The face of two-tier justice?

Patriot Platform founder Danny Tommo must have realised that his recent bail application was a complete waste of time as soon as he learned the name of the judge who would be overseeing it. There was not a chance in hell that the now notorious Tan Ikram, a deputy senior district judge, would show any leniency to a man with Tommo’s right-wing politics.

Tommo – whose real name is Daniel Thomas – was charged last week with criminal damage, after allegedly slashing at a migrant dinghy in the English Channel. He has also been charged with refusing to give police the PIN to his phone. On Friday, Tommo made a bail application at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court, where he pleaded not guilty to both charges. Predictably, Ikram refused the bail application and remanded Tommo in custody until his next hearing, which will be at Portsmouth Crown Court on Tuesday.

It is disturbing that Ikram has been allowed to preside over such a politically sensitive case. After all, this is a judge whose decisions have been shot through with political bias and who was even given a formal warning for his social-media activity for potentially undermining public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.

Ikram’s sentencing record speaks for itself. In 2022, he jailed a former police officer for sending racist messages in a private WhatsApp group. He sentenced James Watts to 20 weeks in prison, and described his tasteless memes – including one mocking George Floyd – as ‘the most serious offences’. This was double the sentence he handed to former Labour MP Mike Amesbury, who in October 2024 – when he was still the MP for Runcorn and Helsby – knocked a constituent to the ground after punching him in the face. According to Ikram’s version of justice, a private message shared among a small number of friends is twice as serious as a violent physical assault.

In 2024, his lenient sentencing of Victoria Thomas Bowen also raised eyebrows. Thomas Bowen, an OnlyFans model, pleaded guilty to assault by beating and criminal damage after throwing a milkshake at Nigel Farage as he campaigned in Clacton in the lead-up to the 2024 General Election. Yet the suspended sentence she received was clearly at odds with the most recent and relevant precedent. In 2019, Brexit campaigner John Murphy was jailed for 28 days for throwing an egg at then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, as he visited a mosque in Islington. Murphy, like Thomas Bowen, pleaded guilty to assault by beating. Murphy, unlike Thomas Bowen, was jailed.

Perhaps Ikram’s most staggering judgment concerned the case of the ‘paraglider girls’ in February 2024. These three women, you might recall, had attached images of paragliders to their clothes and to a sign at a pro-Palestine rally. It was an obvious reference to the Hamas terrorists who paraglided into southern Israel before committing the 7 October pogrom, in which 1,200 people – mostly defenceless Jews – were murdered.

The ‘paraglider girls’ were found guilty under the Terrorism Act of expressing support for a proscribed terrorist group. Yet Ikram granted the women a conditional discharge – essentially letting them off with no punishment. He justified this on the spurious grounds that ‘emotions were running high’ over the Gaza war.

In truth, Ikram should never have been anywhere near the sentencing bench on that day. A few weeks before the case, he had ‘liked’ a post on LinkedIn that described Israel as a ‘terrorist country’ and called for a ‘Free Palestine’. Although the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office accepted his claim that he liked the post ‘inadvertently’, it nonetheless issued him with a formal warning.

The double standard this decision exposed was alarming. Apparently, mocking – and even celebrating – the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust is something to be more or less excused as passions getting out of hand. Mocking George Floyd, however, is apparently a ‘most serious’ offence that warrants a custodial sentence.

Which brings us back to Danny Tommo, who has been treated with far more severity than is the norm for the offence he is accused of. Last year, two members of Palestine Action were charged with criminal damage (the same charge Tommo faces) after blocking the entrance to Elbit Systems, an Israeli-owned defence company. Both India Kalff and Jordan Woodgate were released on bail.

Or take Ahmad Hania. The day before Ikram remanded Tommo in custody, Hania, a 27-year-old Syrian national, appeared in the Warwick Crown Court. He was charged with the rape of a 15-year-old girl, among other sexual offences. Yet he was granted bail until his trial begins – in nearly two years’ time, in August 2028.

More baffling still, the five men who were arrested near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on suspicion of terror offences have all since been released on bail.

This is not simply a question of double standards. The British state seems now to be on a war footing against the alleged threat of anti-migrant and right-wing protesters. While even the most potentially dangerous suspects are granted bail, and violent convicts are released with a slap on the wrist, the full force of the law is routinely brought to bear on those who hold the ‘wrong’ political views. This is no doubt why Del Somerville – a supporter of Tommo’s – was last week sentenced to two years in prison, merely for throwing an empty plastic bottle at police. The same principle is surely at work in the denial of bail to Danny Tommo.

Tan Ikram may be among the worst offenders in our two-tier justice system, but double standards, flagrant bias and overt politicisation are now sadly endemic. Unless we challenge this warped view of ‘justice’, equality before the law will soon become a distant memory.