Sussex Police wantonly attacked a peaceful political demonstration on 24th August 1996 in Brighton. The occasion was billed as a Reclaim The Streets. For the uninitiated, that’s a celebratory protest against car culture, which makes its mark with peaceful protestors physically standing in the road. It was intended to be a beach party. As far as I could tell, the word was to attend dressed for the seaside and be ready for beach games.
That morning I had a wisdom tooth extracted. Head full of anaesthetic and minus one large tooth, I strolled into town to join in with the fun. I was expecting a nice fluffy event and a rare break from my legal training. I had returned home to live with my parents so as to be able to afford my studies and this was exactly the sort of thing I imagined that they most feared – me apparently returning to old party driven lifestyle. Nowadays, I look back on the rock ‘n’ roll years of being a fire-eater and fondly call them The Soft Years. Back then, I was as keen as my folks were to see the back of them. All the same, I chose not to mention this protest party to them, lest they got the wrong idea.
When I arrived in Churchill Square, there was a rather tense atmosphere. There were a lot of police. Hundreds of them. There were also a few hundred people standing in a loose group some distance from the police. I asked someone what was happening. They explained that a couple of Legal Observers had just been arrested and the others had been warned that they would be arrested too. That resulted in all of them taking off their orange bibs and concealing them. One of them had apparently been arrested for handing out leaflets explaining a person’s rights on arrest. I didn’t like the sound of that.
Whilst I was digesting this information and wondering what to do about it, someone else told me that the people with the sand had been arrested in a pre-dawn raid. Their idea had been to arrive at the Clock Tower with a massive truck and tip a huge quantity of sand onto the road around it, so that we could have a genuine beach party. I was never all that convinced by the merits of this plan. It would have been a very dramatic form of defiance. It could easily have created dangerous road conditions in the wet. Drivers could hardly be expected to foresee slippery sand on this junction, on a hill or deal with it competently in busy traffic. Overall, although I could see that it would grab the headlines and probably get a photographs onto the front pages (we still read newspapers in those days), it was very provocative. Having sniffed the story out, the police were bound to come down hard on those they perceived responsible.
The sand boys had been frustrated but the police were probably wondering what other ideas were up which sleeves. Reclaim The Streets, Critical Mass and similar events were a direct response to legislative changes designed to curtail demonstrations. Since official organisers would get into serious trouble in so many scenarios, people just abandoned any attempt at official organisation for anything. The resulting chaos was and is much harder for the police to cope with. Like the original Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, it was a classic knee-jerk law-making; arguably it created more problems than it solved. These days, the police have become a little used to the idea that we do not trouble ourselves with organising committees. Back then, they found our new methodology simply incredible. Their view seemed to be that the organisation had gone underground: organisers had become conspirators. Instead, an idea was launched and people made their own arrangements around that.
The police and the protesters continued to eye each other nervously. I borrowed a Legal Observer’s bib. Various people, none of whom I knew, urged me not to put it on. I didn’t know anyone there. I crossed the physical space between the two groups and spoke to the police officer in charge: Chief Inspector Streeter. I told him my name and address. I told him that I was about to start the Bar Vocational Course at the Inns of Court School of Law and asked him why the Legal Observers had been arrested. He declined to comment. I said that in the absence of any explanation as to why a Legal Observer should be arrested, I intended to become one there and then. I explained that I had borrowed a bib from a stranger. I suggested that if he wanted to arrest me, perhaps he could let me know. He said, “So long as you don’t play any part in the demonstration, you won’t be arrested.” I put the bib on and walked back.
The police moved to the other side of Western Road. The crowd exhorted itself to get the show on the road. We collectively tiptoed after the police. Just as we got to the kerb, someone shouted, “They’re not going to stop us!” Suddenly beach balls were being thrown in the air, the traffic was blocked and there was partying on the road.
