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In many ways, the case heard this week at Glasgow sheriff court was, unfortunately, not out of the ordinary. It was one of thousands of domestic violence trials to have passed through the Scottish courts since new legislation was introduced in 2019 to clamp down on a grimly persistent problem.
A woman had testified that her former partner had waged a campaign of terror against her, and that she suffered abuse while she was pregnant with his child. The court heard that her partner had grabbed her by the throat, pinned her to a door, kicked her off a bed and sent her abusive texts, sometimes calling her a “fat slag” and a “little bitch”.
What caught the eye of onlookers, however, was the identity of the man convicted.
James English may not be a household name, but in the online world he is a star, a podcaster with millions of followers across several social media platforms for his interview show, Anything Goes.
English has won plaudits for securing high profile guests, such as the footballer Paul Gascoigne and Rebecca Loos, who allegedly had an affair with David Beckham.
However, he has also attracted controversy for his ties to figures from the far right, particularly the English Defence League founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, more commonly known as Tommy Robinson. Last September, English appeared at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally, describing the event as “legendary” and praising Robinson for organising it.
During the course of his podcasting, English has also platformed personalities from what has become known as the manosphere.
Other guests on English’s podcast have included men accused of serious sexual offences, such as Andrew Tate, the internet personality recently charged with rape and sex trafficking, and the footballer David Goodwillie.
Goodwillie and his former teammate, David Robertson, were ordered to pay £100,000 in damages to Denise Clair after a judge in a civil case ruled they had raped her after a night out in 2011.
English, a 42-year-old father of three from Larkhall, Lanarkshire, reinvented himself as an independent journalist after appearing on Glow, a failed reality television show billed as a Glaswegian Towie.
Although he says he does not necessarily share the views of his guests, he has given a range of far-right activists a sympathetic platform. As well as hosting Robinson several times, he has interviewed the commentator Katie Hopkins and the Raise the Colours founder Ryan Bridge.
The Unite the Kingdom march was “beautiful” and “very patriotic”, English said. “The people that have been on stage speaking, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, it’s been unbelievable,” he said, on a clip posted on Robinson’s X account. “It’s been great to see so many people getting behind each other and uniting for a better future.”
English is one of many men with ties to the far right who have found themselves accused of intimate partner violence.
Project Starlight, a 2021 study commissioned by Counter Terrorism Policing, found that about a third of people referred to the government’s Prevent programme had links to a domestic abuse incident, either as an offender, victim, witness or a combination of all three. In 18% of these cases, extreme rightwing ideology was present.
Deniz Ugur, the deputy director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said police data had “consistently shown that a significant proportion of men arrested during far-right riots are already known to the police for domestic abuse”.
The Guardian previously revealed that 41% of those arrested in the 2024 riots, prompted by the murders of three young girls in Southport, had been reported to the police for alleged domestic abuse. After the riots, 21% were accused of similar offences.
English had already been charged with abusing the woman, a model he met on Instagram, by the time he travelled to London for the Unite the Kingdom protest. One of its central themes was the threat supposedly posed by migrant men to British women and girls. “It’s all about saving the children,” English said.
Some speakers promoted conspiracies about migration, including the “great replacement theory – the suggestion that there is a plot to replace white Europeans with people from other races. While English described the march as “peaceful”, the Metropolitan police said its officers faced “unacceptable violence” from some demonstrators, more than 20 of whom were arrested.
This week, Sheriff David Hall, who heard English’s case without a jury, convicted him of engaging in a course of abusive conduct towards his former partner between July 2022 and November 2023. The single charge included 19 allegations, six of which Hall judged to have been proved. He described the woman as “credible and reliable”.
Alice Russell Harris, public affairs lead at the domestic abuse charity Refuge, said: “The manosphere, which significantly overlaps with far-right communities, has helped amplify misogynistic narratives that objectify and seek to control women, casting women as subordinate to men and suggesting that those who reject male expectations deserve punishment. These ideas can directly promote abuse – both online and offline – by encouraging men to engage in coercion, control and related harms.”
English, who will be sentenced next month, was not in court to hear Hall’s verdict on Tuesday. However, the next day, he used his social media platforms to issue a rallying cry to his followers, sharing misinformation about the legal basis for his conviction.
“Men need to be worried, especially in Scotland,” he said. “Ladies, if you have a brother or a son, you should also be worried, because women can say anything and it’s a man’s job to prove his innocence.” He added that, in Scotland, “accusations are enough to get the man charged”.
In fact, Scottish law is underpinned by the principle of corroboration, where two independent sources of evidence are required to prove a criminal accusation. Defendants are innocent until proved guilty and the testimony of a single witness – no matter how compelling – is not enough to secure a conviction.
Neither English nor any of the nine people he claimed could support his version of events took the stand. English said this was because he was “so confident” he would be cleared. “I should never have been charged, never mind convicted,” he said.
Ugur said: “It is no surprise to see a convicted perpetrator of domestic abuse and prominent figure in the far right promote deeply harmful misinformation about violence against women and girls.
“Most victims do not report to the police, and those who do, know how many hurdles there are to seeing a conviction due to institutional cultures of victim blaming and failures to treat violence against women and girls with the seriousness it warrants.”
Despite the headlines his case has generated, English has remained defiant, criticising the mainstream media for covering it. “People need to be wary, because if they want you, they’ll find something to get you on,” he said, adding that he was “tired of men getting fucked over”.
He did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, but vowed on his social media channels to continue broadcasting. “I’m still going to keep doing what I’m doing,” he said. “If anything, it’s just fuelled me to keep raising the bar.”
