Inside the bizarre world of the Freemen, who get out of parking fines and debts

CONSPIRACY theorists are getting off parking fines and thousands of pounds worth of debt with bizarre claims they are not subject to most UK laws.

Thousands of Brits are believed be living as freemen on the land, a highly secretive group that originated in 1970s America and Canada and has since spread its ideas across the pond.

Because of their secrecy their real numbers are unknown, but freemen are thought to be active in English-speaking countries including the UK, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Despite their numbers they remain under the radar, only rearing their heads by causing havoc in courts where they can disrupt the entire process by refusing to take part.

They are united in their belief that a big state conspiracy exists between the government and court system to take away their common law rights.

Lawyers have dismissed freemen's bizarre claims as a conspiracy theory and they are not known to have won any cases in court - but followers say they have used the wild theories to get out of parking tickets and demands for money from big businesses.

As a policeman who has worked in London for the past 19 years, Sam is an unexpected candidate for freemanism.

The 47-year-old dad, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, first came across the movement in 2016 when searching online for a way to manage his spiralling debt.

"I'd heard about freemen before but didn't know much about them, I just wanted justice,” he told the Sun Online.

“I was up against big bullying corporations. The information I found was a tool to help me fight against them.”

Sam claims to have written off £30,000 by arguing that the three banks he allegedly borrowed money from had behaved illegally by stopping an agreed reduced payment plan and continuing to charge him interest.

“What they were doing was unlawful,” he claimed. “Under contract law it was null and void. They were breaking the contract.”

Since then, Sam has read up more widely on freemen beliefs and now lives by what he sees as its and his own guiding principles – often in conflict with his role with the Metropolitan Police, in his eyes an “immoral” limited company.

"I police through common law," he said. "There's a fine line between the dictates of your job and what is right. I do what I think is right, I use my own tuition and logic.

“I wouldn’t hand out parking tickets, for example. And when I saw a woman stealing nappies from Lidl, I turned the other way."

Sam estimates there are "several thousand" other freemen in Britain alone, but says he acts alone and has contact with only a few other freemen.

“If I had my way we’d live in an anarchic system, one that is self-governing," he said. " The whole current system is corrupt and set-up. It may sound nutty, but it's nothing less than enslavement.”

Freemen arguments like these are sometimes wheeled out by those who unwilling to follow the law.

The Sun Online reported in October how motorist Dean Renshaw was stopped for driving an untaxed car - but refused to admit any offence.

When cops pulled him over and told him his tax was "well out of date", the self-styled freeman replied: "I do not respond to statutory acts because they are laws of the sea."

These sentiments resonate with Veronica Chapman, an author of several freemen texts who created and runs fmotl.com, a website for the community with more than 16,000 monthly subscribers from all around the world.

The extraordinary site contains entire sections on “how to get out of fixed penalty notices” as well as sample letters to write to banks about extracting oneself from debts.

But Veronica maintains that freemen are slaves, not con-artists.

"Freemen are accused of trying to get out of paying for things, but nothing could be further from the truth,” she said. “All freemen are trying to do is to prevent themselves from being robbed."

Freemen may be able to bamboozle the odd debt collector or parking warden, but they are yet to win a single case in a court of law.

Dozens have tried – including Mark Coles, a self-declared freeman on the land who refused to answer a judge’s questions about his identity and claimed his sentencing hearing was a “perjury” at Taunton Crown Court.

Appearing before the judge, he repeatedly said: "I am not Mark Coles, I am a man."

Somerset Live reports how he told the court he was appearing "under duress" and added that "Mr Coles is a fiction, and a trust entity.”

People who class themselves as FMOTL say they are born with one name and given another by the government through the name written on their birth certificate. This is sometimes known as the “strawman” theory.

This means that “freemen” claim to have a sort of “get out of jail” card by saying that any court is holding only their fictional self - the name written on their birth certificate - to account rather than them.

But former government lawyer Carl Gardner describes the freemen concepts as “pseudo law” that “apes certain legal modes but is used to attack law operating in any kind of serious way”.

He believes the movement originated in the US or Canada with a group who call themselves the sovereign citizens, an idea which spread to the now distinct freemen - who also hold that the person is sovereign.

"This seems to be attached to what we call white nationalism," he said.

"This can appeal to people who are on the fringes of the far right, who feel isolated. I think some of those people have tried to develop this idea that the individual can govern themselves."

But he dismissed the ideas as “sinister nonsense".

"They use law like magic spells. That means they're no longer subject to the law.

"It is a fringe thing, and a conspiracy. I think the far right is very invested in it, I think we all need to be a bit careful of it."

He added: "Some people don't mean well but take advantage of others, some of them may have mental health issues and be vulnerable. It's a concern that people are taking these ideas and using them."

However bizarre they may seem, freemen beliefs have changed the direction of police officer Sam’s life. Over the next months he plans to quit the police force, de-register from paying “illegal” tax and give back his own sort of tax through services to the community.

“I’m leaving here to have a more honest job,” he said. “Learning about freemen beliefs has opened so much for me that I didn’t realise was there. It’s totally changed my perspective.”