Jail threat to OAP pals over ‘noisy dominoes’
Man fights injunction on shouting
A BLACK pensioner says a ban on his group of friends being loud when they play dominoes amounts to racial discrimination.
Ernest Theophile, 73, says he and his friends have gathered in a London square to play for 12 years.
Following complaints of noise, Westminster Council secured an injunction against social gatherings at Maida Hill Market Square in North London.
The council said there were more than 200 complaints and that one resident claimed they had been forced to move. In March last year a judge tweaked the order, allowing gatherings in the square. But people are under threat of being jailed if caught “playing loud amplified music, drinking alcohol and shouting and swearing”. Mr Theophile, whose family came to the UK from Dominica in the 1950s, says the order amounts to discrimination. He said: “If you are West Indian you just can’t play dominoes without making a bit of noise.” His barrister Tim James-Matthews told Central London County Court: “The majority of those whose behaviour is constrained by the injunction... share a protected characteristic: race.
“An injunction restraining the activities of a minority of black people in a public square where there is a theoretical power of arrest and sanction of imprisonment is indirectly discriminatory.”
Mr Theophile’s solicitor
Anne McMurdie said after the hearing: “It’s really curtailing how they have always socialised together.
“They can’t have a beer with it either.” Westminster Council insists that seeking the court ban was a reasonable response in light of widespread disruption at the square in the past. The disruption included public drinking, drug dealing and abuse as well as urination in the street, it was claimed. Judge Heather Baucher has reserved her decision on whether the council properly assessed its duties under the Equality Act.