Free Speech - The Story of Lucy Connolly
Dusty's One Offs. Number 3. #BeMorePorcupine.
Lucy Connolly
I will be sporadically producing one off pieces on specific issues and, generally speaking, these will only be available to my paid subscribers. This is the third in the series and I hope my paid subscribers will forgive me for making this available to all subscribers since I believe this is a vital issue for all in what I describe as the Terf Resistance and, of course, a vital issue to all who believe in free speech and freedom of expression. If you want to access future One Offs, please make a paid subscription for the cost of a cup of coffee per month 😃
I was inspired to write this piece by a marvellous article in the Telegraph ( which I am going to take the liberty of reproducing in full here) by Allison Pearson about the case of Lucy Connolly.
I am dividing this piece as follows.
The law on free speech in the UK.
Allison Pearson’s own experience of police action.
The Telegraph article.
The law in the States - the Brandenburg Test.
Other examples of online offences.
Conclusion.
The Law on Free Speech in the UK.
A Suffragette addresses the crowd.
Alison Redmond-Bate was a Christian and a member of an organisation called the Faith Ministries. The photo above is of a suffragette by the way because my subject here is not specifically preaching the Gospel but Free Speech.
The Faith Ministries preached the Gospel on the streets. On 2 October 1997 Alison, her mother and one other woman were preaching on the steps of Wakefield Cathedral.
An anonymous couple complained about the preaching to Police Constable Tennant who was on foot patrol. He attended at the Cathedral. There was not much of a crowd. He warned the three women not to stop people but, since they were not actually stopping people, he moved on. Twenty minutes later PC Tennant returned to find that a crowd of more than a hundred had gathered. Some of the crowd were showing hostility towards the three women preachers. PC Tennant asked the women to stop preaching. When they refused, he arrested them for breach of the peace.
Alison was convicted. Alison appealed her conviction to the High Court.
Commenting on the case of R v Nicol and Selvanayagam (1995), a case involving an animal rights protest, it was stated by Lord Justice Sedley giving the judgment in Alison’s case :
…the Court would surely not find a…complaint proved if any violence likely to have been provoked on the part of others would be not merely unlawful but wholly unreasonable - as, of course, it would be if the defendant’s conduct was not merely lawful but such as in no material way interfered with the other’s rights. A fortiori if the defendant was properly exercising his own basic rights, whether of assembly, demonstration or free speech.
The essential other dimension in this case was the Human Rights Act 1998 ( not at that date brought into force but the court placed great reliance on it and, additionally, Lord Justice Sedley felt that much of the rights contained in the Act were already enshrined in the common law ie. case law which has established and developed many principles of law not covered by legislation).
The two relevant Articles of the Human Rights Act are as follows:
" Article 9
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one’s religious beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Article 10
Freedom of Expression
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
(2) The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Lord Justice Sedley overturned the conviction of Alison Redmond-Bate:
20….Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. What Speakers’ Corner (where the law applies as fully as anywhere else) demonstrates is the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear. From the condemnation of Socrates to the persecution of modern writers and journalists, our world has seen too many examples of state control of unofficial ideas. A central purpose of the European Convention on Human Rights has been to set close limits to any such assumed power. We in this country continue to owe a debt to the jury which in 1670 refused to convict the Quakers William Penn and William Mead for preaching ideas which offended against state orthodoxy.
The full judgment is here:
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/1999/733.html
Allison Pearson
Athena Stavrou in The Independent ( Allison Pearson: Police drop investigation into social media post by journalist 21 November 2024) reported:
GettyImages-124964411.jpg© Getty
Essex Police have closed an investigation into columnist Allison Pearson for alleged incitement of racial hatred over a social media post.
The force said it would be conducting an independent review [ which] will be launched into the force’s handling of the case which centred around a now-deleted X/Twitter post published last year.
The Daily Telegraph journalist said she was wearing her dressing gown when two constables from Essex Police knocked on her door on Remembrance Sunday.
News of the visit sparked a backlash, including from former Conservative prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, who both called the incident “appalling”, and X owner Elon Musk.
Essex Police had been carrying out an investigation under the Public Order Act but said on Thursday that it decided to take “no further action” after the Crown Prosecution Service advised that no charges should be brought.
The full article is here:
The Telegraph Article.
I heard the full story of the woman jailed for two years for a tweet. Her injustice shames Britain
An ugly social media post landed Lucy Connolly with a 31-month sentence – her treatment is a testament to our injustice system
Allison Pearson
04 April 2025
It is many years since I clambered into a cage in Cambridge’s King’s Parade for Amnesty International and stared glumly through the bars at a photographer who snapped me for the front page of the student paper. On that drizzly, damp day, we were trying to draw attention to the plight of prisoners in authoritarian countries where people could be thrown into jail for no reason, except to deter other critics of the regime, and denied their basic human rights.
