Inside the Common Law Court conspiracy theory that led to attempted kidnap and ignoring council tax
Dozens of councils and other public-sector organisations and charities have warning notices issued due to the growth of a niche theory linked to Magna Carta, reports Katherine Denkinson
Standing over six feet tall, Matthew Martin cut an imposing, yet deeply vulnerable figure when he appeared in Chelmsford Crown Court last year giving an impassioned statement in his own defence. Talking at speed, often breaking down into tears, 47-year old Martin told the court how he and two companions became convinced that the legal system no longer had any power over them and it was their duty to “arrest” a senior coroner and “shut down” the coroner’s court. They had “learned the truth”, Martin explained, from a man named Mark Kishon Christopher.
Four years earlier, Martin and friends had been living normal, suburban lives. Now, after a ten-day hearing, they were all found guilty of attempted kidnapping and given prison sentences of between three and seven years. So what convinced them to walk into a coroner’s court carrying handcuffs, determined to exact “corporal punishment” on a man they had never met? The Lead took a deep dive into a niche belief system called the Common Law Court (CLC) to find out.
The CLC is a British, pseudo-legal conspiracy which has existed under various names since the 1990s. Based on one man’s misappropriation of Magna Carta and reliant upon a nonsensical linguistic code called Quantum Grammar, the CLC teaches followers that the law only has power over them if they consent to it. Sold as a way to “beat the system”, leaders of CLC groups also tell followers that they no longer have to pay bills, rent or council tax.
Mostly unheard of prior to the pandemic, the negative effect of Covid on peoples’ livelihoods, coupled with a lack of social media moderation opened the door for Christopher and others to take their conspiracy mainstream.
In 2021, this led to multiple groups taking action. April that year saw a Scottish beautician lead a group of people into Edinburgh castle, claiming they were “seizing” it for “King Arthur”, who was later revealed to be an unemployed security guard. In October, a different group attended the home of Dr Hillary Jones to “serve notice” for his role in promoting the Covid vaccine and, two months later, a Liverpudlian man led a group of “common law constables” into Aintree Hospital demanding the nurses discharge an elderly patient with dementia.
In all cases, the groups left peacefully after handing out conspiracy-filled paperwork. Despite their actions scaring those they targeted, as Covid faded they disappeared from the headlines and there was no attempt by social media platforms to remove their groups, which have since grown and are having a continued, negative effect on the lives of vulnerable people. In the last twelve months, this has led to multiple followers losing their homes to the bank and their children to social services.
Hannah’s story: How she led a CLC group
Hannah Jackson is the leader of a CLC group whose child was removed from her care last year. A fifty-five year-old mother of four, well-spoken and university-educated, Hannah runs her own ‘‘court’ which holds meetings where real family court cases are “tried” before their self-appointed jury. At these meetings, family courts are often found to be operating “unlawfully” and the “plaintiffs” told they should stop engaging with them.
When we chat on the phone I ask her how she discovered the CLC and she tells me that she has “a qualifying law degree”, but left before taking the Bar exam because she “didn’t feel comfortable” and realised that “the so-called courts… are not really courts at all. They’re business administration centres”.
Having come to this realisation, Hannah tells me, she left law, went into business and “was a very successful business woman”. Companies House shows that she ran a cleaning company which closed around 2013 with £52.00 in the bank. Shortly after this, Hannah moved with her sons from London to Devon, where she self-published books and dabbled briefly with professional mediumship, posting online as TheFemaleJesus and claiming to be the reincarnated Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalen.
This was also the time that she encountered a Canadian man online called John Little, who taught her “what [she] now identifies as the ‘legal fiction’”. This is a basic tenet of the CLC; the concept that people exist in two forms and that your name on legal documents is ‘fiction’ and not connected to your actual, physical body unless you “contract with the government”. In real terms, this means that a lot of CLC proponents return council tax letters marked “no contract” in the belief that it exempts them from paying. There are no cases where this has ever been effective, so many councils including West Nortfolk, Bexley, North Tyneside and Sheffield and the homeless charity Shelter now have disclaimers on their websites informing people that non-payment can lead to court action and imprisonment.
Another CLC belief which Hannah expounds on at length, is the idea that everyone has a Trust from which the Crown Corporation can take money. According to Hannah, this is because registering a child’s birth is effectively “transferring the title to the Crown Corporation”, i.e. signing over ownership of that child to the government.
