Thank god Trump is interfering in the Lucy Connolly case. Shame on our Stasi-like dictators - Carole Malone

I’m delighted the leader of another democratic country is shining a light on the collapse of free speech here in the UK and on the gross injustice of a young Mum being banged up for nearly three years for a nasty tweet.

You have to wonder exactly why the UK Establishment seems hell bent on keeping the Northampton child minder in jail - when violent scumbags, paedophiles and sex offenders aren’t being sent to jail at all.

Just for context, in recent months, hundreds of shoplifters haveescaped jail, as has a domestic abuser with 52 previous offences, as has a paedophile with 110,000 indecent images of children. Yet Connollygets locked up for 31 months because she said something this Government and the police didn’t like.

It feels like an Establishment conspiracy – an authoritarian Government saying: “Do what we tell you to do or you’ll end up like Connolly.”

Yes, Connolly’s tweet was bloody awful. In a fit of anger and despair over the murders of those three little girls in Southport, which she believed had been carried out by an illegal immigrant, she wrote: “Mass deportations now. Set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the bastards for all I care.”

Yep, it was truly awful, but she quickly came to her senses and deleted the tweet. Her defence was that her grief at the murder of those little girls was so visceral, so intense at having lost a child of her own, that she lost control for a minute.

But Connolly never said people should actually go out and burn down migrant hotels, yet still she was charged with incitement to racial hatred and jailed for 31 months.

I’m sorry, but that punishment didn’t fit the crime.

Yes, Connolly said something very wrong and she should have been punished for it but not by nearly three years in jail, not when paedophiles and violent scumbags get a smack on the wrist.

And that’s why the US is monitoring what’s happening to Connolly because it says its worried about draconian hate speech laws all over Europe.

And I say again – Thank God it is because this country under Labour is fast becoming a Stasi-like dictatorship where anyone who says something this Government or the police don’t like is rounded up and put behind bars.

And the stats back that up. There are now 30 arrests a day for ‘grossly offensive’ speech under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

That’s why I’m glad the US is “interfering”. It understands what happens when free speech is eroded - this Government does not. Or maybe it does, but it wants people to be cowed and afraid to say what they think.

Reform boss Nigel Farage says: “Our American Republican friends seem to care more about free speech in the UK than our own Government."

And he’s right. But how shameful for Starmer that the US has to intervene in a situation he won’t.

Lord Young of the Free Speech Union said: “This is the third national humiliation in a week under Sir Kier’s Premiership. Has it really come to this that the US Government has to monitor human rights abuses in the UK? Britain is becoming the North Korea of the North Sea.”

He's right, too. Which is why we must stand up for free speech at every opportunity, even when whatever’s been said is clearly despicable, as it was in Connolly’s case.

It was just last week that three judges threw out her appeal, and it was after that that the White House, currently on a crusade for free speech, said it was monitoring her case, which had been brought to the attention of the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio. A spokesman for the State Department said: “We can confirm we are monitoring this matter. The United States supports freedom of expression at home and abroad and remains concerned about infringements on freedom of expression.” It’s why in March, it sent diplomats from the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to London to “affirm the importance of freedom of expression in the UK and across Europe.”

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just shameful they had to do it here in a country that, before Labour, was famed for being one of the most liberal on earth.

Of course, the anti-Trump mob is going apoplectic, screaming that this is interference in our politics. Talk about rank hypocrisy. Wasn’t it the Labour party that wanted to send 100 politicians and officials to the States to campaign for Kamala Harris and stop Trump getting into the White House?

But typical of this government – it just gaslights us all and says what we’re worried about isn’t happening.

So, don’t expect Starmer to do anything anytime soon. Just recently, when asked about the death of free speech here in Britain, he said:

“I’m very proud of our history re that.”

And that’s why he has to go. This buffoon isn’t just incapable of solving a problem he even refuses there is one.

But free speech is dying here in Britain at the hands of Starmer and his Stasi mob, and if we let this Government and the police silence what they regard as “hateful”, then we’ll be handing the State power over everything we can say. And that must never happen!