It was a short lived party. The police lined up into ranks and advanced. West Street seemed to have been closed off for our benefit. Looking back now, I wonder whether the people who shouted that we were being allowed to take over West Street were in fact undercover officers. We were corralled down West Street. As we did the police at the bottom advanced towards us. Then the police appeared on both sides of us. The police on all sides pushed and shoved us into an increasingly small rectangle until there was only just room to turn on the spot. I didn’t know to call it a kettle then.
People were shouting and asking for more room. It got very ugly, very quickly. Pleas to leave were ignored. Between us and the police was a thin strip of space. It was as wide as the length of a copper’s arm. Anyone straying into this region was attacked by the police, physically. Realising that this was not going to end well, I decided to ask a police officer if I could leave. Hands by my side, I asked the nearest officer. His neighbouring colleague drew his truncheon and stabbed it into my chest repeatedly.
The standard issue truncheon had just been replaced. He stabbed me four or five times and only stopped when I pushed the tip of his weapon away. I said, “There’s no need for that, I only asked to leave. You could just say no.” Whatever was going through that man’s mind is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he was worried about being obliged to defend himself from having to articulate a response with his extendible rod? He raised it and tried to beat the top of my head with it! I caught the end of it in my hand and said, “What do you think you’re doing? If you can’t talk, you could just ignore me. There’s no need to try to kill me. You must know the risk of death or serious injury involved in hitting someone on the head?” As I said those words, we played an absurd version of unbreakable crackers. He yanked his end of the truncheon and I pulled back at the offensive end. When I let go, he knew it was because I had chosen to. He looked sheepish and put his weapon away. I asked him again if I could leave and he ignored me, avoiding eye contact.
One of his colleagues ordered me to move away. “Where am I supposed to go? You’ve left me no room to move.” He could see my point. There were people standing directly behind me and people behind them. At this point I felt someone tap me on the shoulder from behind. I turned around. A large furry microphone was pushed in my face. Next to the boom operator was a man holding a large video camera. A woman asked me if I wouldn’t mind being interviewed for French television. “Sure, I don’t have anything else to do.“
She asked me if I was hurt. I said no. Then she mentioned that they had seen the police hitting me with his truncheon. I said something about him not wanting to let me leave and go home. She pressed her point and asked, more insistently, that it must have hurt me. Although not keen to help the police at this point, I didn’t want to lie either so I said, “Oh no, it was nothing.” Her face was incredulous, as if she was annoyed that I hadn’t immediately complained of maltreatment by the heavy hand of authority. She pressed again, saying that I looked really badly hurt and I replied that I wasn’t, that there was nothing to worry about. She pointed to the blood running down my chin. Wiping my chin, I discovered that I there was blood on it. I felt the back of my mouth. Realising that this wasn’t too hygienic, I pulled my hand out and wiped it on my hankerchief, which I then wiped my lips with. It turned from white to red. The interviewer said something like, “Look, you are bleeding quite badly! You are hurt!” My reply must have reinforced every cultural stereotype possible about the British stiff upper lip: “I’m telling you, this blood has got nothing to do with anything. I’m not hurt.” Her face was complete confusion.
I realised that I could use the blood as a means to escape the inevitable fracas. I approached the police again. I pointed out that I was bleeding, took off my bib and asked to be allowed to attend hospital. That worked. On the way home, the anaesthetic wore off and the pain kicked in. Sitting in my kitchen at home, my Mum asked me what I’d got up to that afternoon. “Nothing much“, I replied. Then she told me that one of our neighbours had seen me on BBC South Today in the middle of a riot. Oh dear. The neighbour had related the whole incident to her. “Better not tell your Father“, was all she said.
Now that’s my personal recollection of the events on the day. Luckily, there were people taking a proper record of what actually happened. I’m the Legal Observer mentioned at 14:50 at that link. The following day there were extensive press reports, focussing in particular on the exceptionally high arrest rate. The police broke the law repeatedly that day. The demonstrators did not. Although the Human Rights Act had not yet been drafted, the UK was a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights: it was the first country to sign it and the last to legislate. The legislation made remedial action swifter and clarified the relationship between the Convention and all our other laws to some extent but it didn’t actually introduce any new rights. The police broke those rights over and again. Let me be completely objective about this: the policing was a bloody disgrace.
