Re-Joyce – No By Election.
MP Eric Joyce was spared jail today for beating up four politicians while drunk but he said that he was “deeply apologetic” for his actions.
He swore at officers after going berserk and headbutting Tory MP Stuart Andrew and councillor Ben Maney. Mr Joyce also attacked Tory councillor Luke Mackenzie before turning on Labour whip Phillip Wilson.
Westminster Magistrates Court fined him £3,000 and ordered him to pay £1,400 to victims after he entered early guilty pleas.
Mr Joyce was also given a 12-month community order – banning him from entering pubs and licensed premises for three months – and imposed with a curfew order from Friday to Sunday.
Mortifying. Especially for the electorate.
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1
March 9, 2012 at 16:22 -
That fine is actually quite steep for the offence.
I’m not sure mortification is fair, I mean the man clearly needs some help, therapy or something. I’m sure the good people of Falkirk had no idea, and also, I hear up until this he was a not bad constituency politician.
In any case, if you found yourself in a bar with those listed above, could you keep your hands to yourself?
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2
March 9, 2012 at 16:45 -
Actually Paul, I was sitting here contemplating that 4,000 grand odd wasn’t an unmanageable sum for us to raise to pay the fine of someone who head butted four politicians….I just couldn’t make my mind up which four….
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5
March 10, 2012 at 11:42 -
I here a rumour he is going to pay the fine from Parliamentary expenses. It was after all justified to use expenses for fighting the Tories.
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6
March 9, 2012 at 16:30 -
His community order begs a couple of questions:
1) Does each drinking establishment within the Palace of Westminster have a separate licence or is it one licence for the entire building? If the latter then he would be unable to attend his place of (alleged) work. (This assumes that our lords and masters haven’t exempted their bars from licencing).
2) Does this order even apply within the Palace?
Anyone know the answers?
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7
March 9, 2012 at 20:50 -
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find they’d exempted themselves – just like they did with the smoking ban.
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8
March 10, 2012 at 18:31 -
According to the Licensing Act 2003 the following premises are not required to have a licence for the sale of alcohol, the provision of regulated entertainment or the provision of late night refreshment:
an aircraft, hovercraft or railway vehicle engaged in a journey
a vessel engaged on an international journey
an approved wharf at a designated port or hoverport
a royal palace
a premises permanently or temporarily occupied by the armed forces of the crown at the time the activity takes place
any premises in respect of which a certificate has been issued by a Minister of the Crown on the grounds of national security.The Houses of Parliament aka Palace of Westminster is a royal palace.
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9
March 9, 2012 at 16:48 -
This low life scum gets off with a fine and costs he can easily afford and Robert Green (the Hollie Grieg case) gets twelve months for handing out leaflets – interpreted by Rothschild’s Judiciary (The Crown) as a breach of the peace.
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10
March 9, 2012 at 16:52 -
11
March 9, 2012 at 21:16 -
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12
March 9, 2012 at 21:52 -
Do some research before you come on here making yourself look an ignorant idiot.
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18
March 10, 2012 at 20:28 -
@Charles: There is no correlation between the two events, other than that Eric Joyce and Hollie Greig are from Scotland. Whilst I laud the principled stance of Robert Green, he did rather ask to get a dose of jail by defying the courts in Scotland… Not a very wise move in the circumstances of the case and given the serious nature of his allegations.
Green has chosen to involve himself in the Hollie Greig case and I am sure that certain persons view him as nothing more than a man looking for a cause to fight for, a troublemaker with an agenda, if you will.
One simply cannot act as he did and expect anything less.
By contrast, Joyce was extremely unlikely, given the nature of the offences – charged as four common assaults (although I accept that they were more ABH) to get a term of imprisonment, given his immediate guilty plea and, undoubtedly, the silken words of a highly paid solicitor/barrister on hand to make a heartfelt plea in mitigation.
I don’t like it any more than you do, but that seems to be the way of things.
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19
March 9, 2012 at 18:40 -
Who handed down the injunction? I’ll tell you, the same corrupt, rotten and stinking court system that let off the above mentioned scum low life; and the very same corrupt stinking rotten court system that regularly hands out light sentences or no sentences at all, for paedophiles.
Unfortunately, Robert Green, like yourself, still thinks justice is obtainable in this vile system, which I have proven through my own experiences, is definitely not the case.
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20
March 9, 2012 at 18:55 -
Given the intermediacy of the offence, and the fact that he made an early guilty plea, I think the sentence is a fair one. However, a few points:
– It does seem vaguely ridiculous that he still keeps his job as an MP. In any other job, conviction of a criminal offence would result in immediate dismissal;
– Would the same sentence have been applied if he were not an MP? I suspect not. If an ordinary member of the public had done the same, they would probably have received a short jail sentence.This just serves to highlight the disconnect between the political classes and the general public, and the low confidence the latter have in our unaccountable judicial system.
