The sentences imposed on the Elbit activists explained. The judge, says @JoshuaRozenberg, was in fact "generous" to them in one respect. This blog corrects some of the misinformation and distortion around this case: rozenberg.substack.com/p/act…

What happens when legacy media is captured by ideologists - and made ridiculous and irrelevant as a result.

On Friday, I exposed that Labour had appointed a new left-wing adviser with extreme views to the MoJ. She called Henry Nowak’s murder “useful” to the Right, supports two-tier policing, thinks we should all still be wearing masks, and said men should be able to use women’s toilets. This person should be nowhere near our justice system. x.com/NJ_Timothy/status/2065…

I'd never condone violence against a police officer - this is utterly dishonest. The jury weren't judging them on a terrorism offence. This is an awful sleight of hand. The creeping encroachment of terror laws onto protest & removal of our juries should worry all of us.

Imagine Andrew's reaction if someone like Soros had the same level of influence in a hard left administration in the US or if every Social Media outlet & practically every network and Cable news channel in the US was owned by far left wing ideologues, loyal to a Dem admin?

Gut wrenching to see four young people jailed for direct action against an arms supplier to Israel. Years in prison for protesting to save lives in Gaza, with 'terrorism' used despite no jury convicting them of it. A truly dangerous attack on the right to protest.

Great point 🤔

That's what happens when you break the law - it's called a criminal record. We have a celebrity class of complete and utter imbeciles.

Is anyone surprised that this chancer sees nothing wrong with shattering the spine of a police officer, so long as it's in the name of 'Palestine'

As an MP you should understand how sentencing works or at least look it up before posting. The judge applied the terrorist connection aggravation under section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020 because he found that the offences of criminal damage and grievous bodily harm met the statutory definition. This provision requires a court, at the sentencing stage, to treat an offence as having a terrorist connection if it is, or takes place in the course of, an act of terrorism or is committed for the purposes of terrorism, using the definition in section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Where that finding is made, the court must treat it as a mandatory aggravating factor and state so in open court, which significantly increases the sentence. In this case, Mr Justice Johnson concluded that the carefully planned raid on the Elbit Systems factory involved serious property damage designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public, and was carried out to advance a political or ideological cause. This satisfied the test for a terrorist connection, even though the defendants were convicted only of ordinary criminal offences and not charged under terrorism legislation. The result was substantially longer custodial terms, stricter release conditions, and post-release notification requirements.

This is deliberately misleading. Juries determine only whether the prosecution have proved their case. Sentence is entirely a matter for the Judge and Juries play no role in sentencing in the British Criminal Justice System. I suspect Zack knows this but finds misleading people politically expedient.

There’s 2 types of people… those that look at someone else’s success & says amazing, if they can do it, with enough hard work & a bit of luck I too can be successful OR those that look at others success & want to punish or remove it. We either aim upwards or pull down to the lowest denominator.

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required. The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view. The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed. The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side. This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file. The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required. That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence. The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass. None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts. "The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

Every single person who still cringes at the memory of trying to bullshit their way through an interview or exam question: today, the slate is wiped clean. Set down your burden of shame. Nothing - nothing, I say - could touch this.