Stories of two-tier justice are back. On Monday, Victoria Thomas Bowen, the model who doused Nigel Farage with milkshake on the Clacton campaign trail earlier this year, received a three-month suspended sentence for assault at Westminster magistrates’ court (plus 120 hours of unpaid work and a compensation order.) Farage was very unhappy: ‘We now live in a country where you can assault a Member of Parliament and not go to prison,’ he said, calling this ‘the latest example of two-tier justice’.
One might think the occasional attack like this showed the political process in rude health
Is he right? The judge who sentenced the assailant, Tan Ikram, is already known for his eclectic sentencing record. At the start of the year he gave a conditional discharge to Palestinian protesters openly glorifying the banned terrorist group Hamas, yet a couple of years earlier imprisoned a policeman for five months for a meme mocking George Floyd.
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