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Sycamore Gap

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The trial is ongoing. It’s beyond comprehension how utterly hateful some humans can be. It’s not a crime I imagine would carry a long sentence but I wish we lived in a world where such actions would be seen for what they are.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvg93k0950pt

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Comments

  1. I’d start the retribution by setting fire to their cars while they watched, then figure out an imaginative way to use the chainsaw to make them regret their actions for a very long time.

  2. They’re not the brightest, are they? I wonder if that will count in their favour when it comes to sentencing.

    I’d like to know how someone calculated that they caused £622,191 of damage to the tree. I mean, it’s so precise.

  4. “just having a laugh – a bit of banter – it’ll get likes on TikTok – PC tree-hugging wankers – can’t put the tree up again, can they?”

    These people are accurately called CUNTS

  7. Call me naive, but what I don’t understand about this and so many other things is why anybody would want to make the world around them a little bit worse and/or uglier.

    Where I live, I don’t have to walk too far to get onto a nice path through woodland. It’s usually quiet, pleasantly green, and picturesque. Yet at least once a week somebody will spoil it with a bit of casual fly-tipping: building waste, rusty kitchen appliances, etc.

    Similarly, my bus route travels through a commercial area that’s fallen on hard times: boarded-up shops, sad-looking shutters covering broken windows, etc. Yet the local youth have helpfully decided to make things look even more forlorn by covering whole shopfronts in really bad graffiti.

    Who sees something in their neighbourhood – a 200-year-old tree, a pleasant little country path, the remains of somebody’s failed business and unsuccessful dream – and thinks “You know what? I’m going to spoil that for everybody who sees it. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

    No, cutting down a beautiful, landmark tree is not the worst crime in the world, but the fact that somebody thought that doing so might be worthwhile is just pathetic. How devoid of joy must their lives be?

    Phew, rant over…

  9. Regardless of the legal infringements, the level of crime committed and the depth of local sadness and ire, they assumed they weren’t going to be caught. Or, if they were then it would be a fine and some local notoriety for a little while.

    However that ire last mentioned was very deep. Whether or not they end up in prison or not for however long, someone at some point is going to administer a kicking to them both. Perhaps more than one across the rest of their lives.

    I don’t condone it and it doesn’t make me happy and I don’t wish it. It will happen though and they know it.

    • 4 years. I’m astonished.

      It would seem the local ire may have played a part in the charging and sentencing, but that’s purely speculation. Yep, it was just a tree but it was part of a well loved place. It had been long before Kevin Costner danced around it, and before the romanticism that the advent of social media created around it. Doesn’t afford it any special legal status though.

      As much as I despise the ‘let’s knacker up a place the local soft posh twats love’ moronic aggrieved mindset of these two, it’s a big old wedge of time. However, I have no doubt the pricks will be full of false bravado about it all. ‘That’s nowt! I’m nails, me! Ha, is that all they can give me?’

      For that alone I will allow myself a Nelson Muntz laugh.

  10. I’d give them community service and lots of it. Hundreds of hours. About 1,600 hours would equate to an eight hour shift, Saturday and Sunday, every weekend for the next two years.

    Have them doing something constructive in the natural environment they have previously tried to destroy. Repairing dry stone walls, replanting damaged moorland, planting trees and hedgerows, pulling out Himalayan Balsam out of our watercourses, trapping American crayfish. Who knows, they might end up appreciating their surroundings and regret what they did.

    Then cut off their goolies.

  11. I have skin in a very similar game involving the noxious neighbours who befriended my elderly uncle and bought a beautiful stretch of riverfront land – much of it EU Habitats-protected – from him not long before he died.

    They then went on to erect two enormous sheds without planning permission – the second of them after being warned about the first. They even built an illegal – and therefore uninsurable – jetty on the stretch of EU riverfront my uncle left to me without bothering to let him or me know..There is a whole lot of other fairly despicable stuff they did on top of this that i can’t really talk about for reasons too complex to go into hrre.

    My uncle was vehemently opposed to any kind of development of the area where he spent all bar a few months of his nine decades and would have been appalled by their eco-vandalism. As co-inheritor of his ancient cottage and much of the rest of his land, I felt honour-bound to take up the battle on his behalf and dobbed them into the local council.

