Tommy Robinson asked to leave a restaurant because staff felt uncomfortable serving him…

[harriethoyle]

… AIBU to enjoy this?!

If you spout objectionable views, don’t be surprised if people object to you!

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/tommy-robinson-kicked-out-hawksmoor-london-b1231594.html

What law are you referring to?

Why am I not surprised Farage has been brought into the equation. Just apply everything that's been said here. Copy and paste job.

This is exactly where my thoughts sit also. If the Equality Act is there to ensure we all are treated equally, then TR love or loath him is entitled to that same level of equality. If not then the Asher case reached the incorrect decision.

Personally as a business owner, I have had to deal with customers who I have considered complete knobs. Who's opinions I personally consider odious. However it is not their opinion I am intersted in, only what is inside their wallet.

Jeremy Clarkson bans Keir Starmer from his pub, plus anyone who dares to complain about his prices. I don't seem to recall reading the same objections to that.

Why is he entitled to the same protections? He doesn't come within any of the protected categories, which are obviously chose to cover minorities who are particularly vulnerable and particularly likely to be persecuted for those characteristics.

How far do you take your tolerance? if, say, someone came in loudly advocating strong Nazi principles including how great the concentration camps were and how more people should have been gassed, and if you could see it was upsetting other customers, would you really just sit back and leave them to it?

The principle that it is fine and even a good thing to refuse service to those you disagree with is dangerous.

It's the exact same logic that had a group of women turfed from a pub for holding the view that men can't be women and shouldn't be able to acquire women's rights to things like sex specific spaces.

If you seriously think being a Jew is equivalent to being a neofascist, you need more education than anyone here can possibly provide.

One of these things is not like the others.

Did he do any of those things while in the restaurant? Unless he did, then other peoples opinions and prejudices were the reason he was asked to leave.

If the pub owner doesn't want to serve people with those beliefs, they have a perfect right to refuse to do so. Why not? The same would apply to people who don't want to serve customers who believe that there is nothing wrong with sexual assault on women, child abuse or rape.

No idea. But the owners of restaurants are entitled to ask people to leave if they believe that other customers will be upset by them.

Not sure that you can really describe disliking someone with his record as being prejudiced.

It's the law that you can refuse service to anyone for any reason as long as it's not discriminatory.

If GC women are being refused service for being GC which is a legally protected belief, then the pub is being discriminatory.

I support the right of staff not to serve anyone they don't want to within the law.

If anything she is being supportive of Jews. She is pointing out that we should not persecute anybody based on current public opinion.

In my job I quite regularly interact with a man who I suspect sells methamphetamine for a living. Possibly also a professional grass. (Surprisingly very pleasant though.)

As well as a former (perhaps) pimp, who is a knobhead.

And any number of other criminals, weirdos, and questionable people.

If they are a threat they are banned, but mostly they are fairly reasonable and sometimes even chatty, so I listen to what they want and try and serve them as best I can.

If my staff told me they felt "unsafe" for serving these people because of their morals, I would tell them to get another job.

The world isn't that black and white though. There's loads of room for nuance and inconsistencies.

I don't think Christian bakers should be allowed to refuse to serve gay people because they're gay. I don't think they should be compelled to make cakes promoting gay marriage either.

I don't think restaurants should be allowed to refuse service to people based on protected characteristics, but I don't think they, or their staff, should be compelled to host people they don't like or feel uncomfortable around because those people are known dangerous dickheads.

Tommy loves this kind of attention. He literally just went to prison on purpose for it. I don't think there's a business in the land that could refuse to serve him on the grounds that he'd bring trouble to their doorstep.

So people can then deny someone because of skin colour disability or because they are for trans people or whatever new bandwagon people want to take offence too

So it's all fine if you dont like a person that makes it ok?, the lack of intelligent thought around this is no surprise though

Friend of mine worked in an organisation which had as a client the wife of a rapist and murderer. The circumstances were such that, at a minimum, she must have closed her eyes to what was going on. People who worked there accepted her being a client, but when the company threw a social and wanted to invite her there were strong objections: some had lived in the area where her husband operated and had been terrified. Company saw sense and didn't invite her. According to some people on here, they were wrong to do that. I don't believe they were.

Because it's a way of functioning that will lead to social and political breakdown. It's also very likely to backfire when trends change. One day you are kicking out TR and women's rights activists, - the next it's refusing to serve Zionists, or maybe Marxists.

Hey - why not have a kind of panel that investigates subversive opinions and blackballs them from social life? That seems like a great idea...

It's also massively overblown, all of these places serve people everyday that are outright criminals without even a modicum of concern about it.

That is literally what the law says. Why should anyone be forced to have someone they don't like on their premises?

The Equality Act is not designed (despite its name), to ensure that all people are always treated equally.

It's designed to stop people (save for in justifiable contexts) from being treated unequally on certain, specified grounds (particularly those where there was been a long history of discrimination against classes of people, based on prejudice).

Honestly, how could you even have laws that simultaneously protect people from certain prejudices and also protect people's right to act, carte blanche, with the exact same type of prejudice?

(Yes, there are some cases where two protected characteristics will clash, and some sort of rights-balancing analysis is needed, but those should be - and are - fairly limited circumstances).

The proper comparison is accepting her as a client.

No one is saying the staff needs to socialise with her.

The difference is that Tommy Robinson is a known racist, agitator and violent criminal. My mate owns a pub. She probably serves people with objectionable views all the time, but they haven't chosen to put themselves in the public eye. He wants headlines and notoriety. With that, is going to come people who refuse to interact with you.

I don't understand why people have such difficulty in understanding that that is the law currently and has been for years without all the dire consequences you predict. The simple fact is that, so long as the Equality Act is not being breached, no-one is forced to serve people they don't want to serve. That does indeed include Marxists.

The reality is, of course, that it doesn't create problems because most commercial businesses want to serve as wide a spectrum as possible, and in any event they have no idea what their customers' political opinions or backgrounds are. However, if some customers choose to flaunt objectionable opinions in the course of being massive self-publicists like Yaxley-Lennon, the owners of commercial premises are entitled to decide they don't want to serve them and indeed they don't want other customers to be put off by the possibility of encountering them.

Oh, what protected characteristic does Robinson have?

A clue: being a racist criminal isn't one.

Not really, because the business in question was one where they had no choice about accepting her as a client. A restaurant however does have that choice.