Tag Archives: double standards

We do have a two-tier system

By Neil Hickman | Sat 6th June 2026 - 10:55 am

I think Nigel Farage is right. We do have two-tier policing.

No, let me finish, as the man himself is fond of saying.

A couple of years ago, Lucy Connolly, a troubled and not especially clever individual, posted an unpleasant and inflammatory tweet in the aftermath of the Southport murders. She thought better of it and deleted it after a few hours. And it is difficult to believe that anybody sought to set fire to anything simply because of what an obscure woman from Northampton posted on Twitter.

What Connolly wrote was deeply unpleasant, but I can’t help feeling that the most appropriate thing to do with her would have been to tear her off a strip and tell her not to be such a fool in future. Given the very prescriptive approach to sentencing which now applies, of course, the judge’s hands were tied and she was jailed for two and a half years.

A few days ago, Nigel Farage ignored the request of Henry Nowak’s family not to make his murder the cause of division. With all the authority of the leader of a party that polled 17% at the last election, he made an Emergency Address To The Nation, which, because it was Good Old Nige, didn’t provoke gales of laughter. And he called for people to display “pure cold rage”. Unlike Ms Connolly, Farage is a highly intelligent wordsmith, who chooses his words with care. And he did not invite people to be angry. He invited them to display rage.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged nigel farage | 17 Comments

The double-speak of the Prime Minister and her Cabinet

By Chris Key | Sat 8th October 2016 - 1:15 pm

It is a common dictum that politicians should be judged by their actions not by their words. Well it would appear that on many fronts the government could be rightly accused of double-speak after this week’s Conservative Party Conference.

Theresa May was Home Secretary for six years. During that time she deported almost 50,000 students with dubious legality and yet still failed to meet her own unrealistic targets. She also oversaw a big reduction in the number of immigration officers at ports and airports. However rather than accepting targets will never be met and giving the Home Office the staff they need, it has now become the job of head teachers and property owners to control immigration. If you cannot do it yourself outsource to someone who can is the leitmotif of the May government.

Landlords now face the risk of prosecution if they fail to check the right of their tenants to live in the U.K. Yet when a Tory Minister for immigration in the last government failed to check the papers of his cleaner he simply went to the back benches only to be reappointed to a Ministerial job. The “A country which works for everyone” slogan needs more small print than the average insurance policy.