    After four years of dragging their feet through Ireland’s sclerotic Iegal system, the pair received fines and criminal convictions in Spring last year. Having had their and their ruinously expensive Dublin barrister’s appeal dismissed in terms so damning they have no chance of a judicial review in the High Court, the gruesome twosome have been ordered to tear their eyesores down by the end of May.

    I am not holding my breath.

    • Excellent news! I was going to ask you for an update – this is most welcome.

      Anti-social behaviour may, in individual cases, be seen by some as a relatively minor offence. But in my book, anti-social behaviour is by definition an offence against everybody else alive, and as any punishment should fit the magnitude of the crime, it should be equivalently severe.

      • Yes I concur.
        What individuals make of the world they inhabit within the confines of their own four walls is up to them. If they choose squalor that’s their business but the outside environment belongs to all of us. Discarding litter, causing damage and behaving with a cavalier disregard and lack of respect for the environment really boils my piss. I don’t believe short jail sentences or even fines hit hard enough. I’d remove privileges such as their driving licences and passports. I’d impose bans from ALL licensed premises and sports grounds. Then I’d make them clean up the mess they’ve made.

    • Ditto. I’ve been following this from afar and, much as I’d prefer the constructions pulled down and natural order restored, I’d love to see them banged up for a long stretch in chokey.

  12. I think our society has been ludicrously tolerant of idiotic and sociopathic behaviour for quite some time. The misery that a tiny percentage of the population inflict on the rest of us far outweighs the negligible deterrents in place to stop them. There must be very few periods in the vast expanse of hominid evolution and human history where individuals who repeatedly and wilfully act against the interests of their social group are allowed to remain with that group.

    • Good point, well made. It seems (in my limited global experience) to be a peculiarly British trait to just shrug and put up with bad behaviour from those around us – maybe with an occasional tut or hard stare if you’re feeling devil-may-care.

      I wonder if people in other, maybe less mild countries would stand for the sort of anti-social activities that end up in the headlines with depressing regularity. Yes, our prisons are jammed full and the justice system is overwhelmed, but maybe it’s time for a less British attitude to certain crimes.

  13. It’d be great if they got the longest-ever community service sentence, where they’d be compelled to do truly odious tasks, e.g. Chief Toilet Cleaners at an IBS convention. They’re also a great example of why we should bring back the stocks: being pelted with rotten fruit whilst repeatedly issuing mea culpas might be the making of them.

    Cultural crimes elicit angry responses, but that’s understandable. If someone burnt the Stratford-upon-Avon copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, it isn’t just a git who’s torched a bit of paper.

  14. I’m going to say something a bit shocking as I’m hopefully in safe company. I’d never heard of the Sycamore Gap until this event. Sure, I’d seen the odd picture but it was not at home in my brain at all. I understand the outrage but I can’t be hypocritical and claim the sort of personal outrage that many are experiencing in the wider world.

    Of course, whoever did this should receive appropriate punishment; I’m not sure there is any obvious legal precedent.

  15. Im wondering how much influence the current world trend to just totally lie is having here. Both men deny anything to do with it yet their car was filmed there at the time and on number plate recognition going there and coming back. There’s film of the tree being felled on their phone. Their phones were tracked to be together en route and at the tree at the right time and both were gloating after about how it was making the news. At least one of them said he could not remember his whereabouts at the time because he was tired. And a wedge from the tree was found in the boot of the car. Yet both deny everything.

  17. My take is that an object of immense cultural value to huge numbers of people was
    deliberately destroyed in what was almost certainly a wanton act of militant philistinism.
    It’s reasonable to assume that what little thinking was behind it was conceived with a view
    to cause a deliberate ‘wound’ ( for want of a better term) that was calculated to be disproportionate to the size or value the object itself might have had to those affected.
    A kind of ‘this’ll show those muesli munching cucks’ kind of thing.
    As such, I’d suggest a response that was conceived to reflect the malice intended & was consciously equally disproportionate, to register the disgust felt & send a message to others who may have similar notions.
    Upon conviction, ( & I don’t know if the accused are guilty or not) a sentence of a minimum 15 years before parole is considered.
    If that’s Draconian, so be it – but how would we feel if somebody torched St Paul’s deliberately or destroyed an irreplaceable Turner because they thought it would piss off a particular section of the public?

