The Spine and the Spineless.
A hundred names defended the Filton 4. Not one named the officer they injured.
[A hundred names defended the Filton 4. Not one named the officer they injured.]
You’ll have caught this one. We all did. It was everywhere — papers and news.
Four Palestine Action activists, sentenced as terrorists. A grave miscarriage of justice. Civil liberties in peril. A hundred famous names up in arms. You heard all of that, didn’t you.
Now. Did any of them — the famous names, the letter, the crowd — tell you about the woman on the floor?
The woman on the floor at Filton.
Her name is Kate Evans. Sergeant Kate Evans. On 6 August 2024 she was on her knees at the Elbit Systems UK factory in Filton, just up the road from us, trying to make an arrest.
Samuel Corner struck her twice across the lower back with a seven-pound sledgehammer. An X-ray confirmed it. A fractured spine.
Three months off work. Her sergeant’s rank, gone. Treatment nearly two years on. A woman who needed help to dress herself.
You’ll have heard her name during the trial — the court reporters had it. From the hundred famous names last week? Not a syllable.
The Filton 4 letter that skipped the victim.
I lead with her, because everyone defending the four buried her.
When they were sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court, hundreds turned out on the pavement. A hundred public figures — Sally Rooney, Greta Thunberg, Steve Coogan — signed an open letter calling it a miscarriage of justice.
Read it, all the way down. Go on. You will not find Kate Evans in it. Not once.
A hundred writers. Not one sentence to spare for the woman on the floor.
I’ve a name for this. I call it emotional incontinence: feeling that won’t hold itself in — gushing where it flatters the cause, bone dry where it might complicate it.
They marched for Gaza. Not one for her.
Let’s test it.
Is it practical? Course it is. The police counted 300,000 in London for Gaza. Town squares filled across the country over Southport — mob and counter-mob, thousands a night. By the police’s own count, the big mobilisations of recent years left more than 500 officers injured between them. Not one of those crowds ever marched for the hurt. The machine works. It never turns to face the woman on the floor.
Is it logical? Only if you can call yourself the guardian of proportion while doing the most disproportionate thing in the room — erasing the one person who bled.
And where does it lead? Somewhere quieter than any courtroom: a victim can be deleted the moment she gets in the way. Today it’s her. One day, it’s you.
Not the suffragettes: the Court of Appeal’s words.
I’ll be straight, like always. I’m not telling you the sentence was right. The “terrorist connection” finding — under the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, never before pinned on a criminal-damage conviction — was kept from the jury, and you’re right to be uneasy. That’s a real argument, and it deserves grown-ups.
That’s about the sentence, mind. Not about whether these were gentle souls.
This morning, the Court of Appeal ruled the ban on Palestine Action lawful (she’s off to the Supreme Court next). The Lady Chief Justice put it plainly. This is not the suffragettes, out in the open. It is a covert outfit of secret cells that promotes violence amounting to terrorism — violence that destroys property and causes injury.
The injury, this time, has a name. Kate Evans.
Believe every word they say about Gaza and Elbit. None of it required pretending she doesn’t exist.
Who gains from the silence.
So ask the old question. Who gains from the silence?
A movement that named her would have to weigh her. And weighing her is awkward. So out she goes.
Watch it work. No victim, no violence. No violence, no crime. No crime — four martyrs. Neat, isn’t it.
That’s no accident. Accidents go in all directions. This one points the same way, every time.
You know who spoke up for Kate Evans? Not one famous name. Just the Police Federation, with a letter. Because nobody on that pavement would.
Hundreds for the four. One letter for the one.
A woman on her knees, doing her job, had her spine broken. Hundreds queued at court for the people who put her there.
That is the spine, and that is the spineless. One you can fracture. The other was never there to break.
The Almighty Gob is written and published by John Langley — former independent Bristol mayoral candidate, forensic observer of institutional power, and blogger with no party allegiance and no press accreditation. Find us on Substack and across seven social media platforms.
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