her face. She’s an idiot, clearly. She might also be a bad person, I don’t know. But nearly two years in the slammer for a failed bin attack on heavily armed police? Admit it, it’s a bit much.
Or what about the gay couple, in Hartlepool, whose chief crime, as far as I can tell, was ‘dancing and gesticulating at a line of police officers’. They also struggled as they were arrested. They have both been jailed for 26 months. Let’s not relitigate the ‘two-tier policing’ debate, of which we’ve all had a gutful, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that the knifeman who terrorised staff at a kosher supermarket in Golders Green in January, demanding to know their views on ‘Israel and Palestine’, was given a suspended sentence.
Every day brings fresh news of people being sent down for a long time. Some of the sentences are richly deserved. No one is going to lose sleep over the 29-year-old sentenced to 30 months for trying to set fire to a police van in Liverpool, or the 58-year-old jailed for three years for punching a police officer in Southport.
But what about the 26-year-old father of three in Northampton who received a harsher sentence than that – three years and two months – for a post on X? What he posted was vile. ‘Set fire to all the f**king hotels’, he said, referring to hotels housing asylum seekers. This is clearly an incitement to violence, though it is unclear whether anyone was incited by it. But are we allowed to ask why horribly dreaming of violence on social media gets a longer jail term than visiting actual violence on a police officer?
I understand that an individual’s behaviour can take on a different, more menacing meaning during an outburst of violent disorder. Dancing and gesticulating at a line of cops wouldn’t normally be a big deal, but it might be when there’s a riotous assembly right behind you. Pushing a wheelie bin and falling down would be comically embarrassing on a normal day, but it might be seen as giving succour to the mob during a riot. I get that.
And yet, by the same token, might a little leeway be given in cases where an individual recklessly, and regretfully, found him or herself swept up in the riotous moment? The current sentencing frenzy reminds me of the aftermath of the 2011 riots, when there was a similarly unforgiving judicial response. A student was jailed for six months for nicking bottles of water. A 14-year-old was given a nine-month referral order for stealing chewing gum. Two men aged 20 and 22 were jailed for four years for setting up a Facebook page calling for a riot in Northwich Town, to which precisely no one turned up.
And before anyone asks, yes I did criticise those tough sentences at the time. I described them as ‘surreally over the top’. Many left-wingers criticised them, too. A writer for the Guardian called it ‘legalised injustice’ and said many of the 2011 looters were ‘opportunists’ who did not deserve ‘out-of-proportion punishments’. Where are those voices now? It seems yesterday’s radical critics of rough law ’n’ order have morphed into fans of the carceral state following the riots of recent weeks.
More worrying than the sentences themselves is the culture of gloating that surrounds them. The front pages saying ‘NAILED AND JAILED’ alongside mugshots of riotous deviants. The smugness of centrists on social media as yet another violent scruff is put away. Then there are the reports that Keir Starmer ‘leaned really heavily on the justice system’ to enforce swift punishment on the rioters, in order to ‘amplify the political message that rioting would not be tolerated’. So political interference in the justice system is okay now?
Every decent person agrees that the riots were dreadful and that participants must be punished. But we are surely allowed to be concerned about government meddling in the delivery of justice, the use of the law as an instrument of political messaging, and the thirst for authoritarian solutions to complicated social problems. Don’t lock me up, I’m just asking questions.
