Lucy Connolly's release from prison today is a step in the right direction, but the reality is she should never have been jailed to begin with.
Who is she, 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 Lucy Connolly is also a woman who, after the senseless murder of three little girls 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.”
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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.
The way she has been treated by the British state and the justice system 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 remarkably, released an assortment of hardened criminals to make room for the likes of Lucy 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?
Lucy Connolly's release is a step in the right direction, but the reality is the screws are turning – Matt Goodwin
|PA
A justice system, furthermore, that 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 suggested a few months back, 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 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 pointed 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.
This isn’t just about one woman, even though her case went viral around the world. It's about the Labour Government's steady expansion of Orwellian things like non-crime, hate incidents.
It's about the party's new definition of "Islamophobia" and their push to deride anybody in this country who wants to end mass, uncontrolled immigration and control the borders as "far-right xenophobes".
It’s about the parents who 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 Britons 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.
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”.
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.
This is why Lucy Connolly should never have been sent to prison. She has become a symbol of a creeping tide of intolerance and a growing threat to free speech in the UK.
Today marks a victory in the much bigger fight to defend our free expression and individual liberty.
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.