Lucy Connolly: Free at Last

When the history of free speech in Britain is written (assuming it is allowed to be), this week’s landmark case will no doubt feature heavily. It may also wind up proving the ugliest stain on Keir Starmer’s reign as Prime Minister – and bear in mind, that’s up against Lord Alli’s bedsheets. Lucy Connolly – that paragon of ‘far-right thuggery’ (42-year-old mother, beloved childminder, and wife of Tory councillor – you ‘do the math’) was finally released on Thursday, having served 380 days (40%) of her 31-month sentence for the crime of publicly objecting to the slaughter of little girls in Southport.

This is the infamous tweet posted on July 29 2024, which she swiftly deleted and apologised for:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards 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”

As I wrote closer to the time:

“I have read and re-read Connolly’s tweet, analysed and dissected it several times, and can find nothing to seriously object to. I don’t read it as incitement, and I don’t think anyone could argue in good faith that it was. In any event, it was certainly not in the league of Kneecap demanding you “Kill your MP”, nor Bob Vylan’s exhortations of “Death to the IDF” – both of whom were platformed by Glastonbury and the BBC, and both of whom have escaped serious consequences. Unfortunately for Connolly, she has two black marks against her: the ‘victims’ of her tweet aren’t White, and she is. In addition, as she righty acknowledges her post could be interpreted as ‘racism’.”

Regrettably, the voices in support of Lucy were few and far between (at least, among those that count). In a rare moment of clarity, the British judiciary sprung into action. Connolly was arrested, charged, remanded and banged up by Keir Starmer faster than a Ukrainian rentboy – although in her defence, she failed to accidentally set fire to one of his properties.

Like Lucy, I too have been inside. And while my sentence was nothing compared to the length of hers (it was similarly ‘free speech’ orientated, incidentally), I can confirm that chokey is no jolly-up!

Still, Connolly is defiant upon her release. Keir Starmer may learn the hard way that when you incarcerate people on spurious grounds, you’d better throw away the key – otherwise, your political prisoners have a habit of coming back to bite you on the arse. Here are the most important things we learned from her hour-long interview with The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson (the full video of which you can see below):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sO1oVzFSC0&t=43s

The farcical nature of her imprisonment

“I am just a woman from Northampton living in a three-bed semi, that worked as a childminder. You know, with a husband as an engineer. Okay, he was a councillor, but people forget that’s almost like a second job. His first job was as an engineer, as a father, as a husband. We are nobodies. We are not known to anybody. I will never understand quite how it got to this.”

The tweet

“I know you’re going to come back to me and say, “Oh, you don’t like immigrants. You were racist”, this, that, and the other. But, it’s not about that. It’s just about making sure that the people coming into our country are vetted and that we know that they’re safe in society.

I just went for a walk, you know, put my AirPods in, took the dog for a few miles and calmed myself down. That’s my thing. Exercise, go for a run, go for a walk, calm, you know. And then I came back and I thought, ‘no, you can’t write that’. That’s really not an okay thing to write. I didn’t really mean that, you know, take it down. So, that’s what I did. I didn’t comment on it. I didn’t read the comments. I just deleted the post and didn’t think much more of it to be honest.”

Her ‘racism’

“Most of my children in the 11 years that I’ve been childminding, have been children of immigrants. Nearly all of my families, these people are doctors and dentists and teachers – they’re busy people, you know, and they needed someone they could rely on. And you build a relationship with these people. As you’ve written about, I supported their visa applications, did all their paperwork and signed that off for them. We need people like them. We absolutely should welcome people like them to the UK, because they’re just amazing people and have a lot to give.

I don’t want to walk down the street and people think I’m a racist. Being a racist is not a good trait. You know, we shouldn’t be judging people by the colour of their skin, their religious, any of that. We judge people on who they are, the merit of who they are. I’ve looked after many children from all over the world, and I’ve quite literally treated them as I treat my own children, and love them and protected them like I do my own. So yes, it was very stinging.”

Coerced into pleading guilty

“The legal advice that I got was like, ‘They’re not playing by the rules in these cases. I’ve not seen anything like this before. You know, you should never have been remanded, but they have remanded you. I’m going to try and get you bail, but you know, I’m not hopeful.’ It was just the general consensus across the legal board, solicitors and lawyers and barristers, that these weren’t normal circumstances. These cases were being treated differently.

Because I’d been remanded, I didn’t know how long (I’d be there). I’ve met women that have been on remand for two years, and are still waiting for a trial. I have a daughter that needs me. You know, I’m a stay-at-home mommy. She’s had me there her whole life, and all I was thinking was ‘what is my quickest route to her?’ All I was thinking was, they’re going to throw the book at me for this. They’ve made that quite clear. They’ve done it to other people. What is my quickest route home? And after discussions with my lawyer, he expected I’d be home at Christmas time. I need to be with my family. So, by the time it got to that point I really didn’t care what I was pleading – I just wanted to be home with my family.”

Starmer’s influence / Political prisoner

Despite being a perfect candidate for bail (first time offender, no flight risk), Connolly was twice denied bail, denied release on temporary licence, and had her Court of Appeal request for a reduced sentence refused. When asked whether she believed Keir Starmer had influenced the way she was treated, she answered “100 percent”.

“The probation officer said, ‘you shouldn’t even be in here’. And that for all the many years he’d worked in the probation service, he’d never seen anything like it. He said it is political, Lucy. I think he thought that had I not been married to who I’d been married to, I would have got a lot lesser sentence than what I did get”.

Prison brutality

“They only get the nurse when they’re intending on ‘bending someone up’, forcibly moving somebody. Different officers do it different ways, but they can really hurt you if they want to. And they decided on that day they were going to really hurt me. And I mean really hurt me. I’ve got a lot of witnesses saying it was horrendous to witness. And the more I screamed, the more they hurt me. Completely unnecessary. I was sitting on the floor crying saying I didn’t want to go upstairs, and with that they just sat on me, handcuffed my arms behind my back and pushed my elbows up further and further. The handcuffs were on so tight they couldn’t get them off, and there were bruises all up my arms. I’ve still got to go to a chiropractor about my back and my shoulder, because they hurt me so badly and it was completely unnecessary.”

Considering legal action

“I definitely think that’s something that I will be looking into. Again, I don’t want to say too much because I need to seek legal advice on that. But I do think the police were dishonest in what they released and what they said about me, and I will be holding them to account for that.”

One of the most damaging aspects of this case, as is so often the way with Keir Starmer, is the conflicting nature of his own words. Had he conveniently forgotten that as the Director of Public Prosecutions he previously opined on the ‘chilling effect’ Twitter investigations would have on free speech?

Here he was, fresh-faced back in 2012:

“I think that if there are too many investigations and too many cases coming to court then that can have a chilling effect on free speech. This is about trying to get the balance right, making sure time and resources are spent on cases that really do need to go to court, and not spent on cases which people might think really would be better dealt with by a swift apology and removal of the offending tweet.”

Furthermore, Starmer was particularly at pains to stress the mitigating factor of early deletion:

“This is not a get-out-of-jail card but it is highly relevant. Stuff does go up on a Friday and Saturday night and come down the next morning. If that is the case a lot of people will say: ‘That shouldn’t have happened, the person has accepted it, but really you don’t need a criminal prosecution.’ It is a relevant factor.”

Summing up her experience at the hands of Starmer’s two-tier justice, Connolly put it succinctly, “They didn’t break me”. And that, perhaps, is what scares not just the system, but Starmer himself the most.

 

Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and The Frank Report, which you should probably subscribe to.

 

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(Photograph: The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)