Ezra Levant attended Tommy Robinson’s April 11th Court of Appeal hearing, where the activist—jailed for 18 months (nine in solitary at HMP Woodhill, a high-security prison)—faced a three-judge panel including the Lady Chief Justice. New evidence, like a disputed 39-page PTSD/ADHD report, failed to sway judges, who may take weeks to decide. Robinson’s refusal to remove his viral Twitter video and clashes with prison governor Nicola Marfleet over "DEI Affirmative Action" accusations underscore systemic bias, yet his July release looms. Levant contrasts Robinson’s plight with the BBC’s £3B taxpayer funding while warning of Canada’s potential Liberal resurgence under Mark Carney, questioning poll accuracy. The episode reveals how legal and media power structures weaponize contempt charges against dissenters, leaving justice elusive. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the latest from Tommy Robinson's legal battles for freedom of speech.
It's April 11th, and this is C.S. from the Vance Show.
shame on you you sensorious bug hi everybody As you can see, I'm back in the United Kingdom.
You can tell by all those red double-decker buses.
I'm in a neighborhood called the Strand, which is in central London.
It's a lovely tourist spot, but it's also where the royal courts of justice are, including the Court of Appeal.
It's a great location.
I'm going to turn around a little bit, and you can see that tower back there.
That's actually Trafalgar Square, a great historic square in the UK.
That's actually where the Canadian High Commission is.
I'm not here for tourism, though.
I'm here because I believe it is my duty every time Tommy Robinson has a court case to go to that court case, to do my best to live tweet it in real time for Tommy's many fans and supporters and allies, but also to mark what's happening to make sure that the hateful mainstream media, which despises Tommy, does not get to write the official history of it.
And over the years, most of the time, I'm the only independent journalist in the room.
The rest are government journalists, regime journalists, from left-wing ideological newspapers like The Guardian or from the atrocious BBC, which if you can believe it, is actually worse than Canada's CBC.
Today I was heartened.
I'm speaking to you in the afternoon after the hearing is over.
Today I was heartened to see about four other citizen journalists at the Court of Appeal.
And to my delight, they were allowed to sit in the press tables and use their laptops, which again, that's not how it was back in the day when Rebel News was trailblazing.
Now that's perhaps just these judges didn't mind, but other judges have been very harsh on citizen journalists.
So that was some good news.
I'm going to now play for you a series of videos I made, starting from when I left Ottawa, actually.
I flew through Ottawa because that was a better flight.
I had to get here really early because the traffic in London is really crazy.
So I flew on an early flight, which got in at 6.30 a.m.
And I did that because getting into London can actually sometimes take two full hours from the airport.
So here is a series of my reports.
And let me just say this before I go.
Sometimes Canadians say, Ezra, what are you doing caring about Tommy Robinson so much?
Is it just because he's your friend?
That is obviously part of it.
And he's an alumnus of Rebel News.
As you may recall, he was really our first overseas talent working in the UK.
But I do it because for the same reason I occasionally go to Ireland to cover their migrant crisis.
Or that we sometimes go to France, like for example when Marseille had riots.
Because the themes that we deal with in Canada, mass migration, the Islamification of the public square, these are themes and issues around the world that are often more progressed in foreign lands than in our own country.
And my belief is by watching and reporting and seeing what happens in places like Marseille or London or Sweden even, Amsterdam, we can get a premonition of what's coming for us.
Let me throw to one quick stat.
And I think I referred to this in another video.
The Times of London, very prestigious, some would say the most prestigious newspaper in the UK, published a report last week that on any given day, on average, police arrest 30 Brits for a social media post that's, quote, offensive.
30 a day.
That's a stun.
It's thousands a year.
I really think that that number is higher than the number of arrests that Vladimir Putin makes in the Russian Federation for politically offensive tweets.
Tommy Robinson's Appeal00:12:28
I mean, I don't have any way of proving that, but I just think if there were 30 arrests a day in Russia of a political nature, I think we would hear about it because we hear about Russian dissidents.
30 a day in the UK.
I wonder what the number is in Canada.