I knew no-one at the protest. I went back to my studies. I kept my newly acquired bib. Since then I’ve moved house over sixty times. I’ve given away all my possessions, lost stuff, sold stuff and been separated from stuff. I’ve treasured the bib. When I was completing my barristerial training in London I sometimes turned up at events like Critical Mass. I put my bib on and watched the police very very carefully. I would hear people say things like, “Who’s he? The other observers don’t know him.” Other people would note that a few words from me and the police would change their behaviour. A little. Normally Legal Observers have training to ensure they remain in role. I never did. Effectively, I acted as a freelance observer. I’m not pretending to have saved any days but I did contribute to keeping the peace on a few occasions. I wish I could say the same for the police. I’ve observed them breaking whatever laws they want until they heard me recording everything into a time stamped dictaphone.
At Occupy London the police attacked us on the first night. However, a combination of events kept them at bay after their initial foray. One was the fact that the City of London Police had little experience at dealing with civil disobedience. Another factor was that man of the cloth turfing them off the Cathedral steps first thing in the morning, creating the possibility of a political crisis between the City and the Church of England. There are more factors than I care to name in this essay but one of them was the fact that they knew that right from the start we had an excellent legal team. Once more I had turned up on my own and put my legal head to work. On the first night I recruited John Cooper QC (to advise me on behalf of Occupy London). I suggested warning them via twitter that there were children asleep in the tents and that they ought to read the Children Act before piling in. The tweet went out. A moment later, their lines pulled back. It could have been a coincidence, of course.
The biggest factor was almost certainly their knowledge that no matter how much they filmed and photographed us, we were capturing their every movement and streaming it directly to the world. Probably with better cameras than them. The name Ian Tomlinson was doubtless on every officer’s mind. His death was a tragedy. It was also part of a pattern. The police have form for injuring and killing people at protests. People they are supposed to protect. Previously, they got away with murder because they could cover up the evidence and we couldn’t collect it ourselves. There’s no point stopping people handing out leaflets explaining your rights on arrest any more because everyone has a video camera.
Back to Brighton. Sussex Police have recently developed a new approach to policing protests. They deploy protest liaison officers. We first saw them used when they turned out in force at Brighton Uncut‘s Never Mind The Jubilee Street Party in Churchill Square. Elsewhere in the town, large numbers of officers kept a close eye on a day trip to the seaside by the EDL. Afterwards, Sussex Police made attempts to discuss this new form of engagement with people interested in the protests, by talking to them via twitter. Some of us, myself included, tried to engage with them. Others rejected the approach out of hand. Others still were indifferent. After all, the police have a lot to prove. It is them who have to win trust, not the people.
Although there is a long way to go before this new initiative could be described as a turning point in the relationship between the police and people protesting their rights and their political views, we have also come a long way since 1996. The Brighton Uncut street party was just as unlawful as the ‘beach’ party, yet the police did not just pile in, beat anyone who dared to speak to them and arrest as many people as their cells could hold. Instead they talked to us. That looked like an improvement to me.
Unfortunately, after that the new look protest policing faltered. The protest liaison officers were next deployed at a demonstration by the SmashEDO campaign, which protested against the possibility of war with Iran on 4th June 2012. Sussex Police have been coy about the behaviour of the protest liaison officers on this occasion. It has become clear that they tried to mingle with the protesters and only left the crowd when the protesters mocked them so much that their continuing presence had become inflammatory. Having already discussed the new strategy with the police via twitter, shortly after that protest I asked them whether those reports were true. Instead of replying that they were waiting for reports to be filed and would answer later or admitting it or denying it, instead the police tried to duck the question. (10th paragraph at that link & screenshots of conversation below it.)
These people work for us! They are public servants. I’ve paid tax. I’ve paid their wages. Why they think that they should treat any enquiry much as a politician treats a journalistic question is baffling. I fear it reveals much about police culture. Close ranks, cover up and kill the story. When will they understand that these old tactics won’t work? We have video. We own the internet. The more intelligent approach would be to get straight to the point and admit the truth. Then the merits of the facts could be discussed.
