This British woman should not be in jail
The shocking case of Lucy Connolly --and what it tells us about the free speech crisis
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Sometimes, something happens that is so deeply shocking, so profoundly disturbing that it makes you question your own country. It makes you ask: ‘Am I really living in the free, civilised, democratic nation I thought I was living in?’
At least, that’s what I asked myself this weekend when I read about the extremely troubling and almost unbelievable case of Lucy Connolly, who is fast becoming another powerful symbol of Britain’s severe and spiralling free speech crisis.
Who is Lucy Connolly, you might ask? She’s a young mother, she’s the wife of a sick husband, and she is, by all accounts, a respected and well-liked childminder.
But she is also a woman who, after the senseless murder of three little girls by the son of Rwandan migrants in Southport last summer, when emotions were running very high in the country, tweeted something very inflammatory.
“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f---ing hotels full of the b-----ds for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”
Is it hard to read? Yes. Offensive? Sure. But does it justify what was then handed out to Lucy Connolly by our country’s justice system —a prison sentence of two years and seven months?
Yes, you read that right. Despite having never physically touched, abused, or hurt a single person, despite having never started a fire or thrown anything at a hotel housing asylum-seekers, Lucy Connolly, because of that tweet, was jailed for nearly three years. She was denied bail. She was urged to plead guilty. And she was sent to jail.
And now, despite becoming eligible for temporary release last November, which would have allowed this mother to at least spend some time with her 12-year-old daughter and sick husband, prison bosses are refusing to grant this temporary leave.
Which is exactly why I wanted to use whatever reach and influence I have through this Substack by writing about the case and drawing more attention to it.
Because, perhaps like you, I happen to think the way Lucy Connolly has been treated by the British state and the justice system, encouraged by Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the top, is utterly outrageous. And like millions of other people in this country, I see it as yet another powerful symbol of our ‘two-tier’ justice system.
Just think, for a moment, about all we have seen alongside the case of Lucy Connolly. A justice system that recently, remarkably, released an assortment of hardened criminals to make room for the likes of Connolly in our crowded prisons, and which still threw her in jail even after she had realised her mistake and deleted the tweet, on her own accord, after it had been public for only four hours. I ask you, is this really the kind of person the British state should be locking up alongside convicted murderers, rapists, and thieves?
A justice system, furthermore, that recently let the likes of Labour Member of Parliament, Mike Amesbury, who was filmed physically assaulting one of his own constituents, escape jail altogether while Connolly, who did not lay her hands on anybody, was sent down for the best part of three years.
A justice system which treats Lucy Connolly’s speech crime this harshly but which seemingly has no real issue at all with student mobs and trans extremists demanding we ‘kill all TERFS’ or radical Islamists and leftists singing highly offensive antisemitic tropes and celebrating mass murder on the streets of London for months and months on end.
A justice system that recently suggested, through the Sentencing Council, that people from racial, sexual, gender, and religious minority groups should have their identities and other mitigating factors taken into account when sentencing but which clearly does not think the same should apply to people from the white, straight, British majority, like Connolly, who tragically lost her 19-month-old baby shortly before the Southport atrocity.
A system in which some lawyers and judges really do think we should consider the impact of things like the slave-trade when analysing the contemporary behaviour of criminals from minority groups but which clearly did not care much at all about the fact that Lucy Connolly, who had been diagnosed with PTSD after losing her baby, might have struggled to process the mass stabbing of little girls in Southport.
As journalist Allison Pearson points out in a forensic essay about the case, while Lucy Connolly was urged to plead guilty so as to reduce her sentence, “the judge paid remarkably little heed to personal and general mitigations: Lucy Connolly was a first-time offender, a person of good character, a mother of a 12-year-old child, a carer for a husband with a serious blood disease; she suffered acute anxiety and was on medication as a result of huge personal trauma”. Again, I ask you — why has this woman been thrown in prison? And why, months on, is she still in prison?
The answer, of course, is that this is about much more than Lucy Connolly.
Make no mistake —this isn’t just about one woman, even if her case is now going viral around the world.
It’s about the now unavoidable fact that Britain is in the midst of the very thing Keir Starmer tried to downplay and ignore during his recent tense meeting with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office —a major free speech crisis.
It’s not just about this young mother. It’s about the parents who, as I wrote last week, were arrested by no less than six police officers after daring to complain about their local school in a WhatsApp Group.
It’s about the more than one hundred Brits who have also been hurled into prison for what they wrote on social media in the aftermath of Southport, often in the privacy of their own homes, while the likes of disgraced BBC presenter Huw Edwards, found with indecent images of children, somehow managed to avoid prison time.
It’s about the very long list of British citizens who have now been arrested, marched off to their local police station and often charged for similar ‘speech crimes’, ranging from Royal Marine Jamie Michael, who was arrested and charged after sharing a video online criticising illegal migration and calling for peaceful protests, to veteran Darren Brady, who was arrested and handcuffed for ‘causing anxiety’ by posting an image of Pride flags arranged into a swastika, an attempt to protest against what he sees as the dogmatic and authoritarian nature of Pride celebrations.
It’s about the fact, also revealed this week, that British police authorities are now, shockingly, making around 12,000 (!) arrests every year in this country because of what people wrote online, on mail, or said on the telephone —much of which, we are told, made others feel “anxious”, “uncomfortable” or “emotionally harmed”.
And it’s about the fact that, ever since the Southport atrocity, our country’s increasingly authoritarian Labour government has moved to expand the use of so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’, with more than 13,000 of these Orwellian ‘non-crimes’ recorded in the last year alone and more than 133,000 recorded since they were first introduced, under the equally hapless Tories, in 2014. Under these dystopian measures, anybody can have a black mark put against their name simply if somebody else, without having to provide any evidence at all, perceives them to have said something “offensive”.
This is what the Lucy Connolly case is really about. It’s not just about the absurd and frankly outrageous plight of one poor mother who said the wrong thing at the wrong time before almost instantly trying to take it back; it’s about how this case symbolises a much broader deterioration of free speech and liberty in this country.
A country that was once the home of free speech, free expression, and individual freedom is now rapidly morphing, before our very eyes, into a much more dogmatic, openly biased and controlling regime that is mainstreaming a stifling censorship, an increasingly activist and politicised two-tier justice system, and a society in which rising numbers of citizens, understandably, are concluding they should no longer speak freely and at ease around others. And I don’t know about you but this kind of country, where people feel their freedoms are steadily being stripped away, feels like a very fragile and dangerous place indeed.
How many Tory MPs have spoken out against the disgustingly Far Left 'judge' or this case? What protests, marches, crowdfunding campaigns have Tory MPs organised? None as far as I can see, they are utterly useless. Contrast their pathetic inaction (on any major issues) with Rupert Lowe raising over £500,000 to organise an inquiry into Southport. The Tory party got Britain into every mess it's now in, Dad's Army was more focused.
I too was moved by Allison Pearson’s article about Lucy’s plight. I am glad her case is getting a lot of coverage and hope she will be released very soon. One of the worst examples of a very worrying trend. I saw 1984 on stage a few months ago - full of chilling parallels. Thank goodness for the Free Speech Union.