All right, without further ado, here's my videos of the day.
Oh, hi everybody.
Edge Levant here.
I'm in Ottawa, Canada, about to get on that enormous jet behind me to fly to London because tomorrow Tommy Robinson is having an appeal of his sentence.
A couple weeks ago, he had what's called a judicial review of the manner in which he is being held in prison.
Unfortunately, that judicial review was rejected.
He will remain in solitary confinement for the rest of his term.
It was an 18-month sentence.
He may be released after nine months, but that's still an atrociously long time to spend in solitary confinement.
And I dare say it was not on the mind of the judge who sentenced him that it would be served in solitary.
Of course not.
No one serves nine months in solitary confinement other than perhaps Julian Assange.
So tomorrow will be an appeal of the sentence.
Not that he was found in contempt.
Tommy actually pled guilty to that.
This was for publishing the Twitter video that is pinned to the top of his Twitter page, a video that's now been seen well over 150 million times.
What this is tomorrow is an appeal before a three-panel judge chaired by no one less than the lady chief justice for England and Wales.
I think I got her title right.
The most senior judge in the UK, basically, and two other judges will be hearing Tommy's appeal.
So you gotta admit they're taking it very seriously.
Or you could say that it's a stitch up, or you could say if anyone would have the political power to reduce his sentence, it would be these top judges.
I'll be there live tweeting.
Basically, that means I sit in the courtroom with my laptop open, and I try and type as fast as I can, as accurately as I can, what's going on.
Because as you know, there's no video cameras allowed in court.
So my stenography is the way to get the word out.
Last time I was there, literally millions of people saw what I did.
So I know some people find it valuable.
There will, of course, be regime media journalists there.
Last time I sat next to a reporter from The Guardian, and across from me was the most despicable journalist in England, Dominique Cassiani, who works for the state broadcaster, the BBC, just an atrocious man.
I do not trust any British mainstream media to report honestly on Tommy's case.
There are a few citizen journalists who will likely show up.
I look forward to seeing some of them.
But I take it upon myself to do, I think, the most comprehensive live tweeting, because I'm a fast typist is really the reason why.
Plus, I am formerly a lawyer, so I have some legal training.
I understand some of the terminology.
Let me give you an example of one of the things I'm going to look out for.
I mean, here's a crazy thing that goes to just how political Tommy's incarceration is.
As you know, he's being put in solitary confinement.
So that's 16 cells have been emptied around his so that no other prisoners can come near him.
So there's Tommy's cell plus 16 other cells.
And now Tommy has earned the right to do work outside of his own cell.
He's like painting things.
So they've emptied a further eight cells so he doesn't come into contact anyone.
They keep him in solitary confinement, but just so he doesn't go loopy, I guess they're letting him paint things, but that's still in solitary.
But what's my point?
To keep Tommy Robinson incarcerated in the United Kingdom takes 25 jail cells.
Now, as you may know, the United Kingdom's prisons are overflowing.
So they have released 25 other prisoners to make way for Tommy Robinson.
And I say again, HMP Woodhill, the prison, Woodhill Prison, is a very serious, high-security prison where there are murderers, where there are terrorists.
These are not gentle people.
Tommy alone is there for what's called a civil conviction.
Putting up a video on Twitter is not a criminal act.
It's just defying a court order.
I guess it would be like not paying your traffic tickets.
It's not a crime in itself.
So a civil prisoner is being put in a high-security prison and 25 other violent criminals are released just so that Kiers Starmer can keep him in prison.
We'll see what happens.
I got to tell you, appeals are always a long shot.
In my country of Canada, two-thirds of appeals fail.
And at the Supreme Court level, 90% don't even get heard.
So it is an uphill battle, but I am familiar now with the King's Counsel, the barrister who will be leading Tommy's team.
And if anyone can do it, he can.
Aleister Williamson, I really admire him.
And then there's the team of solicitors that work with the barristers in the UK.
Those are different species of lawyers.
Anyways, I'm going to make use of the time on the plane.
I'm going to review the materials so when I go into court, I'm sort of smart and briefed on things.
