16 July 2025 - 1:00pm
A running joke in the Asterix comics is that Dogmatix, canine companion to the gentle giant Obelix, is a great lover of trees, and liable to howl disconsolately if he sees one being uprooted. Of course, this is something which happens on a fairly regular basis due to his master having permanently superhuman strength. I have always sympathised with the little dog. There is something splendid and almost mystical about a mature tree. They represent continuity and solidity, and give a place its own kind of spirit.
That said, I was troubled to hear that the men who cut down the famous sycamore on Hadrian’s Wall have each been jailed for more than four years. Not because it wasn’t a horrible thing to do — destroying a much-loved national landmark for obscure malicious reasons — but because it seems out of kilter with some of the other sentences handed down by British courts, and the attitude of the criminal justice system more generally.
Last month, for example, two delivery men were sentenced to only two and a half years each for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Huw Edwards, convicted last July of possessing indecent images of children, including some from the very worst category, served no prison time at all, offering in mitigation the fact that he had always felt bad about not getting into Oxbridge.
Rakeem Miles, who killed young coder Samuel Winter, received eight years — less than double that of the Sycamore Gap pair — and will probably be out in six. Drivers who kill and maim are indulged to an extraordinary degree: in 2022 two men who inflicted horrific injuries on a father in front of his family were jailed for only 18 months and 14 months respectively, and were banned from driving for less than four years.
No doubt Justice Lambert’s sentence for Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, the Sycamore Gap vandals, followed the appropriate guidelines. It is plausible that an exemplary sentence is required to deter similar acts of stupidity and malice. The fact remains, however, that the criminal justice system as a whole constantly generates bizarre and patently unjust outcomes. This inevitably, and reasonably, colours how people are going to view cases such as R v. Graham and Carruthers.
Lambert’s decision-making may be defensible on its own terms — it’s hard to find anything especially objectionable in the sentencing remarks — but people quite reasonably form their view of the overall function of the police and courts based on many different cases.
We might even wonder whether it is grimly symbolic of contemporary Britain that you can be more seriously punished for an offence against the aesthetics of the countryside than for serious violence against other humans. The powers that be increasingly lack the civilisational self-confidence and moral courage to deter street thugs and reckless motorists, but they will come down like a tonne of bricks on someone who damages an icon of Ye Olde England.
Arguably, it can be understood as a kind of turn away from reality, an attempt to obscure the failures of the judiciary and police leaders by showing strength against relatively easy targets. In the Bench’s furious defence of a much-loved tree, and its equally furious refusal to defend much-loved humans, we see the shadow side of the stifling cult of twee. You can be out in 18 months if you inflict life-changing injuries on an old man, but please don’t do anything truly awful like upset members of the National Trust. It’s justice as pantomime: emotive, theatrical, and utterly detached from the lives it’s meant to protect.