In the past few days, I’ve found myself wondering what that idealistic young student would have thought if you’d told her that, 40 years in the future, she would be writing about a woman thrown into jail in our own country largely to act as a warning to others. A widely-respected and adored childminder described by one parent as “the kindest British person I’ve met”, a mother of two children (one living, one dead), a carer to a sick husband, by whose side she also appeared in his role as a Tory councillor.
As I write this, that woman is not only serving a sentence many legal experts consider to be outrageously harsh, but is being denied the opportunity for time at home with her family which is granted to jailmates around her who are guilty of actual physical harm. “You’ve upset a lot of people, Lucy,” one probation officer explained when she asked why she was being denied ROTL (Release on Temporary Licence).
If the name Lucy Connolly rings a bell it’s because she was one of the 1,500-plus people arrested in connection with the social unrest which followed the July 29 Southport massacre of three little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. In fact, that’s not strictly accurate. Mrs Connolly, then aged 41 – she turned 42 in prison in January – played no part in the rioting, but a tweet she posted on the day when Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King and Alice da Silva Aguiar were murdered by Axel Rudakubana was enough to get her arrested eight days later, and charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, with publishing material intending to stir up racial hatred.
It was without doubt a horrible, hateful and deeply offensive tweet. “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.”
Having posted the tweet around 8.30pm, Lucy took the family’s German pointer, Harley, for a walk, had a chance to think better of what she’d written in the heat of the moment, returned home and deleted the tweet. It must have been visible for less than four hours, but that was enough time for someone to take a screenshot.
Ray Connolly knew how easily his wife was triggered by the suffering and death of children. He says she was always writing to MPs and to the papers if there was ever a case of neglect or kids being harmed on the news. In 2011, the Connollys lost their firstborn, Harry, aged 19 months as a result of atrocious failures in NHS care. After multiple hospital visits, and Lucy pleading with a paediatrician to put the listless toddler on a drip, the Connollys took Harry home and laid him in a cot by their bed. They woke at 4am to find the lifeless body of their tiny son. Lucy screamed at Ray to do CPR while she called an ambulance and Ray, who is an immensely practical chap, best person in a crisis, did his best. “But rigor mortis had already set in,” he tells me, the horror of that moment never to be extinguished.
Dusty - my emphasis added above.
There followed a bruising battle to “get justice for Harry”. Although the coroner found a catalogue of catastrophic failures at the hospital, it was not ruled to have committed gross negligence manslaughter as Harry’s devastated parents had wanted. (“Those doctors have got away with killing my son,” Lucy said.) The Connollys went on to have a “rainbow baby”, two years later, a daughter called Holly*, now aged 12, but Lucy, who received a diagnosis of PTSD after she lost her baby, never truly recovered. Hearing about a mass stabbing of little girls in Southport was enough to tip her over the edge.
When Ray got home that day, he found her in the kitchen with the six toddlers she looked after. “Lucy was crying.” In the absence of any clear information from the authorities about the killer’s identity (Rudakubana was initially described to a disbelieving public only as a Cardiff-born choirboy) and with Merseyside police and Government ministers still insisting the massacre was “not terror-related” the situation on social media was extremely volatile. There was widespread anger that such a monstrous attack had been targeted at the most vulnerable members of our society. That was the state Lucy Connolly was in when she posted the fifty-one words that would ruin her life for a second time, and turn her into the ideal poster girl for Starmer’s pledge to impose heavy sentences on “far-Right thugs”.
Ray knew nothing about the tweet until the police turned up at the house and took his wife away. It was around 8am and all of the infants Lucy looked after were being dropped off for the day by their parents. (Mrs Connolly’s precious charges have included Nigerian, Somalian, Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Lithuanian and Polish, as well as white British, kids. “It’s like the blimmin’ United Nations in here,” the childminder used to joke.) Lucy went with the police “quiet as a lamb, she thought if she did as she was told everything would be fine,” recalls Ray.
I ask him if he ever thought the family’s tragic history and his wife’s mental distress would help Lucy with her case. He shakes his head. “I knew things were bad when Starmer and the Home Office started going on about the ‘far-Right’, they obviously had an agenda.” Over the next few days, Lucy Connolly ceased to be a person and became a demonised figure stripped of nuance and humanity. “Conservative councillor’s racist wife.” That was her name from now on.
Looking back, we can see how it was expedient for panicking politicians to blame social media for civil unrest rather than acknowledge the growing anxiety about uncontrolled immigration that fuelled the rioting. (That would have meant officialdom shouldering some of the blame.) While social media can amplify content that inflames tensions there is little or no evidence that a single post persuades law-abiding people to engage in violent protest.