I will live tweet as much as I can.
And during breaks, I don't know exactly how long it's going to go.
I'll make little videos.
So you can follow it all on Twitter.
And tomorrow I'll be using the website TommyReports.com.
Now, by the way, I'm flying economy class to get over there.
I have one night hotel in a fairly reasonable hotel, but still between the flight and the taxis and the hotels, probably going to set me back over a thousand Canadian dollars over 500 pounds.
If you can chip in to help get me over there, please do.
You can do that at TommyReports.com.
The reason I feel it's necessary to come all the way from Canada is what I said at the outset.
I simply don't trust the Guardian or the BBC or the rest of the regime media over there to cover it fairly.
I'm not even looking for them to be pro-Tommy.
Can they just be accurate?
Until that happens, I'm going to keep coming back over to the UK.
So if you can help me out, go to tommyreports.com.
And I'll see you tomorrow at the Royal Courts of Justice.
I understand things will be getting underway at 10.30 a.m. UK time.
I'll be there as early.
That's why I'm taking the special flight.
It lands very early so I won't get stuck in traffic from Heathrow to downtown.
All right, I'll see you tomorrow.
Thanks for your support.
We've got to get Tommy out of there and we failed with the judicial review.
Hopefully we'll succeed with this appeal and if not we'll keep on fighting.
Thanks very much.
Oh, hi, everybody.
I'm a bit bleary-eyed.
I just got off the overnight flight from Canada, landed at Heathrow Airport, about to hop in a cab and get to the city center as quick as possible, where at around 10.30 a.m. today, Tommy Robinson will face the Court of Appeal that's chaired actually by the Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales.
That's her official title.
Another way of saying literally the top judge in the country.
He's appealing his sentence.
His sentence that gave him 18 months in prison.
He'll serve nine of that in solitary confinement.
He originally had a judicial review that was rejected to change the way that he is being held.
He's being held in solitary, which is akin to torture.
This time he's challenging the sentence itself as opposed to how the prison meets out the sentence.
It's an uphill battle.
Appeals always are.
And it's safe to say that Tommy Robinson is an enemy of the state.
I don't know if he can even get justice in courts anymore, but he has a top king's counsel as his barrister, Aleister Williamson, who has actually succeeded for Tommy before when Tommy was exiled from the city of London by some rogue cop.
Williamson had that smacked away.
So there is some hope, but it's an uphill battle.
I'll be there to live tweet the proceedings.
That is, to write on my Twitter account as fast as possible what happens, and I'll have little breaks when the court is on a break.
I'll go outside and I'll film a video.
I'll put all of that up on the website, TommyReports.com.
That's where you can see all my reports about Tommy Robinson.
The reason I do this insane night flight to London every few months, it's such a long journey.
It's seven hours in the air, an hour on each side for taxis, is because I believe that Tommy Robinson, not only does he not get a fair shake in court, but he definitely does not get a fair shake in the court of public opinion.
That is, the journalists who cover his case are extremely partisan and frankly hate him.
And they'll tell you that.
I mean, they'll absolutely tell you that.
And the odd journalist who may be sympathetic to Tommy Robinson, his editors or publishers correct him quite quickly.
So the fact that I'm from out of the country is actually a key reason why I feel I can write about the case independently because I'm not subject to the kind of peer pressure that regime journalists in the UK are.
All right, I better get going downtown because traffic in London is insane.
Follow me on my Twitter account, which is simply my name, Ezra Levant, or at TommyReports.com.
By the way, you can help me cover my flight.
Unlike the BBC, I don't get £3 billion a year extracted from British taxpayers.
So if you can help me crowdfund that, you can do that right there on the website, TommyReports.com.
Thanks very much.
Ezra Levant here, as you can see by the incredible architecture behind me, I'm just going to rotate a bit.
I'm at the Royal Courts of Justice in a neighborhood of central London called the Strand.
It's absolutely one of my favorite places in the whole country.
But I'm here not for tourism.
I'm here to cover Tommy Robinson's appeal at the Court of Appeal.
And in about one hour's time behind me, that appeal will start in front of the Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales.
