Two years. That is the prison sentence given to Del Somerville, a 42-year-old father of two from Portsmouth, for throwing a plastic bottle and swearing at police during an anti-migration protest on September 6, 2026.

Somerville had previously pleaded guilty to violent disorder at Portsmouth Crown Court, and was sentenced on September 24. Judge Daniel Sawyer told him the sentence would "act as a deterrent to others following subsequent protests in the area." Prosecutor Edward Warren told the court the protest had begun after the arrival of 114 migrants who had crossed the Channel from France and were brought ashore at Eastney Marina by Coastguard and RNLI vessels. Somerville was identified on police body-worn video throwing a small bottle and shouting at officers.

The prosecution's own description of the initial gathering was "peaceful and lawful." Somerville's defence barrister, Helen Easterbrook, told the court he had been trying to act as a "calming influence" on the crowd before throwing the bottle "in frustration." He is the first person sentenced following the Eastney protest. Four others are awaiting sentence on the same violent disorder charge.

The judge said his aim was deterrence. Consider, then, what Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley was saying at the same time. Spiked reported Rowley warning that defendants "repeatedly charged with knife offences and even gun offences" were being bailed rather than remanded. He drew particular attention to the case of Zafer Dogan, who had taken thousands of photographs of women and girls from a bedroom window overlooking a playground, then used AI technology to convert them into sexual images. Dogan's sentence, Spiked reported: two years and four months. That is four months more than Somerville received for throwing a bottle.

The pattern goes further back. Spiked reported that in October 2024, following the Southport riots, Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months for a social media post the courts ruled constituted stirring up racial hatred. A second man, Jamie Michael, was remanded in custody for 17 days on an identical charge before a court found him not guilty. In each case, the defendant faced prosecution connected to immigration-related public disorder, pursued hard.

Judge Sawyer's logic was transparent. He set Somerville's sentence not to match his individual act but to influence people who had not yet committed one. That is deterrence. It is also a departure from proportionality. When those two principles conflict in cases with political salience, the one that loses tends to be the same one each time.

Seven police officers were injured and treated at the Eastney protest, and Coastguard and Border Force vehicles were damaged, Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary confirmed. Somerville also faces a separate trial at Portsmouth Magistrates Court on a charge of assaulting a police officer relating to his arrest on September 11; he entered a not guilty plea.

Paul Birch, a former police officer and counter-terrorism specialist writing for Spiked, put it directly: when the aggressiveness of a prosecution tracks the political salience of an offence, the law's claim to impartiality is gone. That claim does not come back easily.