On July 30, the day after Lucy Connolly’s tweet, Sir Keir Starmer was jeered when he laid a wreath at the scene of the Southport attack and hastily scuttled away, earning him the nickname “Nineteen Seconds” for the amount of time he had given the distraught crowd. That same day, newly-elected MP Nigel Farage posted a video in which he asked whether the police were deliberately withholding information from the public and wondered whether the incident was terror-related. The Reform UK leader was widely criticised for giving legitimacy to “conspiracy theories” about the Southport attacker. Which were true, of course.
Down at the police station in Northampton, meanwhile, it was dawning on Lucy Connolly that her protestations that she had made a terrible error of judgment and she was really sorry were falling on deaf ears. “I couldn’t quite believe what they were telling me – someone who’d never broken the law,” Lucy would recall. “Whatever I’d done, police made it quite clear I was going down for this, their intention was always to hammer me.”
The omens were definitely not good. Lucy’s lawyer, a young duty solicitor, commissioned a psychiatric report on his client but it felt weirdly perfunctory, far from the rigorous evaluation she’d had in London after Harry’s death when she got her diagnosis of PTSD. This new psychiatrist, who spoke to Lucy for just an hour on a video call, “didn’t even ask me about Harry”.
There was worse to come. The police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) released a statement saying that Lucy “told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them”.
But Lucy hadn’t said that. What she said in her long interview with the police was, “I’m well aware that we need immigrants… I’m well aware that if I go to the hospital there are immigrants working there and the hospital wouldn’t function without them. I’m [also] well aware of the difference between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants and they are not checked and [nor is] what they might have done (any crimes) in their country of origin – it’s a national security issue and they’re a danger to children”. Sentiments which are shared by millions of British people.
Lucy broke down and cried when she heard how her words had been misrepresented. Whatever else she was, she was not a bigot. Lucy and her two sisters had been raised by an old-fashioned socialist mother to abhor racism. The Connollys asked for a transcript of the police interview which was grudgingly handed over after a long delay. Lucy’s mother complained to the CPS and they corrected the statement on their website to match what Lucy had actually said. Too late.
Police also accused Lucy of previous racist posts. Turns out she had called a friend “Pikey” after he had called her “Brummie c--t”. Even banter could be passed off as evidence of malignant character.
After taking advice from her solicitor, Lucy pleaded guilty to the offence of distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred. “It wasn’t my intention to be racist,” Lucy protested, but her initial resolve to fight took a bad knock when a bail application was refused.
Lawyers I’ve spoken to say it was an “astonishing” decision and that there were no substantial grounds for refusing bail.
Lucy had already deleted her Twitter account after posting “I know people are angry, but violence is not the answer”. So she wasn’t going to commit a further offence. Nor was she about to do a runner – not with Ray and Holly at home. In short, there was no justification for keeping Lucy Connolly in custody. Ordinarily, bail would have been a formality. But judges were refusing almost all bail applications connected to the Southport riots.
Notably, some of the most senior judges were drafted in to handle cases which would normally be dealt with in a magistrates’ court. But magistrates could only impose sentences of up to 12 months – clearly not what the PM, who had set up a violent disorder unit to look like he was in charge, had in mind.
‘Collateral damage’
Was it true, as some have suggested, that judges all had their orders from above? That seems unlikely. “I think it was more an informal pressure,” says one senior lawyer who represented a Southport defendant. “A fear of rioting that had the effect of inducing a herd mentality. There was a sense that judges had to crack down hard on this. So it had the same effect as an order from on high. People like Lucy Connolly were casualties, collateral damage if you like.”
With her bail application refused and being held on remand, Lucy was panicking. “Imagine you’re a middle-class mother with a child at home,” says one lawyer. “You’ve never had any contact with the police. Suddenly, you’re arrested, then thrown into jail. There was a feeling of bewilderment, of terror.”
Ray Connolly was convinced by a couple of leading barristers who insisted that his wife should plead not guilty – a jury, they said, was unlikely to convict a patently decent woman like Lucy for one horrible tweet. “If I could have got her round a table with those barristers, I’m sure she would have gone with ‘not guilty’,” Ray says. But Lucy herself was in jail where she was surrounded by women who had waited months for a trial date. “You just don’t know how long you’ll be here,” she argued with Ray. “I might not get to court until spring.”
She would, however, get a large discount if she pleaded guilty. She’d be out in time for Christmas, she believed. Lucy is a tenacious researcher, but while she was on remand she found it very hard to look things up, get proper advice or even speak to her solicitor.
