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The other day I found this Swedish video giving a perspective (from around 2018) on radical feminism. Tip is to set the video to give you English subtitles if you aren’t fluent in Swedish.
Assuming that it is satire, let it be put in the balance when one assesses the contribution of the land of Olaf Palme and Gunnar Myrdal to the World.
And again, if this was so obvious in 2018, why did it take so long for these types to be called out for what they are elsewhere? The highest* criminal court in England & Wales, the Court of Appeal, has come up with a judgment holding that what is called ‘jury nullification’ isn’t permitted, it’s called ‘jury equity’ by some here. The duty of the jury is to return a verdict on the evidence, jurors (who are compelled to serve and take an oath to deliver a true verdict according to the evidence) must follow the law and the judge’s directions. The proceedings arose from some environmental criminals who vandalised a bank and sought to defend their actions on the basis of something like that the bank’s shareholders would have consented to the damage if they’d known it would protect the environment. This is technically a defence in English law, but on the facts, none of the accused mentioned this in interview, all raised it in court and it may well have been found to have been a contrived defence, we don’t know why, because juries do not give reasons or discuss the case afterwards. The case considered the landmark decision of Bushell’s Case from 1670, the juror who refused to convict Quakers William Penn and William Mead and his writ of habeas corpus was granted, after the trial judge fined and imprisoned him for not returning a guilty verdict. Since Mr Bushell wrongly did porridge for saving Quakers, the law has moved on and in England, it is forbidden to mention jury nullification in court. The Court of Appeal’s judgment held that whilst jurors have to give verdicts according to the law and the evidence, there is no mechanism to punish them if they do not do so (provided they actually follow the rules and are either split with no verdict, or acquit). The Court said this:
A distinction that might be lost on some, but it means that the concept of nullification cannot be raised in court as part of a defence. And would it be wrong to think that in the States, ‘jury nullification’ is seen as a pro-liberty stance as a check on an overly powerful State, whereas ‘jury equity’ in the UK is seen as a way to undermine property rights and allow socialist violence to go unchecked? * The Supreme Court is based in England, but it sits as a ‘UK’ court. It could yet hear an appeal from this case if an appeal were brought. I do not have a good enough grasp of Iran’s internal political and social dynamics to know if this wave of resistance has an real prospect of unseating the ghastly Islamic regime… but that would indeed be a truly wonderous start to 2026 if it was to happen. Consider almost any apparently current ‘common knowledge’ today – Net Zero, critical race theory, trans, ‘diversity is our strength’ – and you will find instead a minority concern elevated to ‘common knowledge’ with the dictatorial overlord shouting down those who dare speak against it. This is most acutely felt within academia and certain corporates, but all of us at some point will have self-censored for fear our opinions are not common knowledge when in fact they probably are. If as a society we can succeed in getting a proper handle on ‘common knowledge’ we will greatly improve our country and our sense of ease within it. It has been interesting to see the predictably alarmed reactions to the huge march in London organised by Tommy Robinson et al. One remark I heard on a video was “The most alarming aspect of the event was just how normal the vast majority of the marchers were… the sort of people you’d meet in a country pub, or at a half-time queue for the loo or a concert.” At first, my reaction to hearing that was “surely the normality of the crowd should have made the march less alarming”… but then I realised the marchers not being stereotypical bovver boys makes plausibly labelling the demonstration as “far-right” vastly harder. Yes, I can see how that might alarm some people as the magic words racist, fascist, and far-right lose their power from years of overuse and the fact there were reggae bands and alarmingly black faces in the crowd. What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised. Thousands upon thousands of ULEZ cameras have been destroyed by the Bladerunners (way more than 5,000 last year alone)