That's the official title of the top judge of a three-judge panel.
The hearing today is an appeal of Tommy Robinson's sentence for contempt of court.
You might recall that last year, Tommy Robinson was convicted.
In fact, he pled guilty of publishing a video to Twitter, which remains on his Twitter account to this day.
It's his pinned tweet.
It's a documentary film Tommy made about a particular case in the public interest.
A judge said, Tommy Robinson, don't you publish that?
And Tommy Robinson did.
So there really wasn't much of a case.
Tommy pled guilty to it.
And in fact, he traveled back from Spain to the UK to meet his fate.
He did not try and avoid it.
Tommy was given the absolute maximum sentence allowed under law.
And atrociously and to the discredit of the United Kingdom, he has been serving it in solitary confinement, which is clearly against all legal norms.
A few weeks ago, Tommy Robinson had a judicial review of his prison treatment.
It was not successful.
Today is different in that it is challenging the sentence itself, challenging, it was basically a 24-month sentence, but there are some calculations that are standard that take it down to 18 months, and typically a prisoner is released after half that.
But still, a nine-month prison actual custodial term done in solitary confinement is actually a new record.
Tommy Robinson is the first journalist in nearly 100 years to be jailed for contempt of court, and he has received the maximum sentence.
It really is an astonishing case, and it reminds me of when the Prime Minister here, Keir Starmer, met with JD Vance and Donald Trump in the White House, and Vice President Vance raised the issue of freedom of the press and freedom of speech and free expression here in the UK.
And Keir Starmer babbled and bumbled a bit about how precious it was.
Tommy Robinson's Sentencing Appeal00:12:17
Sounds like he was caught off guard, but cases like Tommy Robinson's are what I think is motivating the United States to take great concern and to, in fact, link freedom of expression with the proposed free trade deal.
I should say that the Times of London had an article just a week or so ago that reported that every single day in the United Kingdom, there are 30 people arrested for what they say on social media.
Let me say that again.
Every single day, 30 people in this country are arrested for some tweet or Facebook post.
I don't have the facts from the Russian Federation, but it would not surprise me if the numbers here in the UK were actually greater than under Vladimir Putin's Russia.
I just can't even fathom 30 arrests a day for mean tweets.
Tommy Robinson, of course, is the leading edge of that free speech movement, and that's why they want to pound him down.
Tommy Robinson's autobiography was called The Enemy of the State, and I think it's apropos.
Anyways, enough perambulations by me.
I'm going to get in there to make sure I have a good seat.
On these important legal occasions, the mainstream media attends.
And by that, I mean the BBC and The Guardian, and even some of the tabloids who are generally friendly to the working class and might even call themselves conservative.
They all have editorial direction from the top to disparage Tommy Robinson and criticize him.
It always boggles my mind how a newspaper like the Daily Mail that has a conservative base, a working class base, can turn against Tommy Robinson.
They still write about him because they like the clicks, but they disparage him.
That's really the reason I've come from Canada, a seven-hour flight each way, because I feel that my journalism will be more independent.
I'm obviously sympathetic to Tommy Robinson, but unlike the BBC's Dominique Casciani or the other regime journalists there, I'm not paid to smear the man.
I'm going to go in and get my seat.
If you want to follow my reports, I'll be live tweeting throughout the hearing at my name on Twitter, which is simply Ezra Levant.
And I will be posting videos like this to TommyReports.com.
Hey, can you do me a favor?
If you think what I'm doing here is valuable, can you go to TommyReports.com and chip in a few dollars?
I've got to pay for my flight over from Canada because I'm like the BBC, I don't extract money from Brits by force.
All right, I'm going in now.
As for Levant here, I'm outside the Royal Courts of Justice.
As you can see, there's a bit of a crowd out here.
These are some of the folks who were in courtroom for today for the Court of Appeal hearing of Tommy Robinson, who was challenging the sentencing that he received last year for contempt of court.
It was a one hour and 15 minute hearing today.
Alastair Williamson, King's Counsel, led Tommy Robinson's appeal, and there was another King's Counsel on the government side rebutting.