“It became apparent early on I was a lost cause,” she told Ray. All her life, Lucy had been a fighter for justice. When she was a child, her mother had urged her so many times, “Lucy, please learn to play the game”, but that pugnacious little girl would never listen. “But it’s not fair, Mum,” she always answered. Lucy was weary now, though, the years of fighting for Harry had taken their toll. A guilty plea looked like the fastest way to put this nightmare behind her. “I don’t give a damn about having a criminal record,” she said to herself. “I want to be at home with Ray and Holly.”
It was a terrible decision, if a perfectly understandable one. “Lucy basically had to admit she was the person she was the opposite of,” says Ray. A sad sentence I can’t seem to get out of my head.
Cllr Connolly attracted his own share of abuse after he told Sky News, “Lucy is a good person and not a racist”. For standing up for his wife, Ray faced calls for his resignation. The monitoring officer at West Northamptonshire council received thirteen anonymous complaints which were referred to a fancy London law firm to investigate when they could easily have been handled internally. It looked a lot like the complaints amounted to an attempt by Labour to try to take down a hugely popular Tory councillor when he was acutely vulnerable in an unbearably bleak situation. With the loss of Lucy’s income, Ray had already sold his car and cancelled any payments he could without touching Holly’s gym classes: anything to preserve some sense of normality while her Mummy was in jail.
The lawyers asked Ray to get some character references for Lucy which they could submit to the court. “I thought because I don’t have direct experience of racism,” he told me, “I’d ask the parents of the children Lucy looked after who do know about racism”.
‘One error of judgment’
I have copies of those references here in front of me and, you know what, it would be hard to find more glowing testimonials.
One woman doctor wrote: “I first met Lucy whilst looking for a childminder for my then one-year-old daughter. Since then I have never had any cause to doubt Lucy’s kindness and warmness. In this time, I have known Lucy to be the kindest, most diligent person who looked after everyone and anyone without any regard for their race or ethnicity. We are originally from Nigeria and moved to the UK for work. Lucy has looked after my daughter as I may expect to do myself as her parent. I also watched her interactions with other people of different races and religions and the care offered was always the same.
“Even my family back home all know Lucy because [of] how fondly I talk about her, in fact I have often described her to them as the kindest British person I know.” Lucy even acted as a formal referee when members of the family applied for British citizenship. “First my daughter last year and even more recently for my husband. She personally drove to my home to drop these letters herself. This is certainly not the behaviour of a racist person. It is my sincerest hope and plea, that one error of judgment is not used to judge an otherwise unblemished record of kindness and openness that Lucy has shown everyone she has come across.”
Another set of parents seconded that view: “We have had the privilege of knowing Lucy for [the] last four years … As we work in the NHS and have a busy schedule, we have been reliant on Lucy’s childminding service. Lucy has consistently demonstrated integrity, honesty and respect in all our interactions, both personally and professionally. She is well-regarded for her strong work ethic, dedication, trustworthiness and sense of responsibility.
“In addition, Lucy is also compassionate and empathetic, always willing to offer assistance to those in need. We came to this country as immigrants working in the NHS and naturalised over the time. We have different faith and belief from Lucy’s, but Lucy has always been respectful towards us and kind to our child. We have never witnessed any racial discrimination or behaviour from her or her lovely family. We can say with full conviction that over the years, Lucy has become a very good friend on whom we can rely and seeing her getting arrested has been extremely painful and shocking for us. We sincerely hope you take these facts into consideration prior to her pre-sentencing.”
No facts of the kind presented in support of Lucy by the immigrant parents who adored her appeared to carry much weight with His Honour Judge Melbourne Inman KC, recorder of Birmingham, when he began his sentencing remarks on October 17 last year.
He said: “This is one of a number of cases that this court has had to deal with arising from civil unrest following the very tragic events in Southport on the 29th July 2024. As everyone is aware some people used that tragedy as an opportunity to sow division and hatred, often using social media, leading to a number of towns and cities being disfigured by mindless and racist violence, intimidation and damage… It is [a] strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.”
Ray, who was in the court in his best Armani suit and polished Church’s shoes (“From a mate, I couldn’t afford them otherwise”) froze. “As soon as Judge Inman started talking about diversity and inclusion, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, you don’t know what you’re saying’. If anything happened to those parents, they would quite happily let Lucy keep their kids and look after them like her own. She really, really would.”
Judge Inman directly linked Lucy’s short-lived tweet to “serious disorder in a number of areas of the country where mindless violence was used to cause injury and damage to wholly innocent members of the public and to their properties”. He went on to say her culpability was “clearly a category A case – as both prosecution and your counsel agree, because you intended to incite serious violence”. No, she most certainly did not intend to incite serious violence.
