Tough sentences have been handed out to those who fanned the flames of disorder online but did not take part. “Where will it lead?”, asks Will Lloyd for The Times. He continues:
Julie Sweeney does not look like a thug. The police mugshot of her taken this month shows neither a scowling hooligan nor a bloated so-called patriot. Instead the 53-year old, with her ash blonde hair, greenish-brown eyes and tired expression, has the put-upon air of a woman who still does her adult son’s ironing.
Yet Sweeney, from Church Lawton in Cheshire, will now be joining hardcore far-right activists, and mindless thugs in British prisons, following the riots that shook the country after three young girls were killed in Southport on July 29.
She is the face of a small but controversial group of offenders to emerge from the disorder: those who published disturbing, racist, silly, threatening and violent content on social media platforms during the riots, without participating in the riots themselves. Sweeney, along with at least a dozen others, find themselves going to prison for posting online during England’s violent summer.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council said on Thursday that 1,127 arrests had been made since the disorder started, and 648 charges laid. Of those, 29 people were charged with offences involving social media or other online activity.
Tough sentences have followed. Jordan Parlour, a 28-year-old man from Leeds was sentenced to 20 months in prison for telling 1,500 Facebook friends that “every man and his dog should smash the f*** out of” the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft.
Richard Williams, a 34 year-old Welshman, was given a three-month custodial sentence for saying taking part in a riot would “keep our kids safe” and sharing a derogatory meme about migrants in a local Facebook group dedicated to protests. District judge Stephen Harmes admitted that the state would “never be able to quantify what level of disruption your post caused” nevertheless it was “part of a spider’s web of disruption which caused riots”.
In Cumbria, Lee Dunn, 51, was jailed for eight weeks after sharing three “racially aggravated” anti-migration memes on Facebook, while Billy Thompson, 31, was jailed for 12 weeks for a Facebook post during a conversation with a family member “which included emojis of a person of ethnic minority and a gun”.
Sweeney, who wrote a later deleted Facebook comment that said “blow the mosques up”, was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment at Chester crown court on Thursday. The court heard that she lived a “sheltered life” as the primary carer for her ill husband since 2015 and had no previous convictions.
Sentences are frequently controversial — as they were when recent Just Stop Oil protesters were given long jail terms. None of the behaviour punished is remotely excusable, but these particularly tough sentences for online crimes have provoked fierce debate.
Is it unreasonable to ask how it is possible for Sweeney to receive a harsher custodial sentence for her deleted Facebook comment than, say, any number of men who receive suspended prison sentences for sexual assaults?
Are we witnessing the arrival of a British McCarthyism: a sign that prosecutors and judges, with one eye on their political bosses and another on the headlines, are making examples of foolish people who pose little actual threat to the public?
Or have the prosecutions for online posts this month simply shown the system working swiftly to act as a necessary deterrent for lawbreakers at a moment of national peril?
Worth reading in full.
