There are thousands more impressive and intimidating buildings in London than Wimbledon Magistrates Court, but last week I learned just how language can more than make up for that lack of grandeur to ram home power in our multi-tier persecution and revenue generation system. The southwest London Magistrates Court is a miserable, miserly microcosm of festering inequalities; arrogant power, the disadvantage of impoverishment and all the efforts that are made the maintain and uphold a system that rewards its servants, so long as they denigrate those born equal. Some observations from my day in court…

Arriving 30 minutes early as requested, I joined a queue for a security check to gain entry to the building proper. The queue was managed by harassed-looking staff, fussing and monitoring everybody’s position, creating an arbitrary arrangement of spacing between us. To pass the time you could talk to a neighbour in the queue or read the A4 laminated posters stuck on the front desk that boasted of the number of weapons seized from people attending magistrates courts in 2022. It took a minute in this queue to recognise that I’d stepped into a world in which I had no power and in which my prized independence counted for nought.

The lion and the unicorn over the entrance are presumably supposed to impress, intimidate or empower every visitor as a symbol of British national greatness. There are no lions in Britain and unicorns don’t exist.

Every single person in the queue succeeded in setting off the alarm when they walked through the scanner (feel the criminality.) This meant everyone, male or female, was then scanned at close quarters by a man with a hand-held metal detector. In every case, a belt had caused the beeping. Law professionals in black suits had the door opened for them and were not scanned, nor did they thank the staff who honoured them in this way.

I had mentally prepared myself for the micro-aggressions of an oppressive institution and was determined to be as unaffected as possible and embrace the experience as cheerfully as I could. I finally cleared the scanners, a bit demoralised and anxious but nothing too bad. On the other side, I found no information waiting. Every aspect of Wimbledon Magistrates Court’s setup, including its staffing, furniture, systems and its legal professionals would send my antipathy to the top of the scale.

I wandered around for a minute looking for a sign then asked a member of the court staff what I was supposed to do. He was taken aback by the question but pointed me in the direction of a board which listed who was due in which court at what time. I saw that every single person’s appearance before the magistrate was listed for 10 AM. I had been advised in a phone call the previous week that I should inform the court that I had to be at work later that day so I could be seen early.

There were around 25 people waiting. None looked happy or relaxed. Yet these were not people facing serious criminal charges. It seemed we were all there for trivial matters, the majority relating to Transport for London tickets. Confusion mixed with anxiety pervaded the waiting area. Most sat down, but two men were particularly agitated. One was wearing a Covid-era mask and I judged him to be attempting to present his innocence through his body language as he avoided eye contact or conversation with any of his fellow defendants yet was keen to ingratiate himself to the staff using textbook manners. The other agitated man I judged (we’re all judges) to be angry at having to be there in the first place, and as the seconds ticked by on the oversized, over-noised clock, his impatience grew. No acknowledgement or respect was offered to him or his time. As a restless soul, I related better to these two misfits than those sitting down passively, anxiously awaiting news of what they were supposed to do, when and where. Presuming they were all in a similar boat to me, this was a load of people on something of a judicial blind date. ‘You are summonsed to court, but we won’t tell you much more than that…’

I stood, leaned against the wall, refusing to slump into a chair and obediently wait for this inefficient system to allocate me a time. After half an hour I got tired and sat down.

The thing that triggered me into picking up my pen and making these notes was when a man entered the waiting room and barked out “Is there anyone who hasn’t been spoken to yet?” His use of the passive voice struck me. The people in the waiting room were not people to have a conversation or discussion with – we were to be spoken to.

The man then went round barking at various people one-to-one or in groups, he ignored me. Most had English as their second language, but he still barked out legalese at them, intolerant of anyone who did not understand the words he was saying, the legal implications or the tricky situations they had found themselves in. No information of any utility had been provided; the timetable lied that we would all enter court at 10 o’clock. Now barking man was getting in people’s faces telling them they had to plead guilty. If they said they were not guilty he snapped back with “there is no not guilty.”

When a very anxious – terrified – woman interrupted barking man to declare she was definitely not guilty, he shouted at her “I am speaking!”

After a while I realised I was the only white British person in the waiting room. There were other white people who I had thought were British but one-by-one interpreters had arrived to help them all master the word “guilty.” I think they could just as easily have said it in their own languages, very slowly while pointing to the thing they really wanted – the exit.

As well as barking man, other members of the court staff buzzed in and out with clipboards gathering names. The notes on their paper were insanely disorganised – no table, no spreadsheet, not even ruled feint with margin, just scribbles of names by staff who seemed overwhelmed even at 10:30 in the morning.

Another member of staff who appeared regularly throughout the morning was an overly cheerful lady with no clipboard who offered out unsolicited banalities such as “it’s busy in court eight today” and “hmm it is a bit warm in here” to the waiters. She was a good sort who had taken on the role of mindlessly reassuring people to try to provide a sense of boring normality and to humanise people in a setting, or a strange ecosystem (to use a word that Rock Feilding-Mellen uses, but in a more accurate way, and also to provide another link between this article and the last one) where dehumanising humans is the whole point.

