Not for the first time, Nigel Farage MP this week said what many other Brits may be thinking.
‘We now live in a country where you can assault a Member of Parliament and not go to prison,’ the Reform UK leader wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), ‘The latest example of two-tier justice.’
He was referring, of course, to the sentence given to an OnlyFans model from Essex who threw a milkshake over him while he was campaigning in his Clacton constituency before the summer’s General Election.
Victoria Thomas Bowen, 25, reportedly called Mr Farage a ‘f***ing c***’ as she hurled the milkshake at him as he left a meeting at a Wetherspoons pub in the Essex seaside town. She said she did it because she disagreed with his political views.
Despite pleading guilty to the crime of assault by beating, she was handed a suspended sentence by deputy senior district judge Tan Ikram.
Judge Ikram told Farage’s assailant that ‘this was not just an attack on him’ but also ‘an attack on our parliamentary democracy’, and reminded the court of the murders of two other MPs – Labour’s Jo Cox in 2016 and Conservative Sir David Amess in 2021.
The judge declared that ‘a clear message must go out, public debate must not be shut down by criminality such as this’.
Too true. So why on earth did he then suspend her sentence of 13 weeks in prison for 12 months, a move that means she won’t spend a day behind bars? What ‘clear message’ did that pathetic let-off send out?
Online model Victoria Thomas Bowen hurling a milkshake at Nigel Farage as he left a meeting in Clacton during his General Election campaign
OnlyFans model Bowen, from Essex, pleaded guilty to assault by beating, and was handed a suspended sentence by deputy senior district judge Tan Ikram
This shocking case has had many people who share Farage’s worries about two-tier justice asking: if the former Brexit Party leader had instead been a Left-wing Labour MP, assaulted in the street by a Right-wing thug, would the attacker have got off so lightly? The evidence suggests not, m’lud.
A week after the Labour Party had come out in support of a second referendum on EU membership, a Brexit supporter called John Murphy lay in wait for the then party leader Jeremy Corbyn at an Islamic centre in his north London constituency.
As Corbyn chatted to community leaders, Murphy – shouting ‘Respect the vote!’ – smacked an egg into his head.
At his subsequent trial, the chief Westminster magistrate told Corbyn’s assailant that he was guilty of ‘an attack on our democratic process’, and, as he sentenced him to 28 days in prison, said his jail term was designed to send the ‘clear message’ that ‘attacks on MPs must stop’.
By contrast, the get-out-of-jail card that the judge handed to Farage’s attacker this week can only embolden, not deter, those inclined to launch assaults on elected politicians and our democracy. Especially, many will suspect, if their targets are politicians of the ‘wrong’ stripe.
We might recall how, only a couple of years ago, the former Conservative leader and Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith MP was called ‘Tory scum’ and assaulted with a heavy traffic cone by three Left-wing activists, none of whom was convicted.
While giving evidence against them in court, IDS was cross-examined about the welfare policies he had pursued in the Department of Work and Pensions, as if he was the one on trial for the crime of being a Tory minister.
Many have also noted the stark contrast between the soft treatment of Farage’s attacker, convicted of a violent assault let’s remember, and the tough sentences imposed after the summer’s unrest that followed the murder of three young girls in Southport.
Victoria Thomas Bowen leaving Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London after admitting assault by throwing a milkshake over Mr Farage in June
People were jailed, not only for the serious crimes of rioting and violent disorder, but also for writing reprehensible words about immigrants and Muslims on social media.
Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old childminder and Tory councillor’s wife, received a 31-month prison sentence after posting ‘set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care’ and calling for ‘mass deportation now’ on X. She concluded: ‘If that makes me racist so be it.’
Julie Sweeney, a 53-year-old woman living a ‘quiet, sheltered life’ caring for her disabled 73-year-old husband in a small Cheshire town far from the trouble spots, was jailed for 15 months for a single post on her community Facebook group. In a message that the court accepted was entirely out of character, she wrote: ‘Blow up the mosques with the adults in it.’
Those posts were appalling, of course. There is, however, no evidence that anybody responded to them by attempting to set fire to migrant hotels or blow up mosques. Did those abusive words really constitute far more serious crimes than ‘assault by beating’?
For context, in 2023 a trans activist who told a crowd at a London rally: ‘If you see a Terf [a feminist who opposes trans dogma], punch them in the f***ing face’, was
acquitted. The judge in that case, incidentally, was Tan Ikram, the same man who presided over the Farage milkshake case.
The ‘political message’ behind the post-riot sentences was clear. A government official admitted that Starmer, himself a former director of public prosecutions, ‘directly intervened’ to ensure that the prosecutors and courts cracked down fast and hard.
‘He leaned really heavily on the justice system,’ the official told The Times. ‘He knew from experience that people needed to see the system working to amplify the political message that rioting would not be tolerated. Prosecutions and sentences needed to be very visible.’
No doubt many think Starmer was right, that keeping the people safe should be the Government’s priority. The question is, however, which people?
This year’s milkshake incident is not the first time Farage has been the victim of such an attack. After he was hit by a banana and salted caramel shake in 2019, the comedian Jo Brand ‘joked’ on BBC Radio 4: ‘I’m thinking, why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?’.
In any case, this is about much more than a drink or an egg. It has serious implications for our democratic society. During the recent General Election campaign, Farage was often the only national party leader to get within milkshake-throwing distance of ordinary members of the public.
With some possible fears or wariness of voters, the leaders of the main parties all too often spent the campaign participating in events carefully stage-managed for TV cameras.
If assaults on MPs become the norm, don’t be surprised if they never interact with the electorate in person again.
Across Europe, millions of voters are in revolt against the political establishment, over everything from mass immigration to the madness of net zero. Reform UK, having only entered parliament with five MPs in July, is now soaring in many opinion polls.
This revolt is also fuelled by many people’s conviction that the justice system is weighted against them, that they are no longer equal before the law, that their freedom of speech and protest is considered less valuable than those on the other side.
As the anger over two-tier justice grows, the old political elites look increasingly out of touch.
Mick Hume is the author of Trigger Warning: Is The Fear Of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?