When I ask her to explain the Trust, Hannah tells me that “whenever you’re born …you have a share of the Land, Air and Water. That is law…and when your mum and dad pop you along to the birth registrars, they transfer your land, air and water rights [aka your Trust] to the crown corporation”. Asking which specific law this relates to, produces an interesting response as she tells me that Land, Air and Water rights are “the real law” because the letters L A and W spell law.
This literal understanding is also a feature of Quantum Grammar (QG) which declares that each word has only one meaning regardless of context. Hannah personally feels QG is “a bit over the top and a bit obfuscated”, but still regards its inventor as “a bloody genius” and has used parts of it to create the paperwork her group have handed to various courts. In 2022, this involved using Facebook to gather a team of volunteers to “take over” Exeter Crown Court. Whilst Hannah calmly handed over her paperwork, the behaviour of her followers outside led to multiple people being arrested.
During these activities, Hannah tells me, she “became a target for the system” but “they didn’t want to touch me because they knew how powerful I was, so they went after my sons.” Claiming that the police kept “accusing the boys of doing things they didn’t” (including arson and an attempted stabbing), she tried to sue the council for £25 million. In 2023, social workers suggested taking her sons into care, giving her “no option but to…flee our home and move into an abandoned house”. Whilst there, she tells me, the council attempted to evict the family which led to “about thirty armed police…[who] smashed their way in, broke down walls and kidnapped my 16 yr old son”.
In a Facebook video of this event, Hannah’s son can be seen standing calmly with about ten unarmed officers. His step-father gives him money and a hug before he is placed into a car and driven away. An officer attempts to explain to Hannah what is happening, but she talks over him claiming “There is no contract with any administrative court…”.
This was also the reason, she tells me, that she never attended any of the family court hearings while he was in foster care. Admitting that this was hard for her, Hannah said “they’d say to [my son] ‘oh your mum doesn't care, she’s not coming to court to try and fight for you’. But thank god [he] knew…that if I didn't go there was a very good reason.”
Hannah’s son is now eighteen and has returned to live with the family, who have since moved to Norwich where she is home-educating her youngest child. She tells me this is easy because “myself and my husband have teaching qualifications” but, when I marvel at how she found the time to study for this, admits that “I’m not a qualified teacher. I have two degrees…my law degree and…a drama and theatre degree”. She then tells me that she is reluctantly “playing the legal fiction game” and cooperating with the council because she wants to “run [her] own alternative provision” and needs to do the relevant safeguarding courses.
In the course of our conversation it becomes apparent that, whilst Hannah clearly wants to do the best for the children, her deeply embedded belief system presents a real obstacle.
This is seen most clearly in her response to a challenge. When I point out that numerous lawyers have challenged the verity of the CLC and ask “have you ever considered that you might just be wrong?”, her reply is a resolute “no”. When I challenge her claim that the Cestui Que Vie Act means we are all subject to maritime law, pointing out that it was put in place to protect people from greedy landlords after the Great Fire of London, Hannah hastily tells me that “the great fire of London would have been orchestrated” before launching into a description of how birth registrations enslave people to the state.
This inability to discuss the system beyond soundbites is something I have encountered with other CLC proponents. It was also apparent in the trial of Mark Kishon Christopher et al, where both Matthew Martin and another defendant, Sean Harper, spent hours spouting paragraphs of learned “knowledge” only to dissemble and claim “student immunity” when corrected by the extremely frustrated Judge.
The lapse into excuses and subject-changing to an area where they can be the ‘expert’, is also a feature of many conspirators I’ve interviewed. Confident when surrounded by those who see them as an authority, many fumble when faced with an informed response. Recent research suggests that this is linked to self-esteem and work by psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky has shown that “people who feel powerless or vulnerable are more likely to endorse and spread conspiracy theories.”
This was very much on display in Chelmsford Crown Court, where Sean Harper told the judge he “met Mark the day after lockdown when my father died and the whole world shut down”. Matthew Martin encountered Mark online, already knee-deep in QAnon and convinced he was saving children from trafficking. His fear of these imagined child abusers was so great, that he willingly paid Mark thousands to teach him how to “be a Sheriff”.
