The shocking case of Lucy Connolly is becoming a cause célèbre. In October, the Northampton childminder and wife of a Tory councillor received 31 months behind bars for stirring up racial hatred for a tweet on the night of the Southport massacre. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, now says her sentence was ‘excessive’ and that she is the victim of a ‘politicised two-tier justice system’; former PM Liz Truss wants her ‘released immediately’. With the White House already putting pressure on the UK over free-speech concerns, that the case has now reached Elon Musk will surely be setting nerves jangling in Downing Street.
The new attention comes after an article over the weekend by the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson on Connolly’s case. In Pearson’s telling, Lucy Connolly comes across as a loving mother and wife and a beloved childminder (to a very racially diverse group of charges, for what it’s worth). She has also suffered tragedy. In 2011, the Connollys lost their firstborn, Harry, aged just 19 months, after poor NHS care, a trauma for which Lucy received a diagnosis of PTSD and from which she never fully recovered.
It was this experience of losing a child that made her distress on the night of the Southport murders especially acute. She tweeted:
‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care …. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’ After this rash and ugly tweet, she took the dog out for a walk, mulled it over and later deleted her message. But the post had been screenshotted, and soon she had been arrested for stirring up racial hatred.
‘Whatever I’d done, [the] police made it quite clear I was going down for this’, she says, ‘their intention was always to hammer me’. So it proves. She received only a perfunctory psychiatric evaluation, where she was not even asked about the loss of her child. After she expressed reasonable concerns about illegal immigration in a police interview, the CPS issued a misleading statement that Lucy ‘told officers she did not like immigrants’.
Several legal professionals consider her 31-month sentence inordinately harsh, and we have learned about the effect her imprisonment is having on her family. In the absence of her mother, her daughter has started having behavioural issues at school. Her husband, Ray, who is ill, does his best, but is no substitute for Lucy.
Crueller still, Connolly is being denied release on temporary licence, even while it’s granted to fellow inmates convicted of more serious crimes. A low risk to the community and a primary carer to her child, Lucy ought to be a prime candidate for this normal step in the rehabilitation process. But Lucy claims that a prison official told her probation officer she wouldn’t get let out with a tag ‘because of press and public perception’. ‘The whole system is corrupt’, she says.
Still, blaming the system as a whole here strikes me as rather too charitable to those most responsible for what has happened to Connolly and others like her. Because the injustice that has followed the Southport unrest was no inevitability nor an accident: it stemmed from deliberate political choices.
In the most crucial part of the exposé, Connolly says she was influenced to plead guilty as a result of being held on remand. Behind bars, struggling to speak to a solicitor and with a trial date potentially months away, Lucy became panicked and demoralised. ‘A guilty plea looked like the fastest way to put this nightmare behind her’, explains Pearson. She pleaded guilty in the knowledge she would get a discount on her sentence, expecting to be out by Christmas.
In fact, having spoken to barristers, Ray Connolly was convinced that no jury would convict Lucy for a single horrible tweet. Indeed, this contention has been borne out by other speech cases following Southport that have come to trial. In October, former prison officer Mark Heath successfully argued that in his series of anti-immigration social media posts he simply was expressing his ‘strong views’, and was found not guilty of stirring up racial hatred. As for former Royal Marine Jamie Michael, in February the jury took such a dim view of the prosecution of this mild-mannered veteran over a YouTube video that they returned a not guilty verdict in just 17 minutes. Behind bars, however, Connolly never got to hear that she stood a strong chance of being found not guilty should she face a jury of her peers.
So the question one has to ask is: why was she not granted bail? After all, this was anything but normal practice. Lucy was not a danger to the community. She was certainly not going to offend again, utterly shocked by the experience and having in any case deleted her Twitter account. And this was a first offence by a respected childminder of good character.
But judges were refusing almost all bail applications connected to Southport, following explicit political direction from the top. Early in the disorder, a flinty-faced Sir Keir Starmer had told the nation: ‘The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand. Charges will follow. And convictions will follow.’
Politics also came to influence the justice system through the widely repeated claim that the unrest had been caused principally by disinformation on social media – ‘whipped up online’, in Starmer’s words. This claim has always been dubious at best, there being plenty of offline reasons for public anger. Indeed, arguably it was the authorities’ information vacuum about the Southport suspect that sparked so much mistrust, as the government’s terrorism adviser, Jonathan Hall KC, has recently said. This face-saving narrative about disinformation may well have pushed the justice system to come down harshly on online speech. The judge who sentenced 23-year-old care worker Cameron Bell – held on remand for a TikTok livestream in which she referred to migrants as ‘tramps’ – made this abundantly clear, saying: ‘The violence was fuelled by misinformation and misplaced far-right sentiment.’ In sentencing Connolly, Judge Melbourne Inman likewise drew a link between ‘social media’ and violence on the streets.
Further heightening the zeal of the state response was Starmer’s repeated claim that the unrest was the work of an organised ‘far-right’, a ‘tiny, mindless minority’ who had arrived from out of town to exploit the situation. In fact, the majority of those arrested were locals, as later analysis of the arrest data by both the Telegraph and the Guardian has found. Misleading as it was, this narrative served to aggressively politicise the unrest. In this telling, those involved were not fellow citizens distraught at a tragedy – who might therefore be treated even-handedly – they were enemies within, to be crushed. Judge Inman made the political nature of Lucy Connolly’s case clear when he admonished her from the bench that ‘It is [a] strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive’.
You don’t have to take my word for it that the Labour government is responsible for the state crackdown post-Southport – just take Starmer’s. ‘Crime has consequences’, he boasted in his rose garden speech near the end of August, adding, ‘I won’t tolerate a breakdown in law and order under any circumstances’. But if the prime minister can take personal credit for the Southport response, he must accept personal blame for the plight of its victims. Which means Lucy Connolly remains in prison for a tweet – her 12-year-old daughter without a mother, her sick husband without a carer. Two-tier Keir should not be allowed to forget it.
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