      • He’s now saying he accidentally said “we did it” but he meant to say “he did it” referring to an unknown person who cut the tree down. And when he sent many voice messages and screen shots about the felling to the co accused it was just out of interest. Regardless of how you see this case it appears to be one of the most ridiculous defences in the history of the law. His car was there, his phone was there, a chunk of the tree is in his boot with a chainsaw. But he says it was someone else, he doesn’t have a chain saw and was in bed all night. Oh and the reason his car was there earlier was because he was taking his wife for a meal but decided to turn round when their new born baby was playing up. Whatever they sentence these morons to they should add 50% for wasting everyone’s time.

  23. And they’ve been sentenced to 4 years and 3 months each. I’m of the ‘twattish behaviour, but it’s only a bloody tree’ persuasion, and think some sort of long community sentence would be more appropriate than looking them up.

    ‘What you in for?’
    ‘More than 4 years for chopping a tree down.’

    • I don’t know the details of the sentencing guidelines, but I’m guessing they might have got less if they had admitted guilt at the first opportunity, and not denied everything in a big and expensive jury trial.

        • @Gatz

          Would community service help rehabilitate this pair of sad inconsequential nobodies?

          Seems unlikely given that neither of them has expressed a shred of remorse for their appalling act of vandalism

          • What good will locking them up do? For comparison, I’ve looked up GBH. The maximum sentence for section 20 GBH (unlawful wounding without intent to cause serious harm) is 5 years. You could, say, put out someone’s eye in a pub fight and so long as that wasn’t your intention you could get a shorter sentence than these idiots.

            Again, twattish behaviour, and quite possibly unmendably twattish, but it’s only a tree. When the Hardy Tree in Old St Pancras church, a more famous tree than the sycamore which I had never heard of before it was vandalised and destroyed, fell down after a storm people were a bit sad and went about their day. This is one of those times when I can only shake my head at the hysteria of the British public, a collective madness which has reached all the way to the judiciary.

    • I’m the opposite.

      It’s not a crime of desperation, nor of necessity, nor of protest, nor even of ignorance,.

      It’s a crime driven by cuntish behaviour, and I am absolutely OK with the book being thrown at them

  24. People are funny sometmes. We were on holiday in Italy in May and I was chatting to one of our party over dinner one night. He had retired after running a successful garage business, and was a typical no nonsense northerner – nice bloke who had obviously worked damned hard and treated his customers well and was now going through his bucket list. Anyway, for some reason the conversation turned to transexual people, and he was very open minded, live and let live etc, and was similarly fairly liberal in other views, but the subject of these two twats came up (can’t remember why) and he declared they should be hanged and he’d be happy to spring the trap door…..stunned silence around the table…..anyway, the weather has been nice today hasn’t it?

  26. I am struck by the number of people i have heard heartily approving of these sentences who are also very vocal advocates of the moves to stop sending non violent offenders to jail. It’s all very confusing,

    Meanwhile, my wife reminds me that the students who stole and broke the Stone of Scone 50 years ago weren’t even charged. A trivial, , yet illustative, reminder of the inflation of many sentences in the last half century.

    • Indeed. It’s more that I am agreeing with your pointing out the inconsistency of some positions held. That said, I think fentonsteve is right to say that the sentence in part reflects their behaviour with respect to the justice system.

  28. The sentence is preposterous. Some sort of community service along with the withdrawal of certain privileges such as a driving licence and/passport plus a hefty fine would have been more proportional. It’s not as if these morons are at likely to commit a similar offence. I can’t help thinking that the sentence that’s been handed down is performative. To appease public opinion and certain half-witted voices in the national press. If that is the case then that is not justice it’s theatre.

  29. Phoebe and Jocasta from Just Stop Oil Paintings pled guilty but still got two years for tomato-souping Sunflowers. Imagine their surprise when they get out to find their eco-warrior mates have abandoned the soup and superglue and gone back to Mummy’s weekend cottage in the Cotswolds.

    How do you feel about that sentence, Pencilsqueezer?

        • I agree. Sorry I was being flippant. I feel the same way about that piece of stupidity and the courts response to it as I do about the idiots in question and the sentence they received. The saving grace for Freda & Gwen is that their bit of nonsense was an act born out of conscience and not just a bit of idiotic mindless vandalism. The other thing is of course no lasting harm was done to the painting unlike the tree.

          • You could argue that Pheebs and Jo-Jo caused more damage to the national heritage than the two fellers. Making galleries and museums a target means security guards, bag checks, queues, entrance fees and other barriers to access to art and antiquities. They probably don’t think of it that way though.

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