This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Having never previously appeared in a court case, in February I trekked to Manchester to listen in person to an application for judicial review in which I was cast as the villain. The self-declared hero was Lynsay Watson, an ex-cop fired for gross misconduct after a harassment campaign against another gender-critical campaigner.
Watson was seeking to force police to prosecute me for criminal harassment against a friend of his, Freda Wallace. Both are men who identify as women. I’ve written previously about their allegations, so suffice it to say that some are true and entirely lawful; the rest might be criminal if they weren’t pure invention. (In case you’re wondering about the outcome, two months later I’ve heard nothing.)
It was a fun day out. I watched an obsessive argue in front of a judge that he and men like him have the right to force everyone to call them women and to avoid vile slurs like “he” and “man”. I also saw Watson arrested as he left court, to be questioned about allegations I and others had made — with actual evidence — that he had committed criminal harassment against us. Until we told the police he would be in court that day, they had failed to locate him for questioning.
Those who worry about access to justice may think I’m being complimentary when I say the judge treated Watson’s ramblings with courtesy, reminding him of what the case was about whenever he veered off course. But I’m not. That people like Watson are humoured like this says nothing good about our criminal justice system, which is endlessly deferential to those who abuse it whilst coming down hard on the innocent.
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Most obvious is the shocking waste of public resources. Watson was a litigant in person on a low income; that means court fees were waived, and he had no legal costs. And he makes a habit of this sort of thing: during the hearing he claimed to have brought 25 or 40 similar applications for judicial review (he said both numbers at different points); at least one was granted permission to proceed.
He also claims to have made at least 100 crime reports, including about the victim of the harassment for which he was fired from the police. Last year an employment tribunal had to move from Edinburgh to Dundee because of posts about the judge and lawyers the court interpreted as threatening. Those who must defend themselves from his allegations usually have to shell out for lawyers. And all that court time, plus representation for the police, comes out of the public purse.
The tenderness with which the criminal justice system treats Watson contrasts starkly with the way allegations against him are slow-walked or ignored. Because he is trans, he falls under one of the five “monitored strands” in hate crime legislation. Statutory Home Office guidance requires that his allegations, including of non-crime “incidents” he claims distress him, be treated with a seriousness denied to non-special people like me.
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This offence against equality before the law originated with the Macpherson Report into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. It found police had ignored evidence of violent racism in his community and recommended that in future they record racist incidents that fell short of crime to help spot patterns and head off actual crime before it happened.
Over time more monitored strands were added and the recording threshold was lowered, despite no evidence ever emerging that the approach worked. Then came the Blair era and public sector targets. Police were required to reduce recorded crime and increase clear-up rates. So they massaged the figures by avoiding recording reported crime whenever they could get away with it and focusing detection efforts on the most easily solved crimes rather than the most serious.
When that blew up in scandal in the 2010s, a new system was designed that was equally rife with misaligned incentives. Police were ordered to record reported crimes “at source” — that is, to write down all allegations within 72 hours of receiving them and to classify them as if every word was true.
Predictably, recorded crime soared but actual investigations and prosecutions didn’t. And on top of the pre-existing problem of unequal treatment of different groups, the new system reversed the burden of proof. As I know from the paperwork from my case, the decision to record me as having committed criminal harassment was taken not because there was evidence I had done any such thing, but because there was no evidence that I hadn’t.
To spell that out, police were sufficiently sure that they shouldn’t actually question or charge or prosecute me for the crime Watson alleged I had committed that they vigorously opposed his application for judicial review. They sent a barrister to Manchester to argue before a judge that no court could possibly conclude that the alleged criminal offence was made out and that any prosecution was “doomed to fail”.
But they still wrote down that I had committed the offence. That record will turn up any time I interact with the police in future, despite being based on the unsubstantiated word of a trans-identifying man with a grudge against me. This is a shadow crime-recording system disconnected from evidence, investigation or proof.
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Lawyers I’ve talked to about my experience are astounded: their familiarity with crime starts further downstream, after allegations are taken seriously. Politicians are too — even those working to abolish non-crime hate incidents. But I’ll tell you who knows all about this system: Watson, who worked within it.
The criminal justice system is laughably ill-equipped to protect itself — and people like me — from people like him. Getting someone declared a vexatious litigant, which stops them from taking civil cases without judicial permission, requires jumping through hoops. The only remedy for vexatious crime reports is a prosecution for wasting police time. But it’s less trouble — for the police, not the rest of us — to continue obediently writing down whatever he says.
You could read this all as a story of good intentions gone awry — until you ask whose interests are served. A big increase in recorded crime; a shift in focus from violent crime to thoughtcrime; classifying crimes that will never go anywhere instead of patrolling, investigating and prosecuting; pandering to the permanently aggrieved whilst hounding law-abiding types: this is a criminal justice system run for the benefit of those working within it, not those it is supposed to protect.
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An apt descriptor is anarcho-tyranny, a coinage of Sam Francis, an American political theorist who died in 2005. A virulent racist shunned by all mainstream politicians after he wrote an essay defending slavery, he is undergoing a revival, not because of his positions, which remain beyond the pale, but because of his prescience.
Administrators would displace capitalists as the elite
For Francis, politics had nothing to do with ideas or principles but was simply a power struggle. He urged Republicans to abandon ideological commitments such as free trade and small government and instead woo what he called the MAR constituency, middle American radicals. To do this, he recommended limiting immigration, raising tariffs and protecting blue-collar jobs. He was so much a prophet before his time that he nearly got Donald Trump’s defining acronym right.
His analysis of class interests owes much to the 1941 book The Managerial Revolution by philosopher James Burnham, which argued that in the emerging bureaucratic state, administrators would displace capitalists as the elite by reshaping the administrative state to suit themselves.
In an essay titled “Anarcho-tyranny, U.S.A.” published in 1994, Francis argued that this explained the unceasing creation of new criminal and civil offences of a type to be committed by the generally law-abiding and a reduction in enforcement action against the genuinely criminal.
The examples he gave read distinctly oddly today: seatbelt laws, speed limits, bans on possessing child pornography and restrictions on gun possession. But in 1994 not even the most oracular thinker could have predicted a new sacred caste of people who deny their sex and the de facto criminalisation of anyone who mentions it.
I can’t imagine that credulously transcribing Watson’s allegations, working out what recently invented crimes they would constitute if true and churning through paperwork for absurd judicial review applications is deeply fulfilling work. But it pays judges’ and police officers’ salaries, and, unlike tackling actual crime, it’s easy and risk-free.
