Earlier this year, 27-year-old civil servant Jonathan Dalton was jailed for two years for grievous bodily harm against a 69-year-old man who was a fellow passenger on a train. The victim was left with life-changing injuries.

Dalton’s motivation was his girlfriend’s objection to the elderly gentleman’s views on the remuneration of female tennis players. Dalton imposed his politically correct opinions on a frail old man by viciously jamming his fist into the pensioner’s eye-socket and breaking his cheekbones.

The judge’s comments described the scene of the attack:

“The victim doesn’t even know it’s coming. Smack. Smashes his cheek bones. Smashes his eye socket. You decided to change somebody’s life forever, that person having lived through life a lot longer than you have now faces the remainder of their life with diminished sight in one eye. You try and run away from him, having of course just given him an earful, having just smashed his face in. It was visible to everyone as the blood poured out of him.”

I believed this was a hate-crime. In my opinion, two years was insufficient punishment for this outrage. The only mitigations were previous good character and an early plea, but that was enough. There appeared from reports that Dalton’s long-term-partner, ‘Miss X’, had some responsibility for the assault on a blameless man as she was the person that initiated the argument. She was never charged.

It is possible for members of the public to petition the Government under the Unduly Lenient Scheme to appeal against short sentences. I wrote to my MP to alert the Government about this sentence and the fact that Miss X appeared to also be culpable.

Today, my MP forwarded a reply from Robert Buckland, the Solicitor General, who responded on the behalf of his colleague the Attorney General.

Mr Buckland states that current legislation does not include powers to extend sentences for an offence of the kind sent Mr Dalton to jail. However, he goes on to say that ‘the Government has committed to extending the scope of the Unduly Lenient Scheme so that a wider range of sentences can be challenged in future’.

About Miss X, the Solicitor General said that he was ‘informed by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that police considered the witness statements of those who were at the scene and concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove that she had encouraged Mr Dalton to commit the offence. As a result the CPS were not asked to provide charging advice and no further action was taken in relation to her.’

So a militant feminist refused to step up and take responsibility for the gruesome consequences of her beliefs and instead cowered behind her boyfriend. Miss X allowed a man to do all the time for a row she started. This is extremist cherry-picking at its most hypocritical. So much for equality when it comes to actually taking a stand for the sisterhood.

Miss X should own up to her part in this. She is Mr Dalton’s ‘long-term-partner’. That also includes in this crime.