Picture the scene. A kitchen table anywhere in the country. A child’s dinner time. Food is served but not eaten, just pushed around the plate. It may, depending on the dish, be rearranged into a pretty shape. It may be piled up or spread around. Parent grows concerned:
“Are you not hungry?”
“I want pizza.”
“We don’t have pizza.”
“I want pizza.”
Back and forth the conversation goes, as dinner grows colder. Progress, as in the Russia/Ukraine talks, is elusive. Eventually parental patience snaps. “You can eat that or you can go hungry. You can put it in your hair or decorate your room with it, for all I care. But you’re not getting pizza.”
In saying that, is the parent encouraging or inciting the child to discover the tonsorial possibilities of spag-bol or the construction qualities of mashed potato?
Of course not. They are expressing frustration, not encouraging action. Even a four-year-old knows that.
The legal system, however, appears not to. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a tweet that read, “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care…” Pleasant? Absolutely not. Ladylike? Not particularly. Inciting, though? Not really. Not unless you believe that every time the expression is used it is a call to action, not an expression of impotent frustration. In which case, why bother adding “for all I care” to what would otherwise be a simple command?
Mrs Connolly appealed her sentence and the appeal was denied. Judges can only deal with the law as it is written and the arguments they are offered – judicial free-styling is not to be encouraged – but the hearing and judgement have brought the case back into the public conversation.
The context, those in the “lock her up and throw away the key” camp say, is key. The tweet was sent following the Southport murders. It was throwing petrol on an already smouldering fire. In that combustible atmosphere, any mention of violence was liable to spark it off.
But that is not the only context which is relevant. Mrs Connolly was, and I say this in the nicest possible way, a nobody. She was not a public figure, the leader of a party or someone with a platform of any size. She only became somebody when she was arrested and sentenced. Had she not attracted the attention of the legal system, she would today be at home in obscurity.
There was no reason for anyone to follow her instructions, if that is how we wish to view them, nor any reason for her to expect them to do so. Status and position matter. If I stand on the corner shouting that we should invade France, people will cross the street. If Nigel Farage does, some people (not many, one hopes) will man the boats.
No matter. Such was the situation that anything which might be interpreted as incitement was incitement, no matter what the author meant. Consider, however, an alternative reality in which criticising the British Empire is a crime. To George MacDonald Fraser, his Flashman books were “adventure stories dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant cad”, to a reviewer in the Guardian, they were a “scathing attack on British Imperialism”. Would it be reasonable to bang him up on the basis of another’s interpretation of his words? If it is, where does this stop? For few things can be interpreted in just one way. If an author is to be responsible for all possible interpretations of their words, then, purely for their own protection, every utterance would need to be so heavily qualified that communication would, effectively, become impossible.
If it is not reasonable to make an author responsible for all possible interpretations of their utterances, is it any more reasonable to blame them from any actions which others might take based upon them? Consider someone idly sitting at home scrolling through their phone who came across Connolly’s tweet and took it as a call to action. What would they need to do? They would need to go to a migrant hotel (possibly after first having found out where it was), they would need to acquire combustibles, gain access to the property (which, given the situation, would have been guarded) and then got down to business. Each of these actions would have involved a choice, a choice they could not have chosen not to make. The more decisions an individual makes, the more responsibility they bear for the action, and the less reasonable it is to expect someone else to foresee it. Even for those engaged in a riot (who probably aren’t scrolling through Twitter since, I imagine, rioting requires a degree of attention to the task at hand) setting fire to something, particularly a location which is guarded is a project, not a reflex.
Thus, even if one accepts that Mrs Connolly was inciting violence, her words do not pass the “imminent lawless action” test. If someone shouts “Fire” in a crowded theatre, most people will immediately act on instinct to preserve their own lives. They will not be able to control themselves. Burning down a building, for all but some superheroes, will always be a matter of conscious deliberation. And people must always bear responsibility for their choices. Mrs Connolly surely, given her lack of status, did not expect, and could not reasonably have expected, anyone to go through all the effort required to set fire to a hotel merely because she had tweeted.
