Free Lucy Connolly

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this 41-year-old wife and mother is a political prisoner

Lucy Connolly (photo: ‘X’)

Last week, a judge at Birmingham crown court sentenced Lucy Connolly to 31 months in prison. On 29 July, in the hours after the horrific slaying of three young girls in Southport, and when false suggestions had begun to emerge that the perpetrator was a migrant, this 41-year-old wife of a local councillor and mother of one, had taken to social media and posted the following message:

Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards 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.

Most people of good conscience would agree that, even allowing for the anger and revulsion that Connolly felt over the events in Southport, these were despicable words to write. Millions of her fellow citizens shared in that anger and revulsion, but almost all refrained from posting anything remotely similar. Connolly herself appeared to regret her actions, as within a few hours of posting the message, she deleted it.

In the event, Connolly – who, the court heard, was of previous good character and has herself experienced the loss of a child – was convicted of having distributed material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred. She has also lost her career as a registered childminder.

Some have argued that Connolly got everything she deserved and is entirely unworthy of sympathy. Others, though in no way apologists for her appalling comments, have been left with a feeling that this was another case of selective tough justice – that the sentence handed down to Connolly was not only disproportionate to her actions, but also inconsistent with how other – and often more serious – crimes are dealt with by our justice system.

I fall into the latter category.

It would be disingenuous not to recognise here that Connolly admitted the offence. But there may be a host of reasons why a defendant pleads guilty in a particular case – few defendants are themselves experts in the law and will often be acting on advice – and we shouldn’t allow the plea in this case to blind us to some of the glaring questions that have been thrown up by it.

Remember that Connolly was convicted of ‘stirring up’ racial hatred. To my mind, ‘stirring up’ is an unsatisfactory term and one that is open to interpretation. But, if we were looking for guidance on its meaning in this case, the judge, in his sentencing remarks, said that Connolly had ‘intended to incite serious violence’.

Dictionaries I have consulted on the word ‘incite’ define it, variously, as ‘to encourage’, ‘to spur to action’ and ‘to urge or persuade’. Now, I am not a qualified lawyer, but it seems to me that saying you wouldn’t care if someone took a particular action – ‘Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care’ – is discernibly different from positively urging someone to carry out that action. True, that distinction will not, in the eyes of many, make Connolly’s words any less repugnant; but it does seem to raise a question about whether the threshold for a criminal offence has been met.

After all, there are lots of things we might be unconcerned about if they were to happen – we might even welcome them – but that is not the same as inciting others to do those things. I am happy to say, on the record, that I wouldn’t shed any tears if Ian Huntley’s life were ended by a fellow prisoner tomorrow; but I certainly wouldn’t encourage a fellow prisoner to end Ian Huntley’s life. You see the difference?

Doubtless a clever and enlightened criminal lawyer will happen to read this piece and scoff at my naivety and ignorance. Lawyers – especially those who like to parade their expertise on social media – can be a bit like that. So I’ll expect the incoming. But the law isn’t the preserve of legal professionals; it is there to serve all of us, and if it is drafted or applied in a way that appears unclear or inconsistent to the ordinary citizen, it is perfectly legitimate to point it out.

In addition, and even if we were to accept that Connolly had intended to incite, we are surely entitled to ask whether it was likely that anyone would act on her words. Was there really any chance that, in the short time her message remained visible, one of Connolly’s social media followers, or anyone else, would read it and be inspired to grab some petrol and head to the nearest migrant hotel? Surely this question ought to matter when considering a charge of incitement. If Connolly had spoken the same words during a group conversation in a pub, would the law have reacted in the same way? If not, why not?

More important than these technical points, however, are the wider political implications of both this conviction and various others that followed the riots in the summer. Don’t misunderstand me: some people did some atrocious things during the unrest and deserved to see the inside of a prison cell. I have no sympathy on a personal level for anyone who decides to wreak havoc on his community through violence and intimidation.

But can anyone seriously deny that, in some cases, the sentences we have seen meted out are wildly out of step with what normally passes for justice in our courts? We have all read stories – they seem to come along every five minutes these days – of cases in which defendants convicted of appalling crimes – sometimes having inflicted serious violence on innocent people – managed to avoid prison and received nothing more than a community order or suspended sentence.

I’ll give you one example – a conviction that occurred in the same month that Lucy Connolly was arrested. Andruas Abdurachmamovas was captured on CCTV attacking a complete stranger on a Lincolnshire street. He punched and kicked the victim in the head, leaving him unconscious in the middle of the road. The victim sustained lasting physical and psychological damage. Abdurachmamovas, 39, was found guilty of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He received a suspended sentence and walked free from court.

There are, I promise you, plenty of similar examples; one need only spend a few minutes browsing the internet to find some of them. These are cases in which victims were caused genuine hurt and suffering, but the sanctions passed down to offenders were lenient in the extreme and stand in stark contrast to the stiff sentences dished out to those involved in the summer unrest, including defendants who were punished for social media posts.

Should we be surprised by all this? Probably not. After all, we have become a society in which, through a web of restrictive laws – which the government has threatened to expand in the wake of the riots – words are policed as ruthlessly as actions, and causing ‘offence’ may land someone in the dock.

We are also a society in which an elite class seeks more and more to limit the parameters of ‘acceptable’ opinion. Anyone who steps beyond those parameters might be taking their livelihood, reputation and, at the extreme end, their personal freedom in their hands.

This drive for ideological conformity, rooted principally in a belief in the new religion of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, has led to a situation where subjective political opinions are presented as hard and incontestable truth. Witness, for example, the words of Judge Melbourne Inman KC when sentencing Connolly. He told her, ‘It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive.’ The judge recited this mantra as though it were established fact, rather than merely his own personal belief (albeit one that is shared by most other members of the elite class).

Is it possible, too, that judges are being subjected to a bit of peer pressure? Having seen their colleagues hand out harsh sentences in every other case connected to the unrest, would any judge want to risk his or her professional reputation by being the first to take a more judicious approach? Moreover, against the prevailing (but false) narrative – encouraged by the prime minister, no less – that the violence was exclusively the work of the far-right, it is easy to see why members of the judiciary would want to be seen to be adopting the most hardline stance.        

Lucy Connolly’s real sin was that she saw the red mist after hearing about the horrifying Southport incident and posted something intemperate and deeply unpleasant on social media. Explaining how she had been traumatised by the death, in horrible circumstances, of their own toddler son, Connolly’s husband explained that ‘she will kick off’ when she learns of harm being done to another child.

None of that is to excuse her actions. But even if it is believed that her words did amount to incitement, it is hard to see how forcing Connolly to languish for up to two-and-a-half years in a prison cell, apart from her husband and young daughter, is in any way proportionate or consistent with the soft-touch approach that usually characterises our criminal justice system.

Connolly has plainly been made an example of – and for political reasons. In that context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that she is a political prisoner.

She does not belong in jail.

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