Let’s park the issue of Sussex Police being unable or unwilling to just confirm the facts on the ground. The decision to deploy officers charged with engaging with protesters uninvited inside the protesters’ ranks must be categorised under “Undiplomatic”. There is a deep seated suspicion amongst many political activists that these officers are simply on an intelligence gathering mission. For my part, I suspect that even the police would realise this technique would be an utter waste of resources. Last year’s half a million plus requests to snoop on our communications was much more likely to bear fruit than donning a uniform and walking amongst us. Film is more useful than individual personal recollection. Undercover agents who are still allowed to rape their way around the activist community will certainly acquire more information than watching people wave donuts on sticks at you. The average plod may not be the brightest soul in the force but surely those further up the chain of command cannot have really intended these particular officers to gather intelligence? It’s much more likely that the decision to deploy them like that was a bungled attempt at public relations and the slowness to withdraw them a reflection on the reflexes of the command structure. After being pinned down on this issue, Sussex Police later implied to me that their officers had as much right to the public space as anyone else. That’s true but it isn’t the way to develop new community relations. It’s like the landlord turning up at your birthday party and telling you he owns the house.
Many local political activists point to the officers wearing the liaison bibs being the same people employed on more pernicious tasks. There’s not much mileage in that point. These liaison officers are not a completely separate unit from the rest of the police. They’re just performing a role on the day. Performing different roles is a feature of professional life. Rather than picking on the people involved, we should point out the problems with the new role in the hope that they can be ironed out.
It is early days still. The gap of understanding between the two sides is wide. There is too much distrust on both sides. There will always be some political activists who view the police as a front line in their battle for regime change. There will always be some police who regard anyone who isn’t shopping for retail therapy to be a troublemaker. In between, there are many who would like to find a better approach. The problem is that the police have all the power. The ball is in their court. My guess is that they get a few more chances to serve us properly but only a few. If they fail to get those right, this new initiative will crash. They’ve come a long way from mindlessly attacking everyone in sight but that’s happened because we have empowered ourselves. As Marx argued, a change in technology has ushered in a change in the relationship between the powerful and the weak. Therefore, the police don’t get any credit for abating their traditional methods. They need to win credit by backing off.
At Occupy London the City of London police won much sympathy with the protestors by keeping their distance. Sure, they walked through our camp but only in ones and twos and even then only occasionally. They stood back. I knew when they followed me through the streets because they weren’t that clever about it. I expected them to anyway. Often they followed me and other conspicuous people whilst others took on more important tasks, online. These days we don’t talk to the people we’re standing next to by using our voices. We use direct messages on twitter, off the record encrypted channels, the tor project and various other methods.
Brighton & Hove is now officially a City. It is run by the Green Party, which openly welcomes citizens’ asserting their democratic rights to protest. The City Council has explicitly stated that everyone has the right to protest and they expect the police to facilitate those protests. Thus the EDL was allowed to march under the cover of the so-called “March for England“, even though every member of the local administration is deeply opposed to everything they stand for. That event was bound to carry big risks of trouble. There were people determined to disrupt the march, themselves exercising their lawful right to a static demonstration without advance permission. There was trouble. Bottles were thrown at the racist EDL. Some EDL supporters attacked local people (myself included). The police had a complicated job to do that day and on the whole they managed it very well, which is why I have not pursued a complaint against them for failing to arrest the man who attacked me. They probably didn’t deploy sufficient numbers to cope with the predictable stress lines across town that day. No doubt lessons are being learnt for next year.
The point the police have to grasp is that it is not for them to control demonstrations, let alone become involved in them to any extent. Their job is to maintain the peace. Nothing more, nothing less. If a protest group doesn’t want to engage with them, there’s nothing they can do about it. Without any threat of violence, there’s no need whatsoever for more than half a dozen police officers. Two at the front, two at the back and one walking along either side. If they want to park greater numbers around the corner, to be ready for spontaneous trouble, fine. Barging in on a political demonstration which they cannot support is not engagement, it is incitement. If the police don’t understand this, they need to take a long hard look at themselves and their role in our society. We all know what it should be – to keep the peace, not to keep control.
