Let’s get the easy bit out of the way at the start so we can put the predictable left-wing response to bed: what Lucy Connolly wrote was disgraceful.
Her expletive-laden call to torch migrant hotels, posted in the heat of the Southport child murders, was vile and indefensible. No decent person can excuse it.
But no sensible person is debating whether her words were wrong. The question the public is asking is why she was treated more harshly than rapists, paedophiles, even convicted terrorists, or even just other people who did similar things.
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Lucy Connolly, a Northamptonshire childminder and mother, deleted her post within hours and later expressed regret. Yet she was jailed for 31 months for “inciting racial hatred”, serving more than 300 days behind bars, often in near-solitary confinement.
Compare that with Huw Edwards, a BBC presenter who admitted to possessing child abuse images but received only a suspended sentence. Or Rees Newman, a convicted child rapist spared jail altogether because of prison overcrowding.
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|Keir Starmer's past puts Lucy Connolly's sentence in a whole new light - Robert Courts
But here’s the funny thing. Even within the political world, the disparity is glaring. In 2019, while I was the Conservative MP for Witney, a Labour councillor tweeted that watching The Riot Club had “left [him] wanting to burn every single Oxford college to the ground” — “preferably with every single Tory MP inside one of them at the time”.
Is that so different to what Connolly said? Was he prosecuted? No. Did Labour withdraw the whip? No. They went on to make him Mayor of Witney.
Yes, we actually had to go through the farce of civic duties together, with him expressing a desire, apparently, to kill me and all of my colleagues. Neither the system nor the Labour Party took any action against him.
More recently, we’ve seen a Labour councillor filmed at a rally miming a throat-slitting gesture and shouting “we need to cut their throats and get rid of them”.
A jury acquitted him. Ok, fair enough, juries - as the foundation stone of our liberty - can do what they like and, yes, the charge was a different one. But sometimes policymakers need to be aware that an effect can be caused by the way things look. And the way things look here is ugly.
Meanwhile, Connolly’s tweet – yes, disgraceful but deleted within hours and debatable that it incited anything – saw her locked up and paraded as an example.
The public will, when they see that, understandably ask: “If that is not two-tier justice, what is?”Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick MP put it plainly: the Government is “now halving prison sentences for killers and rapists, while Lucy Connolly remains behind bars for a reprehensible but swiftly deleted tweet”.
If the public sees rapists and killers walking free while a mother stays caged for a tweet, no wonder fury is building at the justice system.
Sir Keir Starmer’s own record makes the hypocrisy starker. As Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013, he issued guidance that people who swiftly deleted offensive posts and showed remorse should not normally face criminal action. Connolly did both, yet Starmer had no concerns over her prosecution as Prime Minister. The very rules he once wrote were seemingly ignored.
Why? The public would be forgiven for concluding that Connolly’s politics made her an easier target. She was a Tory councillor’s wife, vocal about immigration, and therefore fitted neatly into a narrative of “far-Right agitators” behind last summer’s unrest.
To restore order, the state wanted scalps. And she provided one. The contrast with how the system treats others is corrosive.
Judges are seen by the public to bend over backwards to show “compassion” for hardened criminals, yet take a sledgehammer to those who breach speech codes.
The British state extends endless indulgence to career offenders – or to those who come here illegally and manufacture reasons to stay – but is ruthless when punishing political speech it dislikes.
There is no defending Connolly’s words, and there is nothing here that does so. It is, however, about defending the principle of equal justice.
There is a reason why the statue of Justice outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand wears a blindfold: because justice is meant to be blind, even-handed, interested only in what the person has done, not what sort of person they are.
When the public sees rapists and paedophiles walk free while a mother spends a year in jail for a tweet, trust collapses. The law begins to look like a weapon wielded for political ends.
The irony, of course, is that by punishing her so savagely, the authorities have ensured that she will be remembered not for her foul-mouthed outburst but for the grotesque disparity of her sentence.
She will now be, as she has been called, a “martyr for injustice.”Free societies rely on equal rules. Justice cannot be tougher on one side and softer on another.
Lucy Connolly’s release should spark a reckoning. The disgrace lies not just in her tweet, but in a system that increasingly seems to punish words more heavily than crimes of violence. Readers should ask themselves: if this can happen to her, who will be next?