You Be The Judge: Crime & Punishment (Ch5)
Hypocrisy is not a criminal offence. If it were, Britain’s jails would be overflowing with self-righteous eco-activists who think they’re better than everyone else.
Just Stop Oil protester Morgan Trowland boasted smugly, on You Be The Judge: Crime & Punishment, how he’d closed the Dartford Bridge for 36 hours by scaling its cables and climbing into a hammock.
Big-nosed and bony, the archetype of a ginger-bearded Leftie, Trowland ranted about his mission to save the world by blackmailing the government until it banned oil and gas extraction.
Down below, traffic tailed back for miles, creating far more pollution than usual. Thousands missed hospital appointments, crucial meetings, exams, funerals and who knows what else.
But as presenter Anne Robinson said, ‘Mr Trowland plainly believed that he knew better. In short, to hell with everyone else.’
His double standards were exposed when he tearfully explained how he was inspired to fight climate change during a trip to India. Here, he met people whose lives were affected by, ‘extreme heat because the weather has been ruined, in part by British people on motorways’.
And how did he get to India? On his pushbike, perhaps, or on foot? Or was it on a passenger jet burning tons of fossil fuel, I wonder?
Anne’s one-off show, part of a week of programmes on Channel 5 about the justice system, encouraged us to think about fair sentencing. Trowland served 14 months in prison for causing a public nuisance, which seems an ineffectual sentence.
Just Stop Oil protester Morgan Trowland boasted smugly, on You Be The Judge: Crime & Punishment, how he’d closed the Dartford Bridge for 36 hours by scaling its cables and climbing into a hammock
Thousands missed hospital appointments, crucial meetings, exams, funerals and who knows what else – traffic tailed back for miles, creating far more pollution than usual
Morgan Trowland was sentenced to three years in prison for causing a public nuisance
To salve his own conscience, he was willing to inflict financial losses on countless unlucky businesses and private individuals. The moral remedy would be for Trowland to repay as many of them as possible.
Any property he owns should be sold, and a swathe of his income used to reimburse his victims. And to make sure he doesn’t use the penalty as an excuse to sponge off the taxpayer, he should be barred from claiming benefits for ten years. Let’s see if he’s still as keen to pose and preen about ‘saving the world’ when it’s his own money he’s wasting.
The other case studies in this gimmicky programme were rushed and depressing. Reconstructions of court hearings laid out the bare facts of three grim trials. In one, a teenager pleaded guilty to murdering his ex-girlfriend in her family home. In another, a thug on a drunken night out punched a stranger to death in an unprovoked attack.
The third was a horrific story of death by dangerous driving. Panels of retired detectives, former judges and ex-prisoners gave their opinions on what the punishment should be. Members of the public who’d lost family members to crime also weighed in.
Presenter Anne Robinson’s one-off show, part of a week of programmes on Channel 5 about the justice system, encouraged us to think about fair sentencing
Just Stop Oil protesters gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 2023, where activists Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker appealed their jail sentences
In every instance, the killer’s sentence was shorter than anyone expected. Unbelievably, the drunk who admitted manslaughter spent just nine months in prison.
He even claimed he was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder — because he’d killed a man. Where’s the justice?