Judge Inman also claimed that Lucy failed to offer words of comfort to the Southport victims although she specifically said in her notorious tweet, “I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure”. There spoke a mother who had lost her own beloved child and was aware, to her infinite sorrow, that you never get over it.
The sentence Lucy Connolly received for a post on social media – 31 months – was greeted with general disbelief in legal circles. “Sickening”, “outrageous”, “a normally reliable judge was wildly out”, are a few of the printable comments. Although Lucy was given 25 per cent off for her guilty plea, 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.
“I daren’t tell Lucy they’ve given Ricky Jones bail,” Ray told me this week. “It would kill her, the injustice of it. But Lucy was the perfect message for Starmer after Southport, wasn’t she? If they could do that to a nice, middle-class lady like her, imagine what they could do to you.”
Dusty - once again, my emphasis above.
‘It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so horrifying’
After she got that deafening two-and-a-half year jail sentence, Lucy messaged her husband and daughter: “Please don’t live on chicken nuggets and Haribos.” As Mrs Connolly arrived at Peterborough jail – “The most petrified person I’ve ever seen arrive here,” said one prison officer – a doctor, the father of one of the “scrumptious” little girls Lucy looked after, was on his way to the immigration office to submit his citizenship application. Among his documents, there was a reference from the Kindest British Person his family knew. As on so many occasions, Lucy Connolly, poster girl for racism and designated scapegoat, had done everything she could to help. What kind of racist does that?
As Lucy’s tearful mother said to me, “It would be hilarious, Allison, if it wasn’t so horrifying”.
Despite her fears, Lucy Connolly settled in well to prison life. Although there was initially a bit of suspicion – “You’re posh, you’re an MP’s wife” – she says she “met some amazing ladies and girls, they really looked out for me”. Among her fellow jailmates were drug dealers, thieves and murderers like the wonderfully named Patio Sue, who was “remorseful” for burying both her parents in the back garden. When the other inmates questioned Lucy about her crime – “What you in for?” – and she explained it was a post on social media, “they cracked up”. It is the correct reaction, I think.
“Lucy got on great with some of the most difficult prisoners,” says Ray in his Midlands accent with its distinctive soft, hammocky vowels. “There was this strong, scary, very attractive, powerful Jamaican girl and she was really kicking off with the prison officers, and they didn’t know what to do, and Lucy went over, sort of grabbed her and gave her a big cuddle. The officers said, ‘What’s wrong with her?’, and Lucy said, ‘She wants her Mum’.”
The childminder had found her niche as a mother hen to some very damaged and vulnerable young women. “They sat in Lucy’s cell for hours, chatting and setting the world to rights,” Ray says proudly. “Lucy’s asking me to send extra money in ‘cause there’s homeless girls in there and they’ve got no financial support from outside.”
We are talking at the kitchen table in the Connollys’ 1930s semi with bow-fronted windows in a placid Northampton suburb. Harley the dog, who misses Lucy terribly (“he goes nuts running to the front door when I’ve got Lucy on speakerphone from prison”) won’t leave my side. Through the French doors onto the back garden, I can see the Wendy House and other toys that Lucy’s small charges used to play with, mementoes of a happier time. On the shelf behind us, there are two “Free Lucy Connolly” mugs, a gift from a police officer friend whom Ray was worried wouldn’t talk to him after Lucy’s arrest. “He said, don’t worry, Ray, lots of the lads down the stations are right behind you. They think it’s mad what’s happened to Lucy.”
On the way in, I admired a pretty Easter wreath of pastel flowers and eggs tied to the front door. Given everything he’s dealing with, I tell Ray I’m amazed he remembered to put that up. “I want things to keep as normal as possible,” he says. “So Holly doesn’t think too much has changed with her Mummy away.” He apologises for the bags of balls and other golf paraphernalia in the entrance porch (Ray is a local golf champ who met his future wife, seventeen years his junior, in the clubhouse). “Lucy won’t be pleased to see all this stuff when she gets home,” he laughs.
At that point, Holly comes into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and there is some good-natured banter with her dad. When I ask, “Is he taking good care of you?” she laughs and says, “I do all the cooking”. Although she looks radiant with health, Holly was recently suspended from school after a deterioration in her behaviour, which is clearly linked to Lucy’s absence. “I do my best,” says Ray. “But she tells me to ‘go away, Dad’. She needs her mum.” Like her mother, Holly is not afraid to speak out when she thinks someone has done something unfair. “But that’s a teacher!” her father protests in vain.
On the phone, Holly’s grandmother, Heather*, tells me her daughter Lucy is very house proud and fastidious. “She got the A levels, but she didn’t want to go to uni because she didn’t like the thought of living in a shared house with 20 messy people. Now she’s living in a prison house with 20 people – she can sort of see the funny side!” Heather says Lucy insisted Ray got out the Emma Bridgewater Christmas crockery, “and she’ll be insisting he gets out the Emma Bridgewater Easter stuff – he’d better!”
