The Spectator

Portrait of the week: prisoners are freed, Ted Baker closes and train drivers announce strikes 

issue 24 August 2024

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Emergency measures, known as Operation Early Dawn, were brought in to ease prison overcrowding. Defendants would be summoned to a magistrates’ court only when a space in prison was ready for them, the government said, and would be kept in police holding cells or released on bail while they awaited trial. The measures at first affected the north and the Midlands. By the beginning of the week, 472 people had been charged with offences arising from the recent public disorder; 300 had appeared in court in the preceding week. Donna Conniff, aged 40, the mother of six children, was jailed for two years for throwing a brick at police during a disturbance in Hartlepool. Dean Groenewald, 32, of no fixed address, who had 30 previous convictions, was jailed for two years and two months for throwing a bit of paving at police in Sunderland. Pakistani authorities charged with cyber-terrorism a man accused of spreading disinformation thought to have fuelled unrest in Britain.

Aslef members employed by LNER, a train operator run by the Department for Transport, will strike every weekend. As many as 74,000 people prosecuted for alleged rail fare evasion in England and Wales will have their convictions annulled because the cases were wrongly heard under the single justice procedure, which allows a magistrate to sit behind closed doors; but offences under the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 are not eligible for the procedure. A man was drowned and Mike Lynch, aged 59, a British tech entrepreneur, was among six missing after a yacht, the Bayesian, sank off Sicily. Stephen Chamberlain, his co-defendant in a fraud trial in the United States, in which both were acquitted, died two days earlier after being hit by a car in Cambridgeshire. In the seven days to 19 August, 827 migrants arrived in England by small boat.

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