Lions, giraffes, hyenas, and counterfeit courts
Breaking down the HMCTS court name fraud into its smallest component parts
We rely upon police officers, judges, parliamentarians, clerks, civil servants, and legal officers to uphold the law. But what happens when the State itself “goes rogue”, and instead adopts the methods and forms of organised crime?
Those inside the system see their colleagues “obeying orders” as usual, and cannot believe that the “fringe” challenges offered by the public are grounded in fact and law, even when they are. The system is designed to close off remedy to all but the most determined. If you want an example of what “determined” looks like, PeaceKeepers are making admirable headway in exposing the council tax and debt enforcement scams, after years of litigation.
Eventually there is a reckoning with reality — the basics of proof of obligation, names of magistrates, seals on documents, authority to act as an agent, and chains of custody cannot be evaded forever. When lies creep into official doctrine to cover for fraud, it creates inconsistency (“anti-Logos”). This sets up stress fracture points: superficially the official administrative procedures seem sound, but when you look from the right angle, you can see the crack that cleaves “real” from “unreal”. The job of someone like myself is to help others take what might be obscure conflicting procedural rules that cover for fraud, and recast them into ordinary language, so that the crack can be communicated to all.
Yesterday I served a Notice of Fraud upon the Government Legal Department as part of my pre-action protocol to expose “ghost courts”. Fraud is a strong word, so you need to have your ducks in a row before you use it. I feel I now have a robust enough framework to explain to a High Court judge why the misrepresented court names cannot be treated as harmless errors. Somewhere near the heart of the matter is the difference between an error “within type”, and one “of type”. To make sense of this, let’s try out a framework of court names and errors, so we can see not just the fraud, but how official doctrine is spun to cover it up retrospectively.
Here are the basic facts of how a summons is supposed to work:
One shot rule: A summons has one chance to name the court with authority to act. Miss it, and it’s void.
Four corners: the court name has to be on the piece of paper, not discoverable via research into IT codes, statutory instruments, or historical naming practices.
Shorthand: Defects can be “cured” if the court name printed still points back to the statutory court “well enough”.
Surplusage: Extra fluff can be ignored if the core name is valid.
Counterfeit: If the name creates the appearance of a different tribunal, it’s void ab initio.
So, in my own case, the summons purports to come from “North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court (1752)” (abbreviated to NWCMC1752). Can that be “cured” back to the statutory court, which is “the Magistrates’ Court for the North and West Cumbria Local Justice Area” (abbreviated to MCNWCLJA)? If all you care about is the typed text and orthographic errors, one might argue that we have a “close enough” match. There is “North and West Cumbria” as the core identity, “Magistrates’ Court” moved front-to-back, “Local Justice Area” left off as shorthand, and “(1752”) as surplusage. However, that doesn’t work when you look deeper at the ontological (i.e. philosophical existence) basis for the court name and its underlying reality of types.
The problem is one of categories and how existential types are set in concrete at the moment a thing is instantiated into the world. This is brought to life by the recent Supreme Court judgement around transgenderism that recognised that biological sex is fixed at birth as a fact. While we can issue a “gender recognition certificate” later in life to reflect a lifestyle identity, nothing about that paperwork that alters the chromosomes and genitalia you had when you emerged out of the womb. Now, if you become a wonderful simulacrum of the other sex down the road, and men ogle your plastic boobs, that becomes a recognisable fact of its own. But it doesn’t change the birth sex.
There is no “court recognition certificate” that can be presented if you start off with a non-court name. NWCMC1752 purports to be a legally distinct court from MCNWCLJA, but lacks any statutory basis. It is a little bit like getting an invoice from Flying British Ltd, and trying to pretend it is from British Airways plc. Sure, they both have “British” in them, and allude to aviation, and have a corporate type label, but they are existentially distinct. An invoice from “British Airway [sic] plc” might be excused as a typo if everything else is in order, such as the registered address, company registration, and payment information. But you cannot make a boy-at-birth into a girl-at-birth, nor a non-court (NWCMC1752) into a court (MCNWCLJA).
There’s a deeper subtlety at play. Each Local Justice Area (LJA) is an administrative region, and has a court assigned to it, albeit not formally named in statute. That means we have two identities in play: that of a territory (the LJA), and that of a tribunal (the court for the LJA). They are not the same thing, and the LJA itself (a tool for allocating justices to sittings) cannot act as the bench for the LJA (the overall juridicial entity). “North and West Cumbria” is the name of the territory, not the tribunal. It is of the wrong “type”, and you don’t turn the territory back into the tribunal by slapping the text “Magistrates’ Court” at the end. It’s like changing your name from Stephen to Sophie. It doesn’t alter the at-birth fact, and courts cannot be “queer”.