I think the government had six lawyers in the court today, if I count it properly.
And of course, Tommy Robinson, besides, he had actually two kings, two barristers and a number of solicitors.
It's just an enormous industry battling over Tommy Robinson is a cottage industry in this country.
And as I mentioned in an earlier video, holding Tommy Robinson in prison is an industry, too.
He is in a unit with 16 cells.
They emptied it out just for him.
And another eight cells, they've emptied it out so he can work there.
Literally 25 cells in His Majesty's prison, Woodhill, have been cleared out to hold Tommy Robinson a civil prisoner.
He's not even in there for a crime.
He's in there because he wouldn't take down a Twitter tweet.
And that's not a crime.
The fact that 25 violent criminals were set free is astonishing.
Anyways, I don't want to repeat that story.
Let me get back to what happened in court today.
So there were two things happening.
On the one hand, the Tommy Robinson lawyers wanted to bring new evidence before the Court of Appeal.
And the reason why that's important is that an appeal, by definition, is not a rehearing.
It's not another kick of the can.
It's not another trial.
It's reviewing the record that was before the lower court and reviewing if that lower court was correct or correct enough.
Higher courts like the Court of Appeal are reluctant to overturn lower courts unless there's a really important error that they made.
So adducing fresh evidence was an important application made by Tommy's lawyers.
And one of the main things that they wanted before the court is a 39-page psychological report done of Tommy Robinson in recent weeks.
And that psychological report diagnoses Tommy with not only PTSD, but also ADHD.
And I won't get into the technicalities, but it basically said that prison is causing Tommy to become more and more mentally ill.
And that that's not only a problem now, but God forbid, could lead to a catastrophic incident once he's released.
I hate to even say it, but it was brought up in court, including the risk of suicide.
May it not happen.
But this psychological examination of Tommy Robinson was not disputed by the government.
That is, they do not challenge it.
They do not disagree with it.
They do not say it's incorrect.
They do not have a counter expert trying to defeat it.
Basically, the argument made by the government today is, so what?
Their argument is the sentencing judge knew enough about Tommy's mental state and referred to how rough prison is in his sentencing.
And Tommy already got a modest discount for mental health reasons.
So basically, the Crown is saying, even if this fresh evidence is put before the Court of Appeal, it is not enough, they say, to reduce his sentence.
Now, Aleister Williamson, on behalf of Tommy, said that the challenge here is to realize that this is a civil prisoner, not a criminal prisoner.
And so when we think of a prisoner doing a hard time in segregation, in solitary, having his privileges removed, as Tommy had done to him, we're used to thinking about a criminal context.
I mean, this Woodhill prison is a place where murderers are kept.
But Tommy Robinson is in there because he wouldn't take down a tweet.
So to compare the treatment of a civil prisoner with murderers is absurd and insane.
The judges were attentive, especially the Chief Justice.
And at the end of it, they announced that they were not going to make their ruling immediately, but rather were going to review the voluminous written statements and the arguments made by the lawyers today.
I don't know how quickly they're expected to rule.
I don't know how quickly the UK Court of Appeal normally issues rulings.
It wouldn't surprise me if they took at least a week or two and they may just issue a written ruling and send it electronically to the lawyers, or they may convene against, again here in the court, I do not know.
I want to lower expectations because I think it's important to know that most appeals fail because higher courts want to defer to the trial judge.
Higher courts only want to overturn the lower court if there was something dramatically wrong.
Now Tommy Robinson is the first British journalist to be jailed for contempt of court in nearly a century.
The length of his sentence is extraordinary.
So perhaps the extreme nature of his sentence does merit a reduction by the court.
But there was one point that the government lawyer made that may have resonance with the judges, and that is some of Tommy's ability to get out of prison rests with him.
Because during the sentencing, the judge essentially said to him, if you take that Twitter video down now, we'll lop off months from your sentence.
And Tommy refused to do so.
And today, again, the government lawyer said that if Tommy Robinson were to purge his contempt by taking down the tweet, that that might reduce the prison sentence immediately, even without the judges having to do anything unusual, because that's sort of what the sentencing judge said.
