Law & Order

I want to discuss with you about, for Law and Order tonight, not least something caught my eye, dangerous career criminals apparently with more than 100 convictions are apparently being spared jail time. This caught my eye and let me just give you some stats about this, because apparently the number of people with multiple convictions that avoided prison has apparently tripled from 1,000 odd in 2007 to 3,325 in 2023, we’re at a time where you know loose lips on Twitter can see you get sentenced.

You know I don’t agree necessarily with that approach on Law and Order but I found it absolutely astonishing that you can have multiple convictions and not be sent to prison what do you think to that?

Well, there was a case which caught my eye yesterday which was the lady, I think she’s like 53 and I think she cares for, she took care of a rather sick husband and she writes something really quite wrong on Facebook and she ends up getting I think 18 months. I found that bizarre because had this been 3 months ago or is it 3 months ago, she’d probably have got a suspended sentence for that. The woman was saying something like you should burn down a mosque or something, with the adults in it, yeah. I mean should you really be saying that? No, you should not be saying that and one of the things that might come out of all this cracking down on Law and Order is that people will not be saying that in future on the basis that they may well be going to jail.

I am saying is that three or 4 months ago she would have got a suspended sentence which may not be right but the thing is she got 18 months. What about this, there’s a guy in London who stole, on his ebike, stole 24 mobile phones from various people in one single day, a massive criminal, a really nasty piece of work he drove it 50 mph down pavements, people had to scatter to get out of the way, he was chased by the cops and all the rest of it he ended up getting 20 months right.

Tough Sentencing for Some, Not All Offenders

All I’m saying is the Prime Minister has ordered the judges correctly probably to crack down on these rioters correctly okay, to uphold Law and Order, why don’t we have the same sentencing policy throughout the whole year so that when this guy who steals 20 phones in a day right, why doesn’t he get 5 years right, why doesn’t he get five years? I mean, I agreed with you, do you remember that lady who was murdered in a pub by a machine gunner just before Christmas on Christmas Eve in fact that killer got 48 years. He’s 22 years old he won’t be out that’s the earliest he will be out is when he’s 70 okay. Fantastic, why don’t we have judges permanently on the case of these criminals well I would argue if you’ve been killing someone with a gun you shouldn’t be out at all quite frankly but anyway whatever James.

I do think we are seeing people getting prison terms for words and then people not getting much for actions and that’s got to be a problem for Law and Order, there’s one of these cases that’s come up from the recent riots around that, but from the online harms act that’s now in place and one of them I saw I think it’s on trial tomorrow there was a rapper who on TikTok said something which is libelous about Tommy Robinson, but then being taken for a criminal charge which could end up in a prison term which seems to me quite weird.

I think if you libel someone then they’re entitled, the person you’ve libelled is entitled to take you to court and that’s not a matter for our criminal justice system and our prisons which really should be about serious offenders and people that are a danger to other people and the rehabilitation of those where that’s possible.

So I think in some of these of course you can, I need to be clear about the particulars of the specifics of the case, you’re referring to if I’ve got my facts straight, I think that you’re referring to a fellow that goes by the name of Twister Cheese something like that yeah, I mean how pathetic what kind of grown man calls himself Twister Cheese anyway? That aside what he actually said was that he made some social media post suggesting that Tommy Robinson had told people to attack mosques and that was not true so the that he’s found himself in trouble is not in doubt.

Misrepresentation Online

Oh, it’s libel, it’s about you’ve deliberately misrepresented something and therefore you’ve perhaps incited other people to go out and retaliate and I need to be careful because this is a live case my point there is that we have libel and before we had the online harms bill act now that we had libel, we still have libel. If he has libelled Tommy Robinson then Tommy Robinson is entitled to take him to court for damages on that basis.

I’m saying that if you say that so, if I say Kelvin McKenzie said you know some offensive bad thing that he didn’t say I don’t think I should be taken to Criminal Court, I think Kelvin is entitled to say it, we’re in this whole different world now and I do need to be careful about the specifics of the case that you’re talking about because as you say this person speaks more in more general terms, let me broaden this out we have found ourselves in what I would almost call some kind of clown world where we’ve rushed now to criminalize people for things that previously you shouldn’t be doing, I don’t think you should be doing.

But, whether or not there would be criminal acts that should result in prison time I would personally dispute and if you’re going to do that on one side of the fence so if you’re going to start saying and again I need to be a bit careful about what I say because there’s live criminal cases, but on one side of the fence if you’re going to start saying you know you’re going to be legally in trouble if you suggested that the killer of the Southport girls was an asylum seeker and that’s false and then you whipped up hatred.