Rather than try to stop political protests, the police should allow people to make their point and, if necessary, use their power to arrest people for a breach of the peace. Peaceful activists will not resist that type of arrest. Activists will make more impact by getting arrested for civil disobedience than for fighting. The police need to make a judgment call on when such arrests are justified. We can have the arguments in court later, rather than on the ground. If an activist is released, they should be allowed to move freely again. If the police lack the resources to deal with large numbers of protestors in this way, then they have a political argument with the government.
People must be able to talk to any police officer, without fearing violence. If there is a role for specific protest liaison officers, the police need to spell out how it differs from all other police officers. Having justified that distinction, it must be maintained cogently. Bibs on bobbies is meaningless unless there’s a properly understood role. At the present time, the purpose of the new role is far from clear. I’d like to see Sussex Police complete their journey from their nasty behaviour in the nineties, to transform themselves from being political tools to being the protectors of the peace. To promote the chances of their success, several sections of the activist community are giving them the benefit of the doubt, for now. The next outing of the new protest liaison officers will be watched very closely indeed. The pressure is on the police to behave like concerned citizens, not control freaks.
Beware of Paul Randle-Jolliffe if you seek legal advice: he is a woo merchant
Mr Randle-Jolliffe claims to be a direct descent of Saer de Quincy, a knight in the service of King William I of Scotland and 1st Earl of Winchester. Apparently this medieval fellow is 24 times his Great Grandfather. Leaving to one side the political issue of whether we are subjects of a monarchy or citizens of a democratic country, we are all entitled to issue proceedings in a court of law. This right is beyond dispute. Court proceedings are part of the fabric of our civil society. Everybody knows that they have the right to invoke the court’s jurisidiction to help them. Everyone, except Mr Randle-Jolliffe it would appear, because in the witness statement he submitted to the High Court supposedly in support of the recent encampment of protesters in London known as Occupy the London Stock Exchange (OccupyLSX), he relied on his relationship with Saer de Quincy to “make my claims of right“, arguing that “Saer de Quincy was one of the 23 Surety Barons of the Magna Carta…“.
Paul Randle-Jolliffe has worked for six years as a self-employed fellow operating a “Christian General Law Advocacy Service” (here’s his website) and as a McKenzie friend. He claims to have been involved in both civil and criminal cases in “local courts” and the High Court. One can only wonder precisely what he means by “local courts“. There are county courts, magistrates’ courts and crown courts and a range of other tribunals which all sit around the country. Mr Randle-Jolliffe is careful to avoid mention of whether or not he is paid for his work.
In England & Wales, anyone may represent themselves in any court proceedings but there are restrictions on who can represent other people. Being able to represent other people is known as a “right of audience”. Barristers have rights of audience in all courts. Solicitors have rights of audience in the lower courts but have to pass extra exams to obtain full rights of audience in all courts. A “McKenzie Friend” refers to those occasions when a court would allow an unqualified person to assist someone representing themself in court. A McKenzie Friend has no rights of audience but they are, with the judge’s permission, allowed to advise the litigant in person. Judicial permission is a matter of discretion and will be refused unless it is clear that the person cannot manage proceedings by themselves and cannot afford or otherwise obtain legal representation or advice.