And by the way, I did go to Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed, and at least during the hearing, the video was not his pinned tweet.
Anyways, I'm getting a little bit lost in the weeds, and I think part of it has to do with my lack of sleep.
I flew overnight, and I maybe slept an hour on the plane, and I did my best to be attentive in the courthouse.
I apologize if I'm a little bit rambling here.
I'll try again a little bit later, maybe once I've had a snooze.
But it is funny, I left Canada.
There was snow on the ground when I left Ottawa some 15 hours ago, and here it is, 20 degrees Celsius in the UK today.
I should say there's one more thing that caught my attention.
When the government lawyer was reading out what he called facts from the prison warden, the prison governor, Nicola Marfleet, the DEI Affirmative Action Ire, a very sadistic woman, Tommy Robinson objected, and you can see he was on the video screen and he was waving and he was writing notes on a piece of paper, calling Marfleet's facts lies.
And some of them I know are lies.
For example, the point that Tommy Robinson has a large number of visitors, I know from personal experience that I was accepted as a visitor and then canceled twice.
So I know that the prison governor cannot be trusted.
But I'm not sure if those points really are going to move the needle in this case.
I don't know if that's really where the front line in this battle was.
I think there's a chance because of Tommy's mental health deterioration and because of his unusual and cruel treatment in the prison system, there is a chance that his sentence will be reduced.
But frankly, if that were to happen, you would think it would have been done in the judicial review a few weeks ago that was specifically about his treatment in prison.
The judge in that case didn't have it.
But I was glad to see them try.
I'm just so sorry that Tommy is still in prison.
I think, if my math is right, he's set to be out in July, which is an eternity from now when you realize how long a day feels in solitary confinement.
That's my report for now.
Hopefully I'll cogitate on this a little bit more.
I was glad to see other citizen journalists in the court, and I was glad that there was no attempt to kick them out, as I've seen before.
There were some folks from Vox Populi in there.
I can't remember all the independent journalists, but I was happy to see them.
And that's a change over the years.
I remember when I started covering Tommy Robinson's court cases, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, whatever it was, Rebel News was the only game in town if you didn't want to read what the BBC government broadcaster had to say.
But I'm pleased to say there were, I think, four citizen journalists in court today and more outside.
So it's a very healthy change.
Speaking of citizen journalism, I did fly out here, obviously, on my own dime.
People Believe Polls Matter00:02:03
Unlike the BBC, I can't extort money from taxpayers.
If you want to help me cover my flight, feel free to do so at tommyreports.com.
Thanks for your help.
And as you know, we'll keep covering Tommy's cases until he's free.
Thanks for your time.
Well, that's my show for today.
I hope you found it interesting.
Obviously, the real battle for me and for Rebel News right now is back in Canada, where our team is going full tilt.
Not just the Rebel News team, but where the four Canada, it's like a super PAC is really what it's called in the States, is going full tilt also.
So we'll be back there very soon.
And the whole team is given her.
I'm worried about how that election is going, to be honest.
I don't like the way the polls are looking and people say don't believe the polls.
Well, when every single pollster, and their reputation for accuracy is on the line, when they say that Ontario has swung back to the Liberals, I think it behooves us to, at the very least, take it seriously and not to write it off too casually.
I do not believe that every single pollster is in the tank to the Liberals.
I know some of them are, like Frank Graves of ECOS, but I don't think anyone takes ECOS seriously.
Other pollsters, like you know the one that I quote every month, David Coletto of Abacus, he says last I checked that the Conservatives are six points behind.
I simply do not believe he's making that up.
Now, some would say that people are fibbing to the pollsters, that there's a shy conservative syndrome out there, that people don't want to let people know they're voting conservative, maybe.
But I think that a lot of liberals who were tentatively parked with Pierre Polyev now are gravitating back to the Liberal Party now that the detestable Justin Trudeau is gone and Mark Carney looks like a PM and sounds like someone who knows how to handle financial crises, which some people believe we may be heading into.
So the battle continues, and we'll do our part, I'll tell you that.