Whenever Lucy is “spiralling” because of her anxiety, she just gets fixated on an issue – on something in the world she thinks is unjust, says Heather. “And I’ll say to her, ‘No point getting yourself in a tizz about that, love.’” But injustice has always been a big thing for her eldest daughter, the one who always looked after the waifs and strays at school. “She gets sick and starts shaking, her brain doesn’t work – like when she wrote that awful tweet.” (Heather thinks Lucy’s decision to plead guilty arose out of her anxiety to get back to Holly as quickly as possible. She thought she’d be home by Christmas and that she’d get an “HDC” (home detention curfew), or “Tag” – a home detention curfew, as part of which the prisoner wears an electronic tag). “Because Harry died, she thinks something terrible will happen to Holly, and you can’t tell her different.”
Heather says she felt “ashamed” initially when she found out what her eldest daughter had done – “Can’t defend it, it was horrible what she said, but the punishment is out of all proportion” – but she has since been a staunch maternal ally, badgering the Ministry of Justice to find out why Lucy is being denied the home leave that is granted to prisoners who have committed far graver crimes. “Lucy’s probation officer said she didn’t belong in jail.” She pauses, hearing what she just said. “Imagine my Lucy having a probation officer – it’s surreal.
“We’ve been through worse,” Lucy’s mum says suddenly. And, then, at the thought of her dead grandson, I hear her start to cry.
Back in the Connolly kitchen, Ray is telling me about his wife’s struggle to get the home leave to which she has been entitled since November. The injustice system had not put Lucy through enough by incarcerating her for longer than many paedophiles, or so it would seem.
At Peterborough, Lucy’s probation officer, a man with 18 years experience, told Lucy: “We used to have the best justice system in the world – not any longer.”
The probation officer fought for Lucy, Ray says. In a video call, the external probation officer said they were astonished at the refusal of applications for ROTL – which are supposed to be part of the rehabilitation process. Lucy claims that the deputy governor told the probation officer that there was “no way” Lucy would get let out with a tag “because of press and public perception”.
Lucy lodged a formal complaint about the ROTL refusal. The response from officials was that it was due to her risk assessment not being completed – which was contrary to what Lucy had been led to believe.
But Lucy knew she was entitled to ROTL. “I’ve read every single case about requirements for ROTL,” she writes. “Are you low risk to the community? Yes, I am. Are you the primary carer for your child? Yes. If you are, you can apply for childcare ROTL.”
To add insult to injury, two of Lucy’s fellow prisoners who applied at the same time were granted home detention curfews. Both girls had been presumed unsuitable due to their charges of death by dangerous driving. Both girl had direct victims. “I did not,” Lucy scrawls furiously, “yet my crime was apparently worse than the death of someone”.
In frustration, and feeling the hierarchy at Peterborough were against her, although she loved the prison officers, Lucy requested and got a transfer to an open prison in Staffordshire, where she hoped to find a more sympathetic governor.
Ray thrusts a sheaf of papers at me; they are written in biro in Lucy’s neat hand. Page after tragic, futile page of carefully researched reasons why she should be let out to see her daughter and her husband, who is doing a brilliant job of holding the fort, but is not sleeping from the worry of it all. “I’ve aged ten years,” Ray says, shards of blue eyes flashing whether with defiance or defeat I cannot tell.
‘Exceptional circumstances’
As we sit together, Harley snuffling beside us, I read aloud from one of Lucy’s recent appeals: “You state that your decision is based on my current circumstances and not the circumstances surrounding my offence. However, I feel you have completely missed my point in my original appeal. The situation is putting additional stress on my husband and a detriment to his health. He doesn’t just have a cold he has bone marrow failure… On top of this, since submitting my original appeal my daughter has been suspended from school which is totally out of character. The trauma of her mummy being away from her will affect her for years to come.
“You are not taking any of this into consideration… as the whole system is corrupt. You also state it’s impossible to give definitive guidance on what constitutes ‘exceptional circumstances’ but in the next sentence you write that I do not currently constitute exceptional circumstances. The two contradict one another. You need to give me an example of an exceptional reason. I believe you are just making excuses and your strings are being pulled by someone from outside the prison service. You state the prison has to comply with the court but the LAW actually states I AM ELIGIBLE for Tag but presumed unsuitable. Please explain who is presuming I am unsuitable and for what reason?”
On and on, she goes, like a moth batting furiously against the light, concluding desperately, “While you are playing politics, my 12-year-old is suffering and my husband’s health continues to deteriorate. I will emphasise again, the LAW states I am eligible for Tag”.
