21 months on bail for protesting?
With reference to this article in the Guardian about one of the eighteen accused of protesting at Israeli 'Elbit Systems' at Filton, Bristol, who has been remanded on bail for 21 months in gaol when even in extreme cases the recommendation is that it should not be for more than six months.
Comment by TTV:
William Plastow’s mother believes it is the longest anyone will have been held awaiting trial on protest-related charges (See Guardian article here: https://www.theguardian.com/.../its-outrageous-says... ) The population of this country lives under a misapprehension that we are protected by the law when in practice the opposite is often the case. The executive is allowed to act almost with impunity when dealing with individuals and actions it does not like. There is always a way civil rights can be circumvented by quoting some law or another. There is never enough of them apparently and we can be condemned by them unfairly. When it comes to, we have little or no protections, even to remain silent when questioned, especially if the Terrorism Act is employed, even if there was no terrorism involved. Just reporting on the atrocities of the Israeli government can be regarded as such as in the case of Richard Medhurst. What can you expect from a government that STILL actively supports a genocidal regime? All the civil liberties/Magna Carta/European Convention on Human Rights seem to 'fly out the window' when the government has it in for you. The notion that Judges are separate from Government under the theory of the 'separation of powers', is another misnomer as is the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty'. Bail is meant to be the answer to unjustified imprisonment before trial, but even that is denied as in this case. The potentially innocent are treated as guilty and incarcerated even without trial and conviction. Keeping someone locked up for 21 months is unjustified and inhumane when personal violence was not involved. Obviously the intention as with the Liverpool riots, is to send out a message of deterrence because the government is anxious to prove to Israel the weapons supply train will not be interrupted. Could the be a less ethical reason for it? The contrast with the way illegal immigrants have been treated is also illuminating. Gaol for ethical protestors. Five star hotels for young males from dubious regimes. We all know how Julian Asange was deliberately kept inside. More recently the Starmer alleged arsonists do not have a trial date set until the end of April 2026 and are being kept inside until at least then. Surely not an ulterior motive for that? And what happened to the bail protocol in favour of bail unless there is a real risk to the public and in any event not longer than 6 months? A legal protection is no protection at all if it can be disregarded at the whim of the government - oops! I mean the judiciary?
9.6.2025: If the score is bodies and limbs, Israel is much, much WORSE than so called HAMAS. Those murdering israeli jews have been doing it since 1948! Then when Israel arranged the Oct. 8th 'invasion' it uses it as an excuse to flatten Gaza. It put out blatant lies about the invasion just to get support for its truly barbaric action, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands, in the process ruining its international reputation. Sadly Britain and America have supported it whilst pretending to be appalled. Israel is run by rascist fanatics, whose aim is to invade, dominate and conquer a whole swaith of teritory they call 'greater Israel', expelling or subjugating all the resident Palestinians in the process. Their methods are violent and diabolical. The last twenty-five years have been an American/Israili disingenuous mess that have caused untold millions of deaths, the destruction of countries and mass migration from which we now suffer. Now that idiot Starmer, embroiled in financial and moral intrigue, actually appears to support a war with Russia. The world's gone mad.
11.6.2025: Sadly if the 2009 film 'Enid', which I watched recently, can be believed, Enid Blyton was a character far removed from the one portrayed by her literary output. She sold 600 million books in her life time across the whole world and her most prolific period was my first ten years of life. She died in the year I started college, not that either of those facts are significant, apart from to me. As a child I was not really exposed to her writing except perhaps in annuals where the likeable 'Toy Town' images appear. I have a clear recollection of her 'Famous Five' and other titles on Jane's bedroom bookshelf. In a way they epitomised two different worlds that daily had to be reconciled, as it did in Enid's own life. The father she adored, abandoned her at 13 and she never really recovered, as illustrated by the fact that neither of her parents attended her Registry Office wedding and she did not attend either either of their funerals. She virtually cut all contact with her younger brothers and was distant from her own daughters Imogen Smallwood and Gillian Baverstock. Kate Forsyth wrote pithily, "In My Life she describes her beautiful old house with its magnificent garden, filled with hedges and roses and waterlilies, her playful dogs, her loving daughters, her husband who bought her a beautiful statue of a little girl reading, her daily routine of writing and reading, and I wanted that life. To read that she used to beat her daughters and locked them away in the nursery and sent them to boarding school against their will so they grew up to hate her, shook my own dreams of how I wanted my life to be." So talented, wealthy Enid, who died following demential in 1968 aged 71, appears to have been a bit of a talented fraud, who escaped her own demons and life's realities in a fantasy world of childish adventure and wooden puppets. Never the less we shouldn't underestimate the largely positive psychological effect this had on a whole generation of children, with whom her creative imagination obviously gelled. It is interesting to contrast the output with modern genres such as the Potter books that have had a similar popularity and whether their adult outcomes are different in any way. St Paul wrote, when I was a child I spoke like a child but now I am a man I have put away childish things." To what extent should we retain our childish fantasies? To what extent should we look away from the awful realities of life and the world and lock them away in the nursery? Isn't that what much of the media and entertainment industry is for?
11.6.2025:
Palestinians have the moral and legal right to defend themselves from a violent invading army. That israel and the West labels them as 'terrorists' doesn't change the fact that Hammas is doing exactly what Britain would have done if it had been invaded by Germany in the 'last' war, which of course nearly happened. That doesn't change the fact that Israel has chosen, in addition to stopping weapons, to intentionally target the civilian population and infrastructure, with weapons supplied mainly by America and Germany amongst others, and stopped essential food and medical supplies. Ingrid's boat only had the latter, but still it was illegally siezed and impounded. If indeed Hammas is a 'terrorist organisation', by every metric, Israel is a thousand times more. Hopefully this realisation is seeping into world consciousness.
If the score is bodies and limbs, Israel is much, much WORSE than so called HAMAS. Those murdering israeli jews have been doing it since 1948! Then when Israel arranged the Oct. 8th 'invasion' it uses it as an excuse to flatten Gaza. It put out blatant lies about the invasion just to get support for its truly barbaric action, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands, in the process ruining its international reputation. Sadly Britain and America have supported it whilst pretending to be appalled. Israel is run by rascist fanatics, whose aim is to invade, dominate and conquer a whole swaith of teritory they call 'greater Israel', expelling or subjugating all the resident Palestinians in the process. Their methods are violent and diabolical. The last twenty-five years have been an American/Israili disingenuous mess that have caused untold millions of deaths, the destruction of countries and mass migration from which we now suffer. Now that idiot Starmer, embroiled in financial and moral intrigue, actually appears to support a war with Russia. The world's gone mad.