Then you have the “(1752)” false specificity, which happens to be an internal IT code that maps to Carlisle Magistrates’ Court, which is also technically not a juridical court, but a licensed hearing venue. This is where things get really messy, as you now have a chimera court name, with a territory pretending to be a tribunal with a “text upgrade” bolted onto an administrative branding element to make it all look more official. Yet at the end of the day it has no more legal weight than “Magistrates’ Court of the Moon (666)”. It’s a bluff — and once you see it’s a bluff, as they cannot supply the warrant for the purported one-shot claim to be a court, then you cannot unsee it.
What is happening is a little bit like the following: imagine a “legitimate” court is a lion. There might be many ways of expressing that court name when not already fixed in statute, which are different prides of lions. Yet they are all unquestionably lions. What HMCTS is doing is asking you to take a giraffe (NWCMC) and a hyena (1752) and pretend it’s a lion. “Well, there’s a big animal with a mane, and one that likes a lot of raw meat, so it’s the same thing as a lion really.” — sorry, we aren’t convinced. You can “cure” a 3-legged lion into a “full lion”; it’s still a lion in essence. You might even, at a push, decide a liger (cross between lion and tiger) is sufficiently “lionish”. But your giraffe and hyena don’t fool us.
Taking this metaphor further, by treating the “LJA as territory” as if it were the court, HMCTS is asking the public to pretend that two men in a lion costume are a lion. But we see the human legs and gait, and the lack of any lion-like roar. And if you put that in a cage with a real lion, bad things happen. Everything is rendered down to the most superficial appearance as text-as-costume, as if running a court is nothing more than a form factory with a typing pool. We’re not talking the Buttle/Tuttle type errors in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian black comedy Brazil — an error “within type”. The state is presenting something akin to a child’s drawing of a summons, and claiming it’s the real deal. It is not, and never will be.
The excuse HMCTS is pushing is that you can publish millions of defective summonses with a knowing false representation to being a juridical court (the “giraffe-hyena”), and then “cure” them into the unseen and undeclared local or nation bench (“lion”). This is absurd, because it collapses any distinction between the rule of law and fraud. You trick the defendant into coming into court via a counterfeit legal instrument, and then try to patch it up by saying “well, they turned up anyhow at the zoo, so who cares if it’s a lion or not?”. This is to initiate criminal prosecutions directly from a deception, and is unethical as well as unlawful. So they have hedged with a second, incompatible, doctrine.
At the same time, HMCTS is claiming in its internal advice to clerks that:
all court names can be “cured” into “lions” regardless of what animal(s) are really presented — so court names do matter,
while simultaneously declaring that court names have “no legal meaning” — so “any animal name will do, even if extinct”.
Yet the Criminal Procedure Rules demand the court be named (“show me the lion!”), as does international law that the UK is a party to. These contradictions are the marker for fraud — court names matter when it comes to assigning justices, but anything can be presented to the public on a summons. That’s two-faced, and symptomatic of narrative being substituted for law.
At every stage of my own prosecution for a motoring (non-)offence, the story has changed. The Crown Prosecution Service have different story to the bench, and HMCTS updates is story depending on what pushback it experiences. If there was a legitimate case for a non-statutory court name like NWCMC1752, they would give it. There isn’t one. That’s fraud. The court name is counterfeit, not curable.
The problem the State now faces is whether to
double down on the fraud, insisting we all see a lion (“cure”) when it’s obviously a giraffe and hyena roped together (“counterfeit”), or
recognise the void — that there is no lion anywhere.
HMCTS decided it was in the business of “mass adjudication processing” rather than courts of law, and invented a service branding to put on summonses. But unlike with companies, there is no lawful facility for a court to “trade as” some other name — “this tiger is a lion”. That’s misunderstands the nature of the enterprise. As a result, HMCTS has descended into simulating courts (“lion costumes are lions, honest”), not declaring them (“the lion is over here”).
This uncomfortable reality cannot be suppressed forever, as those inside the system eventually recognise they have been fooled by the circus owner. It only takes one photograph of a real wild lion for everyone to recognise that the men and women in lion costumes are having us on. The public have tickets for a lion show, and there’s nothing on display that is passable as a lion, so they will get angry. All of the doctrine on cures (“have a sketch of a lion”), surplusage (“here’s a lion’s pet name”), and “lions have no meaning” is just a cover-up for the lack of any lion in the tent — or valid court summons.
But there you go, that’s what happens when you make a, erm, cat-egory error.
🦁