Bruce Bawer har fulgt det britiske retsvæsens forfølgelse af Tommy Robinson, som ikke ser ud til at slutte. Det kan se ud til at de vil knække nakken på ham. Robinson er en hård negl og udholdende. Det kan være de mener det bogstaveligt.

Da Robinson blev arresteret udenfor tinghuset i Leeds i fjor og sendt i fængsel i en summarisk retssag, hvor der blev løjet for hans egen advokat, skete der ting som er som hentet fra en Lethal Weapon eller Braveheart med Mel Gibson: Robinson blev flyttet fra et fængsel med britiske indsatte, til et overfyldt fængsel fuld af muslimer, hvor muslimerne havde afgørende indflydelse. De vidste at han skulle komme. Robinson sad to måneder i isolation, og han spiste næsten ikke.

Torsdag og fredag blev Robinson fremstillet igen og anklagemyndigheden havde en så svag sag at alt tydede på frikendelse.

The speed with which he was tried, convicted, and incarcerated after his arrest in Leeds – the whole process took just a few hours – shocked observers who still thought of British justice as something serious and worthy of respect. His release from prison two months later came after the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, in an unusually blistering ruling, declared that the court proceedings against him had been illegitimate in a number of ways, and ordered his immediate release.

That solitary glimmer of fairness from the Chief Justice led some of us to hope that Tommy might, in the end, receive something resembling real justice. But no. Contrary to the expectations of many, a retrial on the same feeble charges was scheduled. At the Old Bailey in London on Thursday and Friday, the weakness of the case against him was painfully obvious. Reporting from a street near the courthouse during a lunch break on Friday, Ezra Levant of Canada’s Rebel Media, who attended the trial (and who himself happens to be a lawyer), pronounced on a YouTube video that “this is as close as it comes to a sham trial as I’ve ever seen in a Western democracy.”

Men så vendte det.

But by the end of the day Levant had been proven wrong. The judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Sir Mark Warby (whom we are supposed to refer to as The Hon. Mr. Justice Warby, but the hell with that), pronounced Tommy guilty. He may get up to two years behind bars: we don’t know yet. In reporting on the verdict, British court reporters – who every day do exactly what Tommy had been convicted for – could barely constrain their glee at what they saw as his comeuppance. He had taken them on, all of them – the judges and MPs, the reporters and professors, the police chiefs and high-ranking civil servants who run that blighted island (and in doing so are running it into the ground) – and, although he had justice on his side and a large and ever-growing segment of the British populace at his back, he had lost.

Denne klassejustits kender vi fra britisk litteratur og film: En arrogant aristokrat tramper på lov og ret og idømmer den mest hårrejsende straf. Men i kunstens verden får offeret oprejsning til sidst. Som regel.

Det Robinson står oppe imod er noget andet. Britiske medier skulle efter bogen være dem, som står op for Robinson. Men de gør det modsatte: De vil se ham dingle.

if this were happening in someplace like Russia, international human-rights organizations would be shouting about it from the rooftops and calling it out for exactly what it is: namely, the kind of nakedly political prosecution that we like to think happens only in totalitarian countries.

I Putins rige spiller det ingen rolle hvor svagt anklagemyndigheden argumenterer, i en sag mod dissidenten Aleksej Navalnij. Staten vinder alligevel til sidst.

Ezra Levant anså det for hinsides enhver sund fornuft, at staten kunne vinde sagen mod Robinson.

even Levant, at midday on Friday, confessed to feeling positive: the first day and a half of the trial had laid so totally bare the weakness of the prosecution’s case that a conviction seemed inconceivable.

Men sådan gik det ikke. Dommerne dømte ham, og akkurat som med sagen mod Steen Raaschou og Jeppe Juhl, som blev hentet af mandstærkt politi for at have delt videoen fra Marokko, var dette en “nogen har snakket sammen”-kendelse. Signalerne kommer ovenfra.

Robinsons supportere udenfor Old Baily var rasende. De råbte taktfast “Shame on you” til politiet. Råbene havde deres virkning: Det er politiet som gør udfald mod demonstranterne og slår med stavene. Et svært dårligt tegn. Politiet mister selvkontrollen. De ved de har en dårlig sag, men i stedet for at skamme sig går de til angreb.

Det er også en side ved de nye samfund, som vokser frem i Vesteuropa: Myndighederne betragter og behandler de indfødte som rejser sig i trods som fjenden.

Derfor er jeg langt mere pessimistisk end Bruce Bawer når det gælder fremtidsudsigterne. Bawer ønsker at ”the establishment” skal få en på kæften, også ved valg. Men Nigel Farage har været svært nedladende og fjendtlig overfor Tommy Robinson og ikke villet have noget med ham at gøre.

Der er ingen med indflydelse i Storbritannien som taler hans sag. Hjælpen kom fra Daniel Pipes og Middle East Forum og deres fond til at bekæmpe ”lawfare”: Ødelæggelse af politisk opposition ved hjælp af retsvæsenet.

Det er det vi befinder os midt oppe imod, med alle retssagerne, som nu rejses for norske domstole, blot for at have sagt noget grimt.

WHEN BRITISH JUSTICE DIED
Another guilty verdict for Tommy.