The BBC says “According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.” I encourage the use a VPN to get around all state abridgement of people’s right to access the internet, including age checks. Say no to police state Britain, not to mention a VPN enhances your security online. The High Court in England & Wales has handed down a judgment declaring that the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police – a force covering Northumberland, Newcastle and Sunderland, (basically the upper part of north-east England) acted irrationally in letting her officers participate in and support a ‘Pride’ event in 2024. In short, the issue was that the Claimant (‘Plaintiff’ to our friends over the Ocean), a ‘gender-critical lesbian’, objected to members of the local Police Force Force and/or members of the Force associating themselves with the views of supporters of gender ideology and transgender activists by actively participating in the ‘Northern Pride Event in Newcastle in July 2024. The Claimant’s belief is that as a person who is ‘gender-critical’, she believes that a person’s sex is an immutable characteristic and that “gender ideology”, which recognises a person’s gender identity, is “wrong and dangerous“. To cut a long story short, the learned judge, Mr Justice Linden, upheld the complaint. Putting it simply, the judge looked at the Chief Constable’s reasons for authorising her officers to participate in the Pride Event and found them to be irrational, i.e. there was no way that the decision could have been taken by a rational Chief Constable. The crux of the case was that police officers have a duty to be impartial and to appear to be impartial, the Chief Constable decided that the duty to be ‘impartial’ was subject to the ‘public sector equality duty’ (a general duty used wrongly here as a ‘catch-all’ to justify any deviation from the norms of acceptable conduct), but the judge said that it was the other way around, the duty to be impartial is an absolute duty, and the ‘public sector equality duty’ is a duty to have regard to the need to achieve equality, rather than the need to achieve it. The Equality cart was put before the Impartiality Horse. At the end of the judgment is a rather stinging finding about the Defendant, the Chief Constable, in paragraph 136: I have already explained that the Defendant’s reasoning did not provide a rational basis for her decision. After careful consideration I have also concluded that the effect of the activities challenged by the Claimant was sufficiently obvious for the Defendant’s decision to be outside the range of reasonable decisions open to her.I should point out for our readers that in England & Wales, judges are appointed by a commission, and the notion of a judge being akin to an ‘Obama judge’, a ‘Biden judge’ or a ‘Trump appointee’ is alien here, but of course the exalted echelons of higher legal circles contain in the main the sort of people who, holding a conference on law to all comers, would see nothing untoward in sneering at a Conservative government’s legal difficulties or Brexit, and the ‘Overton window’ in the legal community is more like a pinprick hole in a camera obscura, but that is not the point. What I would say is that in England & Wales, the more senior judges will tend to stick to the law and this may produce apparently surprising results, like this case. So what happens now? Well in respect of last year’s event, nothing other than this court’s finding. However, this judgment, although from a judge who is in the first-level of the English courts, amounts to a legal ‘slap in the face with a wet fish‘ to activist police officers and will no doubt embolden those who seek to reduce or dilute the endless stream of ‘agitprop’ we see coming from our police forces, and to an extent in the wider public sector. It also helps to show that there is a difference between the activist version of the law and reality. Will the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria take any steps like asking the irrational Chief Constable to resign? Well, I’d be more surprised by that than the Second Coming. Officers of the Swedish Police have made an announcement regarding the 30 or so bombings in the country in January 2025, attributed to extortion of businesses by criminal gangs, and have said that they can’t cope and they need all of society to mobilise to help them. However, they don’t appear to say how this should be done, or what with, so there might be some misinterpretation and I don’t think that the posse is a thing in Sweden, reported by the independent, reader-funded Nordic Times.
This puts me in mind of a character in The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, who, as a fore-runner of today’s DEI activists would roundly proclaim ‘We are all guilty!’, a chilling vision of the climate today. However, coming back to Sweden, we are told:
The Nordic Times has its own take on the matter, citing, as the BBC would probably point out, ‘without evidence’ networks of immigrant criminals. The police do not seem to have gone that far in terms of specificity:
But there is a plan, nothing so far like what appears to be happening in the USA, this is Sweden after all, but the plan is an increased digital presence of the police.
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