The judgement of the court may well be legally correct. I am no lawyer and in no place to judge, but the implications of it are however, in that overused phrase, chilling. If speech can be judged criminal purely on the basis of an interpretation placed on it (no matter whether that interpretation is intended or even the most natural reading); if it may, no matter how convoluted the chain of subsequent events, be seen to encourage a criminal act, then which of us will “’scape a whipping?”. Take, for example, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s Self-Righteous Brothers forever, fantasising about the violence they would inflict on celebrities who stepped out of line. If they can talk about giving Englebert Humperdink a slap for causing a car-crash, can they be blamed for inciting an act of road-rage?
Still, the law is what the law is. Or is it?
In 2021, a convoy made its way through London, with a man shouting through a loud-speaker. “Fuck the Jews, fuck all of them…rape their daughters”, words, in the terms of the relevant law, “likely to stir up racial hatred”, just like Mrs Connolly’s. If anything, the case was more egregious. There was no “for all I care”, just a direct instruction. The crime suggested required, I imagine, rather less planning than setting fire to a hotel. And yet, one year later, the CPS dropped the charges. What was sauce for the goose was not, it appears, sauce for the gander.
As all agree, context matters. Mrs Connolly tweeted during a period of heightened community tensions. Are those tensions likely to be reduced by applying different standards to different groups? Or is more fuel just being stored up for the next fire?
I am a free speech maximalist, far more American than British in this context. If people wish to stir up hatred, that should, I think, be their right, outside a very few, sharply limited circumstances. People have free will and are not mindless automata, unthinkingly following the last thing to hit their ears. If they commit a crime, that is their responsibility and theirs alone. You may disagree. If you do, though, you must surely agree that the law must be consistent and must be seen to be consistent. Which it hasn’t been.
Mrs Connolly’s words were unpleasant. No-one can deny that. But in the all-important context, whichever side one takes, we should agree that her imprisonment was, like an earlier, over-zealous sentence, “worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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(Photograph: Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
You are right! It doesn’t even pass the man on the Clapham omnibus test we learnt on day 1 as law students: in other words, would a reasonable person, on hearing those words, take action? Your frustrated parent analogy is apt: even a child would not take its parent’s outburst literally. It’s embarrassing that our courts have (like the police) become political tools.
”set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”
That is what the BBC and the other MSM bought and paid for organs of state broadcast.
Oddly enough they all leave out the ”for all I care” part of the tweet.
And as you correctly state … it is an expression of exasperation, not an incitement to mass murder. Why did the judiciary not take this pointer to Lucy’s actual mens rea into account?
This is every bit a political conviction at the express orders of Starmer.
Where is the separation of state and judiciary?
This is every bit a political conviction at the express orders of Starmer, an(other) example of, and there are many more, ‘pour encourager les autres’ to be silent and to obey the increasingly dictatorial state orders under threat of a long sentence through their kangaroo courts.
Lucy Connolly is hardly the chimeric, imaginary prototype of a ‘Far right thug’ … Those mythical creatures that Starmer demanded be prosecuted with speed and severity.
Starmer and Co. should be ashamed of themselves though shame is probably an emotion that is entirely missing from the Starmer persona. His is the bland visage of the despot who find themselves wielding executive powers that they should never have been allowed a good sea mile to be anywhere near.
So, every word uttered or written must be now taken literally, as either a declaration of personal intent or an instruction to others (except if uttered or written by someone more elevated than the masses and who can always, if absolutely necessary, get away with a fake tearful apology).
Well, bugger me as we say in Yorkshire (though few consider it may now be an invite).
Lucy Connolly has every right to express her feelings which are not so distasteful or unusual as the MSM would have you believe. She is however emblematic of those this totalitarian state would crush into silence and obeisance. A reckoning is coming.
If only a reckoning were coming, reading comments to reports on this and similar cases in MSM shows a worryingly large level of support for woke totalitarianism, unquestioning support for the EU and self-hatred for being British.
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