If you’re going to be in trouble on that side of the fence criminally for that it then also it stands to reason if that is your kind of threshold and your mindset then it also then stands to reason that on the other side of the fence you would then be in trouble for suggesting that an individual be that Tommy Robinson or whoever has basically told people to smash up mosques, and batter Muslims or whatever which wasn’t true.

Legal Whack-a-Mole

So the problem I think is that we’re playing a kind of reactive legal whack-a-mole and that’s what’s going on and that’s not actually a sensible way to make laws, to enforce Law and Order and what we’re seeing is yes people say bad things on social media occasionally or some of that will end up being illegal in the sense that it’s hate speech or it contributes to you know it’s a specific instruction to go and do an act which is Criminal which would be the same as if I were to say that in this studio now that would be illegal.

But I think on the social media thing rather than focusing on how are certain pieces of news spread how can we see what the algorithms are and how can that be public and how can we have a system where if something isn’t true, it isn’t being spread and we put the onus on the platforms that we’re using and how we engage with those, rather than trying to endlessly do this weird balancing act of someone said a bad thing over here, that person’s going to be dealt with.

Now someone said a bad thing over here we have to deal with this and endlessly this endless escalation of policing speech rather than focusing on like really bad crimes, really bad physical actions took place in the riots and there would have been some speech acts which also are directly involved in those.

Those are the things which should be the focus for law enforcement and the justice system, for Law and Order and then if we are concerned about the spread of lies, misinformation, untruths etc. We should look at how those things are spread which means understanding which we don’t know, social media algorithms those should be a public thing so that researchers, so that the government, so that all of us can say; this spread because of this reason so that we can know if someone is in a febrile situation, someone does say something about something we can say at this point something should click in so that the information doesn’t spread or things about that subject doesn’t spread for X hours or whatever.

Online Regulation Seems Inevitable

I know where you’re going to head with that because Elon Musk gets a load of hassle at the moment because people are saying you know it’s created this wild west or whatever in Twitter or X but before Elon Musk actually took over that platform there was so much throttling of information based on it being what I would call the wrong kinds of opinion, so many people were ‘shadow banned’ and things like that to stop their perspective from getting traction because whoever was running that platform at the time, I would argue didn’t really like those kind of opinions.

You got to be careful what you wish for well but actually there was another reason as well they were trying to protect and as most of the main stream media is today they’re trying to protect their advertising base because if you appeal to the left then then the big advertisers will come in right whether it be Disney or Unilever or any of those, they all come in.

Immediately the riots started getting views right, then suddenly that advertising gets pulled, it’s an incredible and difficult moment so my bet is in the future if I’m still around in 10 years’ time, my bet is that X or Twitter will be behind a paywall actually.

Yeah, I think transparency is the thing that we want, I don’t think some kind of secretive agreement between governments and social media companies is in any way good because views that are opposed to the government are more likely to be shut down than other ones, but us being able to see publicly why did X get, sorry not X, in Twitter why did some posts get shown to loads of people?

Social Media Platform Transparency?

You can see the algorithm, we can research it and understand it because this is our public forum now, you know 20 years ago researchers under researchers, these are private companies sure and so why should, this is Elon Musk’s you know I don’t want to go, Kentucky Fried Chicken in your special secret recipe or whatever but why would he disclose his trade secret because everybody, this is the public forum exactly the same way that GB News or newspapers have some responsibilities to the wider public and therefore they there should be a degree of transparency.

Now the transparency in newspapers was well the thing was published so you could go and do have a look and you could do research and Analysis of it, likewise TV you could research how long things were watched for what was watched what’s broadcast and we can’t do that with social media because it’s a hidden thing with the algorithm and that is what information we are shared that is the public sphere of today.

So, we have to be able to see why we are being shown the information that we’re shown, that’s not a bad thing it doesn’t impinge on those we’re saying that should happen for all of the social media sites and you know and that should be clear and open.

Just briefly Kelvin, well the answer then is to go behind the pay wall so that you don’t have to face the idea that this is not open for all right that’s what I would do, I’d do it tomorrow and it would stop Musk railing on all the time about the fact that there’s no advertising, get people to pay in essence, I pay anyway to get a Blue Tick I pay £8 a month as it stands, I want everybody it keep the left off because they can’t afford it.