After explaining his various charitable endeavours and religious beliefs, in the 13th paragraph of his witness statement, Randle-Jolliffe declares that a he:
Having introduced himself he declares that the Magna Carta is the:
This sort of talk is best described as a rhetorical flourish. It sounds good to the untrained ear and may be, particularly amongst the legally uneducated, persuasive of the idea that here is a man who knows his onions and can be relied upon. To anyone with any knowledge of law, history or modern politics it is plainly a collection of differing concepts all run together as if the rights won by our democratic martyrs were in fact invented in the thirteenth century. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were so-called because they were sentenced to hard labour in Australia for combining together in a trades union (free association). Free speech was a curiously confused concept in this country until the European Convention on Human Rights came into being. Practically speaking it was (and still is) subject to anyone’s ability to sue for defamation. If you are sued for defamation, the burden is on you to prove your exculpability, not on the person bringing the case! It is hard to square that off with an absolute right to free speech. It is highly questionable as to whether the Magna Carta was concerned with human rights at all. Simply, it was a contract between the barons and the monarch which governed their relationship. In the many centuries since then it has been modified to the point of being irrelevant to the modern law and quite right too because it did nothing to prevent the slave trade, the death penalty, corrupt elections and countless other medievalist wrongs aside.
In his 16th paragraph Randle-Jolliffe returns to his favoured theme of his baronial descent. Aside from the argument that after 20 generations everyone is pretty much related to everybody else, a key democratic principle is that birthright is irrelevant to rights under law. Clearly, everyone is equal under the law. Randle-Jolliffe is right to claim that our monarch is also subject to the law but omits to mention that a jury of her peers would be comprised of other members of the royal family. The word “peers” means people in the same social class. In medieval times society was divided into strata between which there was next to no movement. This arrangement is unacceptable in a democracy and demonstrably abandoned. Witness one working class man from Brixton becoming Prime Minister: John Major. In countries more democratic than the UK, the point becomes more obvious. In the USA, the head of state has to be elected. We all remember Bill Clinton being obliged by process of law to answer questions about whether he had lied under oath about being sucked off by one of his staff. Were the Queen to die tomorrow and Prince Charles ascend to the throne, we could not drag him into any type of recognisable legal forum to question him about his unconstitutional interference with government.
Randle-Jolliffe joined OccupyLSX on 4th November, 21 days after it had begun. That night he decided to return the following day to join in with what he could see was a “high purpose“. A tent was made available to him. His statement says,
I set that legal team up myself, having joined OccupyLSX on the first day (October 15th 2011). Although I did not permanently live on site, I spent many nights there and was in daily contact with those who were when I was away. I personally instructed John Cooper QC. I personally issued the first instructions to Karen Todnor, the solicitor who agreed to assist us on 16th November 2011. Coincidentally, I instructed Ms Todnor precisely because it was clear that it would be impossible to work with Randle-Jolliffe, whom I met for the first time on the same day, when the eviction legal team was three people strong. It may be that he believed that he was working with the eviction legal team before that date but the reality is that he was not.
In his 29th paragraph, Randle-Jolliffe confesses to having spent a month in a Benedictine community and points to parallels between that and OccupyLSX: a library, education, a democratic forum, a canteen, and an “open door” with a shelter team. He overlooks the clear differences: people sleeping in to whatever hour they feel like, the lack of unhesitating obedience to all things superior etc. It is a glib comparison. Unsatisfied with the Benedictine comparison he also compares OccupyLSX with the early Christian church, though luckily he doesn’t claim to have spent any time in that!
Randle-Jolliffe completely undermined the entire legal case which OccupyLSX rested its defence on by saying that the “camp is not a protest” and “cannot be called a protest” (paragraph 35). His description of it is an educational encampment, a place of refuge and a debating chamber, which he collectively terms an occupation. It is unclear why he doesn’t believe it was also a massive protest.
The statement itself is packed with evidential irregularities. The basic rules for a witness statement are that you can say what you witnessed yourself, you can say from whom you heard something and you can point to documentation which proves something you say. To be fair, he does refer to documents which prove his family tree but he does not exhibit (via the text of his statement) any documentation (which could have included letters, contemporaneous notes, photographs etc.,) relevant to the issues in the case. He doesn’t even date the various events he reports. A witness statement without dates is practically useless.
Instead he focussed on explaining his family tree and exhibited 36 pages of documents about that. Inexplicably, given the nature of the case in hand, he also produced a document he wrote himself about a private prosecution service he has created, which is willing to charge money for its ‘services’ (here is the website). It is 58 pages long and was distributed to a whole bunch of people including the Queen!