So, this is a big question, I say to Ray Connolly, but do you think your wife is a kind of political prisoner?
Ray pats Harley’s head and takes a swallow of tea before replying, “I think they want to use her as an example. Political? Maybe it could be deemed to be that way, but I think they like the idea of Lucy still being in prison just to send out a clear warning to people: ‘You really need to watch what you say because, look! The consequences are going to be quite horrendous for you if you don’t.’
“Put it this way, Allison, I think it certainly suits the narrative of the Government to have Lucy as their poster girl for racism, which is ridiculous when you know Lucy.”
At one level, this is a terrible tragedy for a family that knows tragedy too well, but pull the camera back and we see the wider picture of free speech and where its limits lie. That’s why Lucy’s latest appeal is being funded by the Free Speech Union.
“Why are people more concerned by my political views than by the actual murder of three little girls?” demanded Lucy in one of her final tweets. She was right about the rush to deflection after the heinous Southport massacre. It seems to me the state knows that uncontrolled immigration has unleashed forces which it has no idea how to contain – namely that the suffering of white girls is a secondary consideration compared to avoiding the stirring up of racial hatred.
Diversity is not always a strength, sometimes it’s a scary problem. The sticking-plaster solution is to silence those who express their distress, or turn them into witches.
So successful was the campaign to demonise Lucy Connolly that, until now, it has been taboo to suggest that her imprisonment is appalling. Many who heard about her draconian sentence may have thought, “She must have deserved it”. Well, I hope I have offered some proof that is wrong, and that “Conservative councillor’s racist wife” was a handy label to demonise a good person who made a dreadful mistake.
Lucy is a victim of two-tier justice. What has happened to her shames a free country, I think. It upsets everyone who knows her and loves her, and those who know her do love her.
On May 15, Lucy Connolly’s case will be heard by the Court of Appeal. Pray for her.
Ray’s words come back to me again: “Lucy basically had to admit she was the person she was the opposite of.”
May the real Lucy walk free.
Dusty - my emphasis again.
The Law in the States.
So:
a) Was the tweet Lucy Connolly posted ( regardless of whether or not it was quickly deleted) really unlawful?
b) Should she be in prison?
Discussing someone else imprisoned for an online post after the Stourport killings, Andrew Doyle addresses the issue on his substack.
Jailed for a Facebook post
Isn’t it about time we had a sensible discussion about incitement to violence?
Aug 13, 2024
“Every man and his dog should be smashing the fuck out of Britannia Hotel”. This was the grim message posted on Jordan Parlour’s Facebook page which has resulted in him being imprisoned for twenty months for inciting racial hatred. That someone would actively promote violence against the refugees being accommodated in this hotel is obviously reprehensible. Nobody I know, or would care to know, would support it.
And this is where the problem lies. One of the major fallacies in the free speech debates is the assumption that those who are defending someone’s right to make objectionable statements are thereby endorsing what they have said. On the contrary, we need to defend free speech even for those we despise, because once we have diluted the principle the consequences will affect us all. When it comes to incitement to violence, sensitivities are naturally high, but this is all the more reason why we need to initiate a sensible discussion. At present, we seem to be allowing our emotions to overcome our reason.
Let’s start with our shared revulsion at the comment made. I feel confident in asserting that Parlour is an unpleasant individual who should be vehemently criticised for his Facebook post. If I were one of the people who saw the post I would have blocked him instantly. But I also do not believe that there was ever any reason for the state to get involved, let alone to have Parlour incarcerated.
Whereas I hope we can all agree that the words he wrote were unconscionable, we need to take a moment to consider rationally whether or not they actually had the impact that we assume. Even if Parlour’s intention was to incite violence, there is precisely no evidence that he was successful. It is one thing to point out that there are keyboard warriors cheering on needless acts of violence, and that violence is indeed taking place. It is quite another to assert a causal link between the one and the other. This is a hypothesis that should be tested, not merely asserted. And this is especially the case if this hypothesis is to be the justification for public prosecutions.
This issue is far more significant than Parlour and his ilk. In such situations, we should be asking ourselves the following question. Which do we consider to be more of a threat - a handful of vile men encouraging each other to commit violent crimes, or a state that is eager to imprison citizens on the basis of what they choose to say? Those of us who know a thing or two about history will understand the extreme dangers of the latter scenario.
