Account Compromised No More

Satire is not a defence. You can go to prison for having done nothing more than mock the haircut of an officially certified, proper politician who has contested fewer elections than you have, and who like you has never been elected above Parish level (although arguably I have been), but who unlike you has never been a parliamentary candidate. Provided that he is the right sort of the politician for the Crown Prosecution Service to take up his case.

And if that can be harassment, then Paul Nickerson's picture of Jeremy Corbyn is undoubtedly defamation. Like harassment, defamation is practically impossible to defend. If the complainant says that she was harassed, then she was harassed. And if the plaintiff says that she was defamed, then she almost certainly was.

Nickerson cannot argue that his picture is simply a record of an event that happened in actual fact, so he had better prepare to sell his house and watch the proceeds go to Momentum or to the Project for Peace and Justice. Corbyn should have started suing people six years ago. He is due Nick Sandmann levels of payout, enough that the movement that his first Leadership campaign called into being could be kept going for the rest of the century.

If Corbyn were on the CPS wing of the Labour Party, then Nickerson would be looking at a stretch. Even without such a sentence, such a conviction would disqualify him from public office under the terms of the Elections Bill that was currently wending its merry way through Parliament. We serfs are expected to know our place.