BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN AND JAMIE FOSTER

It is a peculiar truth of the modern age that the institutions we assume to be most solid—the pillars of the state—are often the most vulnerable to decay. We imagine the law as a kind of granite edifice, blindfolded and impartial, weighing evidence in her scales without fear or favour. The reality, as any honest observer of recent history can attest, is far more precarious. The law is not a monument but a process, and its integrity depends not on the grandeur of its courtrooms, but on the fragile, human virtue of independence. To compromise that is not to reform the system; it is to replace justice with power, and to substitute the court for the factory.

The case of Rex v. Stephen Lennon, detailed in the dry, procedural language of a magistrate’s judgment, is a small but perfect specimen of this principle in action. On the surface, it is a minor matter: a man at a border, refusing to surrender his telephone PIN, charged under anti-terrorism laws. Yet beneath this surface lies the essential struggle between the individual and the administrative state.

The police officers, armed with the sweeping powers of Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, detained Mr Lennon. Their stated reasons were the car he drove, his last-minute travel plans, his alleged “evasiveness.” But the judgment meticulously unpicks these justifications, revealing the rotten core. The officer, PC Thorogood, identified Mr Lennon— ‘Tommy Robinson’, a man with known political associations—almost immediately. The “examination” was, in the judge’s finding, likely driven by “what you stood for and your beliefs.” In short, the man was stopped not for what he might have done, but for who he was.

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This is the first and most obvious product of a justice system losing its independence: it becomes a tool for discrimination. The “protected characteristic” of political belief, as the judge notes, became a “significant influence” on the officer’s decision. Without an independent judiciary to scrutinise this action, to demand to know what questions were actually asked, and to declare the stop unlawful, the power of the state becomes arbitrary. It is no longer a power exercised under the law, but a power exercised upon the citizen. The judge, in this case, acted as a crucial circuit-breaker. He looked at the vague, unremembered testimony of the officers and concluded that the prosecution had not proved the absence of unlawful discrimination. He refused to convict. This is not a verdict on Mr Lennon’s character, but a verdict on the state’s conduct. It is the system checking itself.

Ian Mitchell, in his brilliant and prescient work The Justice Factory, diagnosed this very sickness as it took hold in nationalist Scotland. He described a system where the legal apparatus risked becoming an annex of political project, where the goal was not truth, but conformity. The “Factory” of the title is a chilling metaphor for a justice system repurposed. Its product is not justice, but verdicts. Its raw materials are not facts and evidence, but suspects and political imperatives. Its workers—judges, prosecutors, police—are no longer craftsmen exercising independent judgment, but cogs in a machine, their function to process, to categorise, to output a predetermined result that serves the ideology of the managers.

The leftist radicals have always viewed an independent judiciary with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. To them, the law is not a shield for the individual, but a weapon for the collective. The idea of a judge standing between the state and a citizen—especially one whose views are deplorable to the prevailing orthodoxy—is an affront to their worldview. They see it as an obstacle to “progress,” a relic of a bourgeois society that must be swept away to make room for a more “equitable” system. What they mean by “equitable” is a system where outcomes are guaranteed, where the right people are convicted and the right people are exonerated, based not on evidence, but on identity and political alignment.

The abolition of an independent court system does not happen with a single blow. It is a death by a thousand cuts. It begins with the intimidation of judges in the press, labelled “enemies of the people” for doing their job. It continues with the creation of vast, vague laws—like Schedule 7—that grant officials immense discretionary power, making the citizen’s liberty contingent on the mood of a constable. It is advanced by the erosion of legal aid, ensuring that only the state has the resources to fight a prolonged battle. And it is cemented when the judiciary itself is packed with placemen and women, whose loyalty is to the regime, not to the law. The final stage is the Justice Factory, humming with efficiency, where dissent is processed as terrorism, where opposition is classified as a hate crime, and where the verdict is always known before the trial begins.

The danger is not merely that the wrong person might be occasionally convicted. The danger is that the very concept of objective truth is abolished. In R v. Stephen Lennon, the judge’s power lay in his insistence on facts. What questions were asked? When was the decision made? What was the true and dominant purpose? The officers could not say. Their evidence was a fog of forgetfulness and inconsistency. An obedient judge, a factory-floor supervisor, would have accepted the state’s narrative and stamped the case “approved.” An independent one looked into the fog and declared that he could not see clearly enough to condemn a man. He upheld the principle that it is better for a hundred guilty men to go free than for the state to punish one arbitrarily.

To surrender this is to surrender everything. It is to accept that might makes right, that the individual is nothing before the collective will, and that the law is merely the command of the powerful. It is to replace the blindfolded lady with the hanging judge, and the hall of justice with the factory whose smokestacks darken the sky, and whose products are fear, silence, and servitude. The case of Stephen Lennon is a small skirmish in a long war. The judgment is a piece of ground held, for now, against the factory and its managers. Its continued defence is the duty of every person who prefers the difficult, imperfect search for truth to the efficient, certain production of lies.

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Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024). Jamie Foster – a former Director of The Countryside Alliance – has a background as a country solicitor and is Country Squire’s Chief Writer. He built a reputation through defending high profile cases of alleged illegal hunting, almost invariably successfully.