This is a question I repeatedly asked on my appearance yesterday on Talkback on BBC Radio Ulster, but no serious answer was ever attempted. The host William Crawley, and his guest Claire Hanna (SDLP MP), both took the view that incitement to violence should be prosecuted even when there was no evidence that the words had directly caused harm. They further made the case that the criminal prosecution of Markus Meechan (aka “Count Dankula”) for a comedic video in which he taught his girlfriend’s pug to react excitedly to phrases such “gas the Jews” and “Sieg Heil” was justified because they didn’t find the joke funny. So for this BBC presenter and SDLP politician, hauling someone through the courts and slamming them with a criminal record is a legitimate form of comedy criticism.
The debate was enjoyable and lively, but I do not think it was particularly productive. This is mostly because infantile arguments were allowed to dominate. For instance, Hanna repeatedly asserted that Elon Musk’s views on free speech were illegitimate because he had once mistakenly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory online. Crawley jumped to her defence, saying that Musk was indeed guilty of spreading white supremacist content. I asked him whether the same could be said of the BBC, which likewise had promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory – in this case that the IDF had been targeting medics at a Gaza hospital – and, like Musk, later apologised for the mistake. Crawley refused to answer.
The most helpful element of the discussion came with the arrival of Dr Olivia Brown, an expert in the impact of social media. She was invited on to the show to make her case that words lead to violence and that online censorship is therefore justified. As it happens, she inadvertently ended up disproving her own point. By Brown’s own admission, there was no evidence whatsoever of a direct link between online rhetoric and real-world violence. It was all a matter of speculation and theorising.
When it comes to state censorship, theorising is not good enough. Those committing acts of violence ought to be prosecuted, and I do not believe that their responsibility should be mitigated through reference to potential “incitement”. If somebody were to call on me to physically assault someone else, and I then chose to commit that crime, I would be entirely culpable. For me to claim that I was “triggered” into action by someone else’s words would be dishonest and untrue. It would merely be a cynical ploy to find somebody else to blame.
Every tyrannical regime in history has enacted censorship under the guise of protecting the “safety” of its citizens. Nebulous terms such as “hate speech” and “incitement” will always be subject to concept creep. Today, a man suggesting that his friends attack a hotel is considered “incitement”. Tomorrow, it may be anyone who criticises the government’s policies. You might call this a slippery slope fallacy, but it is one that has been proven to materialise again and again throughout history.
One solution is to implement an equivalent to the US threshold for incitement to violence, known as the “Brandenburg Test”. This was established by the Supreme Court in 1969, when the conviction of Ku Klux Klan leader Clarence Brandenburg for promoting violence was overturned. Following that precedent, the test for incitement to violence is that the speech in question must be deliberately aimed at inciting violence, likely to do so, and that any possible impact must be imminent. Some idiot on Facebook speaking to his 1,500 friends about smashing up a hotel certainly would not meet this threshold.
https://substack.com/@andrewdoyle/p-147661966
Other Examples.
In a post on his substack today, Andrew Doyle provides a very useful list of people being arrested and prosecuted for posting comments online.
https://www.andrewdoyle.org/p/the-uk-states-war-on-free-speech
The Times have just reported on this issue:
Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages
Charlie Parker , Yennah Smart and George Willoughby
04 April
The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.
Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.
Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
The acts make it illegal to cause distress by sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character” on an electronic communications network.
Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023, the equivalent of about 33 per day. This marks an almost 58 per cent rise in arrests since before the pandemic. In 2019, forces logged 7,734 detentions.
The statistics have provoked criticism from civil liberties groups that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech using “vague” communications laws.
The full article is here:
I reported on the case of the parents being arrested ( see photo above) here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-quick-and-the-dead?utm_source=publication-search
Conclusion
My conclusion is that Lucy Connolly’s tweet was not unlawful and she should not have been arrested let alone imprisoned. However I hope that the Court of Appeal on 15 May, when Lucy’s appeal is finally heard, might consider introducing something along the lines of the Brandenburg Test.
I so wish Lord Justice Sedley, who is now retired, was still sitting in the Court of Appeal.
Best of luck, Lucy!
All thoughts gratefully received.
#BeMorePorcupine.
Brilliant article ,Dusty. I had tears in my eyes reading Lucy's story and I feel incandescent with rage at this government and our so called "justice" system which seeks to ruin a young mother ( and her family's ) lives to" make an example" of her. This is pure VENOM and I never thought I would ever see anything like this in the UK. It's Banana Republic politics and has no place here. Starmer and his mouthpiece judge should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves and we won't forget this total travesty of justice !!. I will be praying for Lucy's success in the appeal process and I hope that the appeal court shows more compassion and humanity towards this young woman than has been shown to her so far.Well done to Allison for telling Lucy's story and thanks ,Dusty, for posting it .🙏🙏🙏
Very powerful piece, Dusty. Thank you for sharing the truth about Lucy’s story. It’s a worrying time for free speech. I can only hope Lucy finally gets a fair hearing in May.