LEEDS, England (TND) — A British judge sentenced a man to 20 months in prison on Friday for calling on his Facebook friends to attack a hotel housing migrants.
Jordan Parlour, a 28-year-old from near the English city of Leeds, posted on Facebook over the weekend that “every man and his dog should beat up the Britannia Hotel,” according to the BBC.
Guy Kearl, the judge who sentenced Parlour, said 210 people had stayed at the hotel, many of them with asylum or refugee status. The 28-year-old’s post came amid attacks on the hotel, as rioters smashed the windows, Kearl noted.
“I want to be clear: anyone involved in inciting this brutal behaviour will face serious consequences,” Nick Price, head of legal at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said in a statement.
According to Kearl, Parlour pleaded guilty to publishing threatening, offensive or abusive material with the intent to incite racial hatred. The penalty was five years in prison, which Kearl reduced in exchange for Parlour’s guilty plea.
“As acknowledged on your behalf, this offence is so serious that an immediate custodial sentence is unavoidable,” the judge said.
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The unrest at the Brittania hotel came as claims spread online that the suspect who killed three people in northwest England last month was an immigrant. Demonstrations broke out across Britain, with some protesters setting cars on fire and confronting police.
Following Parlour’s conviction, Tyler Kay, a 26-year-old from Northampton, was sentenced to more than three years in prison for sharing an X-post that read, “Set fire to all the (expletive) hotels full of bastards,” according to the Associated Press.
The news agency reported that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had instructed the courts to speed up proceedings in order to deter other people from participating in “right-wing extremist violence”.
“Kay wrote about setting fire to hotels and published extensive posts calling for action against immigration lawyers – this online behaviour will not be tolerated,” said Rosemary Ainslie, acting head of the CPS’s Special Crime and Counter-Terrorism Unit.
“He was convicted just one day after his social media post, which shows how quickly offenders like Kay are brought to justice,” Ainslie added.
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