We were told to arrive 30 minutes early, but hours go by without anybody entering the courtroom or any explanation being offered as to why the wait. The powerful can withhold words that, in any more equal setting, would be offered as a matter of convention, like on a customer service call, or a delayed train announcement by TFL. I settled into a seating area away from the main group and busied myself writing down intense observations and notes for other articles related to language, the passive voice and injustice.

As we reached high noon, I knew I was the only person in the waiting room who had obtained a drink of water. I had inquired to court staff about where I could find a drink; they pointed to a door; behind that door was another door; behind that door was a room; in the room was a large filing cabinet and behind that a water cooler. Nobody else drank anything meaning but by the time they saw the magistrate, they were thirsty, hungry, agitated, frustrated, anxious, and confused. I was just hungry, agitated, frustrated, anxious and confused.

My advanced mental preparation for Wimbledon Magistrates Court involved reminding myself that, to these people, I was about as significant as a fly is to me before I swat it away. This mental technique succeeded inasmuch as I was not surprised by the attitudes of those earning their living under the lion & unicorn. I also topped up my healthy disdain for people who treat others as lesser beings simply because of some quirk of circumstance. This disdain is particularly strong for posh people (most judges, magistrates and lawyers fall into this category).

My interest and my game was to try to observe whether I could maintain my alertness, increase my aloofness and act with no interest whatsoever towards the functionaries of the system, to show them that I could not care less about what they thought of me. However, my conclusion now is that, no matter how well prepared mentally and emotionally one might be, there are formidable problems to face down. Problem one in Wimbledon was that for a very petty single justice ‘offence’ dealt with by a magistrate there is precious little information or guidance provided to the criminal. This meant that, like everyone else, I didn’t really know why I was there, what the implications were, or how I would be dealt with once in the courtroom. Would I be able to speak freely?

The second problem was that despite being fairly well mentally prepared and also not having the disadvantage of being a non-white person in a Magistrates Court, every detail of the space is designed to make you feel grotty. The chairs the waiting room; the staff and their ignorance; the missing information; the lack of food; the setup is one big insult. The waiting produces hunger, thirst and irritation; the net result being that by the time you finally enter a courtroom, you have been somewhat reduced in stature and some primordial urge to get out as quickly as possible in order to feel comfortable and autonomous once again has taken over.

Eventually, I told the court staff I really had to be at work soon and they bumped me up the list. I was delighted when my name was called and I could go in in fairly good spirits having planned several articles and hydrated myself thoroughly. ‘I could yet emerge the winner here,’ I thought to myself. Entering the courtroom I was faced with six people one of whom was the magistrate; I didn’t know who the others were. There were also people shuffling papers next to me. One of those flanking the magistrate asked “Has Mr Charles had a chance to speak to TfL?”

Everybody then looked at me, at which point I became immediately exasperated. “What does that mean, talk to TfL?”

They told me that it was important I should speak to TFL, they didn’t say why. I asked, “Who is TfL?”

Barking man piped up, “I am.”

“Do I have to go out again?”

Victory had turned to defeat, and I went for my important meeting with barking man and told him that there was nothing about him that identified him as a TfL employee – “you’ve got no lanyard” – no announcement, he’d appeared to be a member of the court staff going round telling people to plead guilty and these people might well have thought he was offering legit legal advice.

“So, what do you want to know?” – barking man seemed excited on my behalf as if getting to ask him questions was a rare opportunity.

“What?”

Barking started to read the meagre details I had already been provided ahead of my day in court….I told Barking to stop because I knew these details, but he continued trying to read it until I insisted that he stop and asked to go back into the court.

However, another person had taken my place in the courtroom and I suspected that following the 2.5 hour wait when nothing much happened, we were now being rapidly processed so that the magistrate and the other five people of privilege could have their lunch. This perception was reinforced when I finally got back into the courtroom and the magistrate asked me if I had anything to say so I made a couple of points which I thought supplemented my written statement quite nicely. The magistrate smiled sweetly at me but neither she nor colleagues had actually read anything I’d written or had any interest in my circumstances, and they were now keen to progress at speed through their issuing of fines. In my relief at being in the courtroom, I had made the mistake of forgetting that I was a fly, about to be swatted.

I was not allowed to sit down so to add to the discomfort of hunger, fatigue, frustration and confusion, I was now standing up awkwardly, too tall to be able to lean on the table in front of me.

Defeated, fined, I left with one personal regret, that I didn’t challenge the court with the question, “What’s the point in all this?” (I would have pointed to the waiting room.) I also left with a sense of injustice, no doubt shared by the other victims that day, that a court was used to extort money from people in an unjustifiable and unaccountable way, and that power was abused to conceal and cloud the truth from people. One thing is for sure, nobody going through that experience comes out with increased respect for the British court system.

The lion and the unicorn at Wimbledon Magistrates Court guard the tyrannical words ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – “Shame on anyone who thinks evil of it.”

What else are we supposed to think of it?

Think evil, stay free.

By Tom Charles @tomhcharles