Britain’s darkest hour has followed its finest hour by 78 years.

Tommy Robinson has been freed from a stint in prison that he never should have been serving in the first place. The New York Times reported: “On Wednesday, the Court of Appeal ordered his release, pending a new hearing in his case. The court questioned the speed with which he had been tried and convicted, noting that it took five hours from the time of his arrest to a conviction.”

Indeed. Tommy Robinson was arrested, tried, and sentenced with a Stalinist rapidity, for the crime of calling attention not only to the Muslim rape gang crisis in the UK, but to the abject failure of British officialdom to deal adequately with that crisis, for fear of being charged with “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

Thus it was only just to free Tommy Robinson, and lessens the impression that Britain is becoming a police state in which it is illegal to criticize Islam and mass Muslim migration in Britain today. Britain is still on that road, but apparently in this case the May government was feeling too much pressure to keep Tommy in prison.

However, no one should get the idea that Theresa May’s government has suddenly decided to behave decently toward foes of jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others. Ezra Levant reported Thursday that “Tommy was physically and psychologically abused in prison. You can see it in his face. His appearance is shocking — he lost 40 pounds of weight in just two months. If he were to have stayed in prison much longer, I fear his very life would have been in danger.”

“I’m not a victim, I’m a target,” Robinson said in an interview with Levant, and the Mailonline reported that he said: “What they tried to do was to mentally destroy me. That wasn’t a prison sentence, that was mental torture.”