Does the UK have a two-tier justice system? Simply asking this question can now land you in deep trouble. For Simon Pearson, a teacher in Lancashire, it was enough to cost him his job.
Pearson was sacked by Preston College, the Telegraph reports today, for a series of Facebook posts lamenting the rise of two-tier justice. In one post, he cited the case of Lucy Connolly, a childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor who was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a racist and inflammatory tweet.
‘Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards [ie, migrants] for all I care’, she posted during last year’s Southport riots. Connolly’s tweet was ‘appalling’, Pearson acknowledged, but ‘she should not have been jailed’. This unusually harsh punishment, he said, was proof of a ‘two-tier policy from the top down’.
Pearson also raised the cases of the Manchester Airport brawl, of the ‘pro-Palestine’ hate marches in London, where protesters are free to call ‘for the genocide of Jews’, and of former Labour councillor Ricky Jones, who has been charged with encouraging violence at a counter-protest to the riots and faces trial next week. In contrast with Connolly, Pearson claimed, these incidents were all met with a light touch from the authorities.
Whatever one thinks of Pearson’s examples (the Manchester Airport attacker has belatedly been convicted and Jones has yet to be tried), he is surely right that Connolly’s prison sentence is unduly harsh, even by the standards of the UK’s notoriously censorious thoughtpolice.
What’s more, the broader trend Pearson is pointing to is, by now, undeniable. The justice system has become corrupted by multiculturalism and political correctness. It is now well established that, for decades, the police have been turning a blind eye to or actively covering up crimes that they fear might inflame ‘community tensions’. The grooming gangs being only the most egregious example.
For the thoughtcrime of noticing this grim trend, Pearson was made the subject of a formal complaint by a Muslim representative of the National Education Union (NEU). The complaint alleged that his Facebook posts were ‘Islamophobic’ and ‘racially discriminatory’. An investigation by Preston College upheld the complaint, finding that his views had the potential to bring the college into disrepute.
This is extraordinary, no? Trade unions would once have stood up for the rights of workers to express themselves freely without the threat of the sack. Yet here we have the NEU actively pleading with bosses to have a teacher lose his livelihood for speaking out of turn.
More alarming still, what Pearson was essentially arguing is that justice should be dispensed equally and that free speech should be protected – that the police and courts should not show racial or religious bias, and that even ugly outbursts like Connolly’s should not result in imprisonment. These are not extreme views – they are foundational to a functioning liberal democracy.
What Simon Pearson’s sacking reveals is that simply supporting free speech and the fair application of the law now marks you out as suspect. Unequal treatment and racial favouritism have become so normalised in the UK that it is forbidden even to question them. These are dark days for Britain.
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