Mike Amesbury’s sentencing is two-tier justice in action

Is punching someone in the face a less serious crime than sharing offensive jokes on WhatsApp? This seems to be the view of the British justice system, at least if this week’s sentencing of former Labour MP Mike Amesbury is anything to go by.

Back in October, Amesbury, who is now an independent MP for Runcorn and Helsby, was captured on CCTV brawling with a man in the street. The altercation began as a drunken row between Amesbury and one of his constituents. It ended with the MP punching the man in the head and knocking him to the ground. For this, Amesbury was handed a 10-week jail sentence yesterday by deputy senior district judge Tan Ikram.

Judge Ikram may by now be familiar with regular readers of spiked. As Laurie Wastell noted last year, Ikram’s sentencing record often reflects the biases of the woke establishment, particularly its penchant for punishing speechcrimes.

Astonishingly, in 2022, when former police constable James Watts was convicted for sending racist messages to a private WhatsApp group, Ikram sentenced him to 20 weeks in jail. That’s twice the jailtime he gave to Amesbury this week for a physically violent crime.

Ikram described Watts’s WhatsApps, which included memes mocking Black Lives Matter and the death of George Floyd, as ‘the most serious offences’. As abhorrent as those messages will have been, most of us could probably think of far more serious offences.

The problem goes much deeper than just one judge. In Britain, you can be imprisoned for two years for producing offensive stickers, and yet committing a violent offence, such as stabbing someone or stamping on someone’s head, might not result in any jailtime at all. Of course, Amesbury’s drunken brawl is nowhere near as serious as those crimes. But in what world is it less serious than sharing grim jokes?

There is something deeply broken about a justice system that treats offensive words more harshly than actual violence. Clearly, the judicial establishment cares more about policing people’s opinions than protecting the public.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.