The statement is a muddle of evidence and legal submission. The purpose of a witness statement is to give evidence. It should not contain legal arguments – they are made in the pleadings to the court, in written skeleton arguments and orally by an advocate. Courts are used to litigants in person confusing these two aspects of a trial but here is a person who offers a service to others on the basis that he understands legal procedure, yet cannot follow even this simple division of roles. The eviction legal team called for statements of evidence to defend the eviction case being brought against OccupyLSX. OccupyLSX’s governing body agreed to be represented in court by the lawyers I recruited. It fell to the lawyers to make the legal submissions, not the witnesses. The roles were already properly established by the time Randle-Jolliffe joined the eviction legal team. As soon as he joined it, he became uncommunicative with the others in the team, with the result that, a short while later, we decided to exclude him from the team. Much later he put in an expenses claim for the money he had spent photocopying his family tree. The claim was refused by OccupyLSX’s finance team.
So far as the evidence that he did give was concerned, he concentrated on the social problems inside the camp but omitted to give any meaningful evidence which related to the actual issues in the case. The eviction case was brought by the City of London Corporation. Unsurprisingly, it was based on well established law which mainly related to obstruction of the highway, human rights and planning. Anyone defending such a case would need to rebut the evidence said to support the City’s case. Not Randle-Jolliffe! He didn’t directly address the main legal issues at all and, to the extent that his evidence trespasses on them his evidence is no more than a series of disordered bare assertions. Probably the biggest issue in the case was the extent to which the camp obstructed the highway. Randle-Jolliffe doesn’t discuss this issue at all.
He preferred to discuss ancient history, in particular the creation of the Magna Carta. Nothwithstanding the many paragraphs of his personal family tree, he announces that “we are ordinary members of the public“, “prepared to be beaten and even die…“. The notion that a modern English judge sitting in the High Court would be impressed by these melodramatic irrelevancies could only reside in the mind of a legal fantasist.
Without any documentary evidence to back him up on Randle-Jollifee insists that a “folkmoot” in 1236 AD was a general assembly similar to that governing OccupyLSX. Assuming for a moment that such events were relevant to the legal issues his witness statement was supposed to assist defending, he doesn’t produce a shred of evidence by way of proof for these claims. That others may know of them is neither here nor there because an English judge can only make decisions based on evidence. Claims that there was some kind of longstanding right to hold anarchic assemblies anywhere would have to be established by firm evidence. At the very least, one might expect reference to and the production of histories written by eminent historians. Randle-Jolliffe doesn’t trouble himself with them. He’s out on a limb, asserting the ancient “folkmoot” led to a “witenagemot” which in turn led to the modern parliament and court system.
None of that was relevant to the actual case brought by the City. He could have brought a claim of his own, seeking perhaps a declaration that the City was obliged to allow the camp to persist, to ventilate his issues in a court of law. That might have been heard at the same time as the case brought by the City against OccupyLSX. More likely it would have been thrown out of court as meaningless nonsense, which explains why Randle-Jolliffe has piggybacked his bizarre beliefs onto OccupyLSX. One wonders how many goblets of mead he consumed whilst drafting his historical account, to which he devotes 23 paragraphs before declaring that
The prospect of a court, as unruly as that required to comprehend Randle-Jolliffe, hearing prosecutions brought by the likes of him is truly frightening. It would be trial by mob rule, with romanticism ruling over reality. Weighing of evidence would go out the window.
Isaiah Berlin’s famous put down that anyone who claimed to have read all of St Augustine‘s works was a liar springs to mind when reading through Randle-Jolliffe’s statement. It jumps about much like some volumes of Augustine’s City of God. Being so difficult to coherently digest, it fails another basic requirement of a witness statement – that the facts described inside it are set out in a logical order. On my first reading of it, I quit on the 65th paragraph because I was laughing too hard.
