Dr. Sean Gabb

Emma West has finally been worn down. Eighteen months after she was charged with racially aggravated intentional harassment and racially aggravated assault , she has agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress with the original charges being dropped (http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/EXCLUSIVE-Emma-West-pleads-guilty-racially/story-19182717-detail/story.html#axzz2VKmkpyXr).  The lesser charge does not,  unlike the original charge,  mention  intent and is unlikely to result in a prison sentence.

Until she attended a bail hearing in May this year Emma West had resolutely maintained a Not Guilty plea despite the considerable pressure applied to her by the state. This included imprisoning her in the highest security women’s prison in England (Bronzehill HMP) “for her own safety” instead of granting her bail,  despite Mrs West’s insistence that she was in no danger. She has also had the constant fear that her young son could be taken from her.

At the bail hearing where she agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, this course of action was suggested not by the prosecution or defence but   by Judge Warwick McKinnon, the Recorder of Croydon, who feared the case was  “spiraling out of control”.

The report carried on the This Is Croydon website has a number of  extraordinary things to say. The reason for the inordinate delay in bringing the matter to trial is  attributed to the question of whether Mrs West was fit to stand trial. That is very odd because if she is deemed fit to plead guilty to this  charge (and to other charges of assault on her husband and police officers)  what possible reason could there be for her  not being fit to stand trial on the original charges?  A plausible explanation is that the prosecution (and probably the CPS) dreaded going to trial on a racially charge case where most exceptionally a Not Guilty plea was to be made and used Mrs West’s psychiatric history as an excuse to delay the trial until she was worn down enough to accept a lesser charge.

The interesting thing is Mrs West may have had solid grounds for being deemed not fit to stand trial. She  was admitted as a  psychiatric in patient  in 2011 suffering from depression. At the time of her arrest she was still receiving treatment as an out-patient.  As anyone who has tried to obtain  in-patient psychiatric care for someone who is patently severely mentally ill will know it is monstrously difficult to find  because so many residential psychiatric facilities have been closed since Margaret Thatcher’s Care in the  Community (Lack of Care in the Community in reality) policy was implemented in  the 1970s. To be an in-patient now suggests her depression must have been unusually  severe.  Such a condition might well have led to Mrs West being deemed not fit to stand trial or the DPP deciding prosecution was not in the public interest.   She has also been self-harming whilst waiting for a resolution of her case. At best,  the prosecution were willing to put a vulnerable person under considerable stress for the better part of two years.

During the time since her being charged and now Mrs West has picked up another couple of charges to which she has also pleaded guilty, assaults on a police officer and her husband whom she caused slight damaged to with a knife when he tried to stop her self-harming. It is conceivable that she could receive a prison sentence these offences, offences which only arose from the stress of being charged with offences which should not exist in a free society, namely, speaking her mind in public.

Mrs West will return to court for sentence on all three charges – the two assaults and the racially aggravated charge – on 1st July.

Her defence counsel  made several  distinctly odd claims:

1. that Mrs West  had only maintained a Not Guilty plea because she was afraid of being labelled a racist. This is a straightforward nonsense because she has pleaded guilty to a charge which labels her a racist.

2. that her behaviour which led to her arrest was due to  ‘double the recommended dose of antidepressant Citalopram which had caused her to have “unusual” ideas.’  So there you have it, thinking mass immigration has been a disaster counts as  ‘“unusual” ideas.’  The only thing which Citalopram may have done is loosen her tongue, a drug version of in vino veritas.

3.  that Mrs West had been  “greatly distressed” by “Right wing groups such as the National Front and British National Party” adopting her cause –  support  which included sending her flowers and cheques – and that this had  “led her try and take her own life.”  In view of her forthright lambasting of immigration and its effects,  it is more than a little difficult to believe that she would have been “deeply distressed” by those parties’ views on race and immigration.

This is a deeply worrying case because it shows just how ruthless the British authorities are willing to be when dealing with someone who does not accept the consequences of mass immigration willingly and supinely.