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21
March 9, 2012 at 19:11 -
@tangentreality It is only an unaccountable judicial system because its officers are not officers of Her Majesty but rather officers of the Temple Inns of the Square Mile or the Bar Association – Rothschild’s crown not the real crown.
All judges swear a secret oath to The Bar in The City and they operate under that oath, not their PUBLIC OATH of Office to Her Majesty.
There is always a conflict of interest in their non-courts.
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24
March 9, 2012 at 19:15 -
Of course he won’t give up his job, he stands to lose a great deal of money if he does. Saw some of his constituents interviewed and they seem to think he should stand down too, I am sure in any other line of work he would have been fired. MPs are a law unto themselves, who else get resettlement money no matter what they have done eg Jaqui Smith etc.
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25
March 9, 2012 at 20:02 -
What would have happened to Wayne or Waynetta Slobb, had they carried out this same attack? Would they hae been let off with a fine and payments of damages to the victims? The magistrate was clearly biased in favour of the political class and should be hanged, or at the very least removed from the bench, for his bias. Joyce is clearly not fit to be allowed into the company of others without restraint. At the very least, if he did have psychological problems and wasn’t just binge drinking for the sheer hell of it, he should have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. And if not he should have had a chance to meet with a nicer class of person in Pentonville or Wormwood Scrubs.
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26
March 9, 2012 at 20:52 -
Sadly, given our appallingly lax justice system, I think yes – Wayne or Waynetta would walk too.
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27
March 9, 2012 at 21:20 -
If Wayne or Waynetta held their hands up and said, “Fair cop, guv”, then yes, they’d probably get the same. The more likely scenario is that Wayne or Waynetta would plead Not Guilty on the grounds of anything they or their lawyers could think of.
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28
March 9, 2012 at 21:55 -
What does it matter, they’re nearly all corrupt anyway. The whole political system is corrupt and needs sweeping away. Democracy is a hoax.
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29
March 9, 2012 at 22:06 -
In my experience, this is quite a heavy punishment for a first time offender (regardless of what the statue books say – a previous conviction for drink driving – deemed to be irrelevant – probably). I was suprised that he was only charged with for counts of common assault, given the fact that he headbutted one victim, the intent alone should surely have prompted a more serious charge, but the good old CPS long ago gave up actually applying the law by its strict interpretation alone. He also gained the maximum benefit from an early guilty plea.
It is fairly clear that Joyce has a drink/anger management problem, which he alluded to outside court. He has, reportedly, also been ‘dipping his wick’ into a 17 year old … dirty lucky sod, some might say. A man with many demons I feel.
Joyce is taking advantage of the system, to stay as an MP and milk the job for every penny he can before he retires at the next General Election – he is a dead duck from then and, given his extraordinaly high expenses claims – Joyce was the first MP, reportedly, to claim more than £1 million cumulatively in expenses – it would be suprising indeed if he chose to do the honourable thing now, in the aftermath of this incident. He cannot be booted out, unfortunately, and I imagine he has a sufficiently thick skin to ‘make hay while the sun shines’ and tough it out, while keeping his snout firmly in the trough… What a diamond, the people of Falkirk have in their MP…
I wondered, however, that, if it is actually true and the people of Scotland do indeed spend a great deal of their evenings engaged as Joyce was engaged on that fateful night, then perhaps his reputation amongst them…”gae on son, stick the heid in, youse a braw wee fighter so y’are” might strike a chord, come election time and consequently, we may not have heard the last of Eric Joyce, ‘Honorable’ “Member” for Falkirk West.
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31
March 10, 2012 at 06:59 -
I fail, like others, to understand why he was not charged with ABH/GBH. Common Assault can be merely someone looking at you in a manner to cause you to fear bodily harm and is surely not appropriate for ‘head-butting’.
I have a feeling that the man on the Clapham omnibus would now be contemplating his first trip to the prison showers.
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32
March 10, 2012 at 08:10 -
The landlady will be well aware of the Licensing Act 2003.
Presumably the licensee of this disorderly bar is Speaker Bercow, can we then expect that the Licensing Authority will be fulfilling their duty by interviewing the licensee? Some questions need to be asked, related to :
4. General duties of licensing authorities
(1)A licensing authority must carry out its functions under this Act (“licensing functions”) with a view to promoting the licensing objectives.
(2)The licensing objectives are—
(a)the prevention of crime and disorder;
(b)public safety;
(c)the prevention of public nuisance; and
(d)the protection of children from harm.140. Allowing disorderly conduct on licensed premises etc.
(1)A person to whom subsection (2) applies commits an offence if he knowingly allows disorderly conduct on relevant premises.
(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine
141Sale of alcohol to a person who is drunk
(1)A person to whom subsection (2) applies commits an offence if, on relevant premises, he knowingly—
(a)sells or attempts to sell alcohol to a person who is drunk, or
(b)allows alcohol to be sold to such a person.
(4)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fineA diligent licensing authority would also be conducting a reveiw of the license.
We cannot allow these rowdy bars to continue business especially in the run-up to the Olympics, what would the visitors think?
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