At paragraph 100, Randle-Jolliffe declares that section 13 of the 1215 Magna Carta enshrined the right to hold a folk moot in the City of London. He claims that this is one of three clauses which are still on the statute books. Paragraph 105 simply asks, “Is the seizure of castles and palaces needed?” The nub of this belief system is summed up in paragraph 106:
No it isn’t. There’s nothing perpetual about any law. All of it can be changed and much of it has. Despite declining the chance to be a litigant in person in the OccupyLSX case, Randle-Jolliffe tried to be an appellant. The judges in the Court of Appeal humoured him with a brief hearing. Consequently, his case was heard. It wasn’t just dismissed, it was rubbished. Here’s my commentary on and full text of the Appeal Judgment in the OccupyLSX case. The Court of Appeal describe Randle-Jolliffe’s grounds of appeal as “esoteric”, using “a concept unknown to the law”, having “no bearing in the arguments in this case”, “simply wrong” and including a point which the Court’s Judges “do not understand”.
Unlike the rest of us protesters, who were concerned about the effects of predatory corporatism, inequality and other general political issues, Randle-Jolliffe gives his personal motivation for joining OccupyLSX as being his loss of contact with his son, his eviction by Isle of Wight Council, his general anger at the family courts and includes various side claims on South Africa’s opinion of the UK’s family law. He is obsessed with the concept of “remedy“. Not getting what you want does not mean that no “remedy” is available, it just means that a court didn’t agree with you.
When we asked people to give statements to help OccupyLSX to defend itself, we directed them to focus their evidence on whether the tents were necessary for the protest. Aside from undermining our human rights defence by his claim that the camp was not a protest, Randle-Jolliffe devoted only 14 out of 175 paragraphs of his statement to the issue of the tents.
13 of those 14 paragraphs contained a single sentence each. The first two sentences cover the sensible point that the OccupyLSX community could not function in many ways without the tents because it contained many people from outside London. Having covered that point he immediately reverted to irrelevant issues: the church and the lack of democratic authority of the Lord Mayor of London (at best a legal issue and thus inappropriate for the statement). He asks a couple of questions without attempting to supply any answers and declares:
Then he immediately returns to his main theme, that there is some sort of viable comparison between the events leading up the Magna Carta and the occupation in St Paul’s.
Here is a man who pretends to know some law. If he knew anything at all about the rules of evidence and procedure, he would understand that there was no place for his various arguments in a statement of fact. Whatever the merits of the comparison he wishes to draw between the historically significant events which led to the Magna Carta and OccupyLSX, the court did not have the power to grant “a licence“. He doesn’t appear to understand the most basic tenets of our common law system. Judges can only entertain or dismiss claims brought by the parties. They do not invent solutions of their own. OccupyLSX never asked for a licence. It simply wasn’t an issue in the case.
Anyone considering asking Randle-Jolliffe to advise them about legal proceedings, might want to first think about whether they can rely on someone whose grip on basic the rules of procedure and evidence is so badly flawed. They might also question whether they should trust someone who thought it useful to declare, as he did at paragraph 107:
Presumably he meant ‘deceased’? Whichever his intended meaning, this sentence is obviously nonsense. The plain fact is that here is someone motivated by his own private grievances who claims to be an experienced lay lawyer yet who has not the slightest grip on either the basic distinction between evidence and argument or anything that was relevant to the case in hand. I hope, for his sake, that he has not been charging money for advice.
If you want legal advice, it can be expensive. There are the Citizen’s Advice Bureaux and Law Centres which may be able to help for free. If you are on your own there is a certain amount of good advice available online. I have written my own guides on how to be a good witness, how to cross-examine like an expert and how to read and organise a bundle of evidence. They may prove useful to you. Despite all the disadvantages a litigant in person faces, you’d be better off alone than taking advice from Paul Randle-Jolliffe.
I’ve informed Paul Randle-Jolliffe that I have published this post and given him a right of reply, subject to my continued commentary.
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Posted in Civil Litigation, England & Wales, Evidence, Freeman Cult, Freeman on the Land movement, John Cooper QC, Law, Legal Commentary, Legal Woo, Occupy London Stock Exchange, Paul Randle-Jolliffe, Protests, Witnesses