23.05.1996

Litter lout escapes tough justice

In brief

Readers with long memories will remember Gill Emerson being fined £700 for throwing anti-monarchist leaflets at the queen in Rochester in November 1994. I am glad to say that, in the land where justice is not only done but seen to be done, the sentence was quashed by Dartford magistrates on May 15. Gill escaped the 28 days in jail demanded by the prosecution.

Afterwards Gill told me: “I am very happy with the result but the fact remains that the protest against the queen was a legitimate political activity and I should never have been prosecuted in the first place. It has been an almighty waste of taxpayers’ money. It is a victory that I have not paid one single penny of the £700 and the debt is now written off after me spending one night in the cells. The police and court have made a public mockery of their own laws yet again.”  She added that the legal grounds for quashing the sentence were “a bit of a mystery”.

Gill had been so incensed by the court’s action that she had been following a course of non-cooperation. Hence the issue of an arrest warrant on March 1, which the police chose to exercise while she was picketing the Gravesend mayoral inauguration ceremony. Leaked information says that the Labour Party requested the riot squad bundle Gill away to disrupt the picket and avoid its dirty linen being exposed in public. Namely, that Makhan Singh, the deputy mayor, had been forced stand down for mayor because he is not sufficiently Aryan, for a creep who is suitably ‘pinko grey’. After all Gravesend is a marginal seat and they do not want to alienate the racist vote in the general election.

Arthur Lawrence