A functioning society depends on equality before the law. If crimes are not treated equally and dispassionately by the justice system, we lose trust in democracy and each other. But as sentences begin to be passed on racists who rioted earlier this month, we see once again a blatantly unequal application of the law.
Let’s make a couple of obvious comparisons. One was highlighted this week by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi). Had those sentenced for their part in the riots this week – who heeded the calls of racist organisers and rampaged through England’s cities – been Muslims inspired by Islamists, they are likely to have been prosecuted as terrorists, potentially facing much longer sentences. Assaulting people in the name of Islam appears to be treated as a far graver crime than assaulting people in the cause of Islamophobia.
How were the attacks on mosques, on a hotel housing asylum seekers and on those who have sought to defend refugees not terrorism? Instead, the riots have been prosecuted as though they were random thuggery, although they emerge from a long and organised campaign of hatred directed towards asylum seekers, immigrants and Muslims. Some of those convicted were reported as having been “caught up” in the disorder: they were portrayed as weak people gone astray. No such understanding is extended to jihadists. As Rusi explains, the UK has a genuine two-tier justice system. It treats some people – white, non-Muslim – as though they act from blind anger, and others – Brown, Muslim – as coordinated terrorists, even when they commit the same crimes.
Far-right terrorists and Islamist terrorists are essentially the same. Both tend to hate women, while claiming at the same time to be protecting them and protecting children. Both tend to hate Jews. Both hate any deviation from their beliefs, their culture and their demands. Both are motivated by a powerful sense of humiliation, resentment and vengeance. Both draw encouragement from agitators: Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman and Elon Musk could be seen as secular hate preachers. Both movements are connected to international networks. Yet the two are treated entirely differently.
Why? It’s not only the police who are institutionally racist, but the entire system. Islamophobia has long been used as a racist code by mainstream politicians. They cannot overtly appeal to a hatred of Black and Brown people, but they can use Islam as a proxy for race, making common cause with a grim but often electorally significant constituency. This, it seems to me, is what the Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick did last week.
But there’s an even more obvious comparison with the way the racist riots have been handled, and that is with the prosecution of environmental protesters. It is true that only the first clutch of riot cases have so far gone to court, and longer sentences may yet be handed down. But what we have seen is that violent disorder and assaults on the police have so far attracted shorter prison terms than those imposed for peaceful protest. In fact, the longest sentence for a rioter to date (three years) is shorter than the sentences (four and five years) imposed last month on Just Stop Oil campaigners.
As the judge in the Just Stop Oil case pointed out, the protesters caused major disruption by blocking the M25. They inflicted an economic cost of £770,000. No one, including the defendants, expected them to escape punishment. But,whether you agree with Just Stop Oil’s tactics or not, by any standards their nonviolent protest, whose aim was to protect us all from harm, was a far less serious crime than the violence on the streets this month, whose perpetrators deliberately inflicted injury and massive, indiscriminate criminal damage. The riots did not just inconvenience people, they terrorised them. When civil disobedience is punished more severely than racist rioting, something has gone badly wrong.
The inequality looks even starker when you compare the Just Stop Oil protests with the fuel protests in 2000. The first day of protest that year was organised by the Conservative party, which saw fuel taxes as an opportunity to attack the Labour government. Two months later, in September, the campaign erupted into a nationwide shutdown by a coalition of lorry drivers and farmers. They blockaded oil refineries and fuel depots across the country. Nearly three-quarters of filling stations ran dry, supermarkets began rationing food, ambulance services were severely disrupted, schools shut, bus and train services were suspended, operations were cancelled and the NHS was put on red alert.
Simultaneously, the protesters blockaded motorways with convoys of slow-moving trucks. Transport across much of Britain ground to a halt. The cost to businesses was estimated at £1bn, which in those days was real money. No one even bothered to document the missed hospital appointments, school days, work days, flights and funerals (of which the judge Christopher Hehir made so much in sentencing the Just Stop Oil protesters), as millions of people had to cancel their plans.
The result? As far as I can discover, not a single organiser or activist was prosecuted. Far from it: the first convener of the September protests, Brynle Williams, used his resultant celebrity to get elected as a Conservative member of the Welsh parliament, where he was treated as a pillar of the establishment. Six weeks after the protests, Gordon Brown, the Labour chancellor, gave the blockaders much of what they wanted, cutting fuel and vehicle taxes.
What made the difference? Sure, the Tories introduced vicious new laws in 2022 and 2023 which were used to prosecute the Just Stop Oil protesters for their far smaller disruptions. But in 2000 there were already plenty of laws criminalising the kind of actions the fuel protesters took.
The difference was that the fuel protesters had the backing of the billionaire press and other powerful players. The Tory leader, William Hague, described them as “fine, upstanding citizens”. None of this should make any difference to the way the justice system handles crime: an offence is an offence, whether or not powerful people approve. But time and again, we see police, crown prosecutors and the judiciary moved by the same fear and favour that distorts every aspect of public life, from government budgets to the BBC’s editorial decisions.
The justice system claims to be blind to identity. It claims to prosecute people for the crimes they commit, regardless of who they are. But we know this is not true. The law peeks from under its blindfold, and treats some citizens as more equal than others.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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