Dennis Noel Kavanagh

Juries are a fundamental protection in our society. They are not to blame to the backlog and removing them in some cases will have very little effect on the backlog and it will deprive some of the most vulnerable of justice.

I feel like 6 with the way UK politics is right now

Is this the Britain we want? Really really?

This is a Green Party candidate in the UK. Genuinely insane.

Two Candidates Arrested. One Leader Playing the Victim. One Party Calling It Peace. Zack Polanski retweeted a post accusing the officers who stopped an antisemitic terrorist attacker of repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head while two Jewish victims were still in hospital. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner wrote to him personally, correcting the factual record, warning of the chilling effect on officer confidence and defending the men who ran toward a knife wielding terrorist armed only with a discharged taser and their courage. Polanski deleted the post, apologised and then, four days later, accused the Commissioner of meddling in the local elections. Polanski caused the situation. He is now complaining about the response to it. That is the sequence and it deserves to be stated clearly. The body camera footage released by the Met tells the story the original post did not. Essa Suleiman approached officers with a knife after being tasered and fell to the ground still wielding it. Officers kicked a man who was continuing to try to stab them as he lay in the street. The Met called it true courage. Polanski called it traumatic. The Shomrim volunteer who helped detain Suleiman told Chris Philp that the man would have tried to kill more people if allowed to continue. Polanski found the footage distressing. The distinction between those two responses is rather the point. But the most revealing observation in the entire episode is buried beneath all the noise. Polanski said that Jewish people who feel unsafe at pro-Palestinian marches only perceive themselves to be unsafe. His words. He attends those marches as a Jewish person, therefore the marches are safe, therefore Jewish fear of them is a matter of perception rather than reality. Two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green by a man operating within the ideological atmosphere those marches have spent two and a half years building. The Chief Rabbi has warned of a sustained effort to terrorise the Jewish people. Jewish families are changing their names and making plans to leave. The Campaign Against Antisemitism has documented record levels of antisemitic incidents. And the co-leader of a party whose activists described Jews as an abomination to this planet in private WhatsApp groups is telling British Jews that their fear is not real. It is perceived. On the same day Polanski accused the Commissioner of election meddling, two Green Party candidates in London had been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred through antisemitic posts online. Saiqa Ali posted content showing a man in a Hamas headband beneath the slogan resistance is freedom. Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation. Sabine Mairey posted content stating that ramming a synagogue is not antisemitism, it is revenge. Both will still appear on ballot papers because the arrests came too late to remove them. The Green Party is fielding candidates arrested for alleged antisemitic posts while accusing everyone who points this out of using antisemitism as a political football. Polanski says he is the only Jewish leader of a major political party and suffers antisemitic abuse every day. Both may be true. Neither addresses the specific charge. The Commissioner's letter was not antisemitic. It was a factual rebuttal of inaccurate content posted by a politician with a large public platform hours after a terrorist attack on Jewish people. Invoking Jewish identity to deflect institutional criticism is not a rebuttal. It is a shield. Polanski retweeted the post. He amplified the content. He caused the row. The Commissioner responded. And Polanski is now the victim. The sequence is the story. "The Green Party is fielding candidates arrested for alleged antisemitic posts while accusing everyone who points this out of using antisemitism as a political football."

Zack Polanski's rebranding of the Greens as an increasingly inflammatory populist party is clearly making some of the more moderate Greens (like Adrian) very uncomfortable, if they haven't already buggered off (like me).

If you’ve ever wondered how you would have behaved in Nazi Germany, you can find out now. Will you call out antisemitism? Will you stand up for our Jewish community? Or will you stay silent and turn a blind eye? If you believe in ‘never again’, speak up for British Jews now.

The disgusting state of the modern-day Green Party.

I think I've just started a Substack (though I'm not yet adept enough with the site to be 100% sure) Please follow / subscribe (unpaid) Link next

Just had this sent to me from my old pal at the Bar (not the boozer). Pinned to the door of a robing room of a Crown Court on the South Eastern Circuit.

‘There is a deep seated reluctance to see Jewish people as victims in any way, because that would cast the majority as either bystanders or perpetrators. It forces us to see prejudice, which might be close to home. Of course, it is also an unsettling reminder that while Jewish people might be the first target for the growing number of Islamists in the UK, we are now all at increased risk.’

Trevor Phillips just DESTROYED Zack Polanski on national TV. This is the first time I've seen an interviewer PROPERLY hold an extreme, far-left politician to account. In a normal world this would permanently end his political career. Utterly DAMNING for Polanski. 🔥

Absolutely superb from Bartosch

Very well said Her Honour Judge Korner KC

Quite

The wheels falling off the Green Party wagon sooner than expected is a true Bank Holiday treat

God, I love ⁦@HadleyFreeman⁩ - “laughter is the best pesticide” as Nabokov said, and by withering antiSemites with wit she is being both the best of Jewish and British columnists.

The deputy leader of the most antisemitic party in Britain can fuck off. (I’m so tired of this gaslighting).

Very well said Jo

It is astonishing that Owen Jones sees antisemitism here, where there isn’t any, but is seemingly utterly indifferent to antisemitism where it is deafening (ie any comment on Tina Ion (Newcastle) who posts under “thereal.anne.frank” handle and calls for “every single Zionist” to be killed; referred to “money grubbing thieves”, “vermin”, “rats” etc? Or Sabine Mairey (Lambeth) who said “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism, it’s revenge”? Or Saiqa Ali (Lambeth) who posted that the UK government is “overrepresented with Zionists Jews”; that Trump is “owned by Jews”; and depicted a serpent choking the globe with a Star of David (“cut the head of this snake”) etc? I say it’s astonishing but sadly it is not at all astonishing.

A MUST listen