While many people have low self-esteem and feel powerless, far fewer get roped into dangerous conspiracies. Of those who do, a deciding factor seems to be that many conspiracies are based in a misinterpretation of actual events. Councils across the country have faced criticism for their use of aggressive bailiff companies to recoup unpaid council tax, whilst the family court system has long been in need of an overhaul. Forced adoptions have happened in the past and there were pedophiles in central government; all of which have been used as the basis for CLC activity.
Whilst none of these events are evidence of an overarching conspiracy, it does not take much for bad actors to take advantage of unmoderated social media and use them to manipulate desperate people to act against their own best interests.
Mark Christopher’s history is testament to this. Ten years ago, he was featured in a BBC documentary attempting to sell bleach-based “cures” for autism. Under his current mantle of “Plenipotentiary Judge”, he made more than £12k from followers paying to hear his webinars on QG and the CLC. Harper paid him more than thirty thousand pounds for his own lessons and Martin used a £70k inheritance to pay for the equipment he used to do Mark’s bidding. Not bad wages for a man whose last legitimate job was as a driving instructor.
So how do we challenge these beliefs and prevent more peoples’ lives from being ruined?
Yisroel Greenberg, a lawyer for Ealing council who wrote a how-to guide on CLC proponents, states that “there is no single approach suitable for all people deploying [CLC] arguments. Much depends on the individual, and whether they are intensely committed to their worldview or simply trying something found on the internet.”
A similar belief is held by Dr Stephan Lewandowsky, chair of Cognitive Psychology at Bristol University. He told The Lead that part of rescuing people from conspiracies comes down to understanding why they use them to begin with. “There are some people” he said “who use conspiracist argumentation as a get out of jail free card” claiming, for example, that climate change is a hoax to avoid justifying regular international flights. These people can, he said, be reasoned out of their beliefs but, when people are completely committed, “it becomes part of their identity to believe in this conspiracy [and] it’s deeply problematic”.
Regarding the involvement of social media in the spread of conspiracy beliefs, he said it was a “major contributing part of this because it allows all this nonsense to be articulated but it gives people a sense of strong support…it allows people to form epistemic communities that give them strength of belief that you’d never be able to form in real life.”
Saying that holding deep conspiracy beliefs was psychologically similar to membership of a cult or terrorist cell, Lewandowsky said that the only thing which really works for those people is “extended psychotherapy”. He added that there had been recent research conducted which showed that Large Language Models (e.g. ChatGPT) had good results in reducing conspiracy beliefs. The experiment engaged 2190 believers of a specific conspiracy in personalized, evidence-based dialogues with GPT-4 Turbo and discovered that it reduced even deeply entrenched conspiracy beliefs by around 20%. An effect which persisted two months later. Lewandowsky attributed this to the fact that an LLM is “infinitely patient, it never gets irritated, it always…offers more counter arguments”.
Discussing the growth of the CLC during lockdown, Lewandowsky agreed that the issue should be taken far more seriously than it is, comparing the situation to the January 6th insurrection and noting that “if you have too many people doing this sort of thing [democracy] becomes dysfunctional”. Regarding the limited action taken by councils and the government, he compared their approach to “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”.
The Lead contacted a number of councils across the country to understand what specific problems they were facing. Only Lewisham responded.
A spokesperson for Lewisham Council said: “Residents cannot opt out of paying council tax, and claims of exemption based on the "Freeman on the Land" movement or similar ideologies hold no legal standing. Failure to pay council tax will result in recovery actions. Council tax collected is pooled into a central fund to benefit all residents in Lewisham and means we can provide support to our most vulnerable residents, as well as deliver vital frontline services we all need and value, like our libraries and parks, youth services, bin collections, community safety and keep the streets clean.
“If residents have concerns or questions regarding council tax liability, it is crucial they seek advice from qualified legal professionals rather than relying on online articles or forums which may provide incorrect or misleading information.”
The apparent lack of consideration given to the CLC (beyond the fact it is incorrect), suggests that more needs to be done by both local and central government to both understand and proactively counteract this destructive belief system.
About the author: Katherine Denkinson is a freelance investigative journalist with an extensive body of work on conspiracies and the the Far Right, published in multiple UK newspapers. Her reporting is informed by traditional journalistic methods and OSINT techniques, focusing on deep-dives into the murky waters of online communities. She is also the co-host of chart topping podcast, Carrie Jade Does Not Exist.
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