Tan Ikram is the embodiment of two-tier justice

In 2019, then UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was egged by a pro-Brexit campaigner while attending an event in his Islington constituency. In protest against Labour’s attempts to overturn the Brexit referendum result, John Murphy from Barnet in London shouted ‘respect the vote’ as he launched his attack. Murphy was restrained and Corbyn was left with a red mark on his face. Murphy later pleaded guilty to assault by beating.

Under normal circumstances, such an offence would likely receive some form of community service. But Murphy received 28 days in prison. Chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot told him that a custodial sentence would send a clear message that ‘attacks on MPs must stop’. What’s more, she said, ‘an attack like this is an attack on our democratic process’. And quite right, too. MPs’ safety is vitally important to democracy. Arbuthnot used her discretion as a judge to note the political significance of this intimidation of a politician, and uplifted the sentence accordingly – a move few could disagree with, whatever you think of Corbyn or Brexit.

It was surprising, then, that the judge sentencing Victoria Thomas Bowen this week came to a very different conclusion in such a similar case. Thomas Bowen was the woman who, during the General Election campaign earlier this year, threw a milkshake at Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as he campaigned in Clacton, now his parliamentary constituency. In October, the OnlyFans model pleaded guilty to assault by beating, as well as to criminal damage.

Thomas Bowen’s milkshaking of Farage, just like the attack on Corbyn, was also an attack on our democratic process. Farage said he ‘felt humiliated’ by the incident and was left fearing for his safety in public. Indeed, he was attacked again just days later on the campaign trail. You might expect the authorities would want to deter this kind of behaviour.

Yet Thomas Bowen has now been spared jail. Deputy senior district judge Tan Ikram handed down a 13-week jail sentence, suspended for 12 months. She must pay Farage £150 in compensation and complete 120 hours of unpaid work, as well as paying £450 in court costs, but she will not see the inside of a prison cell unless she offends again. To be clear, this isn’t completely out of line with the sentencing guidelines. But it was within Ikram’s remit, just as in the Corbyn egging case, to hand down a harsher sentence. Did this attack on a right-wing populist politician not strike him as particularly egregious?

Ikram’s sentencing record shows that there are other offences he is more than willing to treat with extra gravity. In 2022, in an unprecedented ruling, he jailed former police constable James Watts for 20 weeks for sending racist memes to a private WhatsApp group. One of the images mocked George Floyd, the black American whose death in May 2020 sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Ikram ruled that the ‘hostility that [Watts] demonstrated on the basis of race makes this offending so serious that I cannot deal with it by a community penalty or a fine’. ‘A message must go out’, he insisted. While the messages were abhorrent, they were just messages – and they were made in private. To treat speech more harshly than violence seems bizarre.

The public expects judges to be impartial, but it’s clear Ikram sees his own role as political. A year later, in a lecture titled ‘Diversity in the judiciary’, Ikram boasted about his harsh sentencing of Watts to American law students at the College of DuPage in Illinois. ‘This was a [former] police officer bringing the police service into disrepute’, he said, ‘so I gave him a long prison sentence. The police were horrified by that.’ He then proceeded to air woke talking points about alleged institutional racism in the police, and how he sees it as his role to change this. ‘We’ve still got a lot of work to do’, he said.

Ikram has found reasons to hand down more lenient sentences for other speech crimes. There was the time he declined to convict violent felon and trans activist ‘Sarah Jane Baker’, who in 2023 told a rally in London: ‘If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.’ Those of us who believe in free speech can surely agree that, while Baker’s comments were despicable, they should not have been illegal. Once again, it boggles the mind as to how Ikram was able to conclude that sharing a meme in private was criminally offensive, while Baker’s very public call to punch gender-critical women in the face was fine, as it was an attempt to drum up ‘publicity for your cause’.

Even more notorious was Ikram’s handling of the ‘paraglider girls’ trio earlier this year. At a central London pro-Palestine march, just a week after the 7 October attack in Israel, two women, Heba Alhayek and Pauline Ankunda, attached images of paragliders to their backs. A third woman, Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, attached one to a sign. The three women were clearly referencing the paragliding Hamas terrorists who had slaughtered and raped their way through the Nova music festival in southern Israel. As such, they were found guilty under the Terrorism Act 2000 of showing support for a terrorist group and faced a possible six months in prison. Yet despite this, Ikram said he had ‘decided not to punish’ the defendants, instead handing them each a 12-month conditional discharge.

Why the leniency? Again, this was not because Ikram had suddenly discovered the importance of free speech. ‘You crossed the line’, he said as he sentenced the three women, ‘but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue’. Really? To be clear, the protest in question took place before Israel began its full-scale invasion of Gaza.

Further questions were raised about this ruling when it later emerged that Ikram had liked an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn weeks previously. He claimed it was an accident, but he was nevertheless disciplined for allowing a ‘perception of bias’ in the judiciary.

Unfortunately, biases like these are becoming well-embedded in the British judicial establishment. Since 2018, Ikram has been one of the authors of the Equal Treatment Bench Book, which instructs courts to use she / her pronouns if male defendants suddenly decide they are ‘transwomen’. Ikram also sits on the Judicial Appointments Commission. At Boris Johnson’s 2022 New Year Honours, he was even awarded a CBE for ‘services to judicial diversity’ – whatever the hell that means.

Tan Ikram is the embodiment of a two-tier mentality that sadly now pervades our criminal-justice system. The woke elite’s warped sense of justice needs to be challenged head-on.

Laurie Wastell is an associate editor at the Daily Sceptic and host of the Sceptic podcast. Follow him on X: @L_Wastell.