YESTERDAY three appeal judges doubled down on the State’s punitive treatment of Lucy Connolly for what her first judge decided was incitement to racial hatred. If her treatment hadn’t before, this further layer of brutality meted out to her will indeed make her case a cause célèbre.
Lord Justice Holroyde at the Court of Appeal quite extraordinarily said there was ‘no arguable basis’ that Lucy Connolly’s original sentence was ‘manifestly excessive’. Really so? How out of touch is he? Where does he normally reside? Beria’s USSR?
In October, the Northampton childminder and wife of a former Tory county councillor was given 31 months behind bars for stirring up ‘racial hatred’ for a ‘rash and ugly’ tweet on X hours after three young girls were murdered in a barbaric knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last year. Which she deleted three hours later. Yes, it was an anti-immigrant tweet. Which today apparently automatically means it is racist. She and her husband have certainly been made to accept that it was.
During her appeal last week Connolly, 42, explained from prison that she was ‘really angry, really upset’ and ‘distressed that those children had died’ when she wrote the tweet. Yesterday the judges rejected these grounds – of her anxiety and alarm – that prompted her tweet, including the experience of her own child’s death. Yet how many mothers would relate to her feelings? Many I suspect. The horrifying attack by a nearly 18-year-old (who indeed did turn out to be the son of immigrants and had been on the Prevent list) certainly heightened my awareness and concern for young girls’ safety in the UK. I certainly would not want an immigrant hostel in my street. Would the judges if they had daughters or granddaughters? Or at all? I very much doubt they would. But then I guess they don’t live in any of the towns where young male (mainly Muslim) illegal asylum seekers are parked en masse and free to roam, or where there has been a history of Muslim grooming gangs.
The judges also refused to accept that she never intended to incite violence, nor that, as her husband declared, his wife has already paid a very high price for making a mistake. She has. Ray Connolly is right. This was no judgment of Solomon: the judges have shown her no mercy. Even though, as Connolly pointed out, his wife is getting more time in jail for one tweet than some paedophiles and domestic abusers get.
Take Lord Justice Holroyde’s own record on this. In 2022 he was one of three judges who released former Labour peer Lord Nazir Ahmed from prison, although he had been convicted of raping a nine-year-old boy in Rotherham. Writer Peter Lloyd points out that Holroyde is a Labour-voting liberal. Very ‘liberal’ in one case. Authoritarian in another.
Connolly’s case is one of the most glaring examples of two-tier justice. Take the Welsh ‘choir girl’, also reported by Peter Lloyd, caught smuggling £250,000 worth of cannabis into the UK who’s just avoided jail.
There’s the Labour aide who flashed a 13-year-old girl who apparently can’t be sacked despite his guilty plea.
Worst of all, confirming Ray Connolly’s assertion about paedophiles, there’s the case of the BBC’s Huw Edwards, given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to making indecent images of children.
Readers will no doubt will have their own examples of two-tier sentencing and justice. No one can tell me that sentencing in the UK is any longer just or equitable. The disparities and the political dimension to it is staring us in the face, and Labour and much of the establishment don’t care. The judiciary has not just been captured, it’s been politicised. These are activist judges.
Take too Labour Councillor Ricky Jones, charged with encouraging violent disorder over a speech he made to a crowd in Walthamstow on August 7 last year, who has just had his trial delayed to August. No swift justice for him although footage of the incident went viral online, when Jones spoke to the crowd about ‘disgusting Nazi fascists’ and said ‘we need to cut their throats and get rid of them’.
How does that compare with Mrs Connolly’s armchair tweet, Your Honour?
Speaking to Allison Pearson, who has done more than anyone else to bring the two-tier, police state treatment of Connolly to light, the imprisoned mother said: ‘Whatever I’d done, [the] police made it quite clear I was going down for this . . . their intention was always to hammer me.’
Indeed. Pearson reveals that Connolly received only a perfunctory psychiatric evaluation, where she was not even asked about the loss of her first child. Pearson also says that after Connolly expressed reasonable concerns about illegal immigration in a police interview, the CPS issued a misleading statement that she ‘told officers she did not like immigrants’. Even if she had, is that a crime? So much For Starmer’s assertion we have free speech. I have no doubt it reflects how a lot of people feel, including many longer-term legal migrants to this country who have deplored our border control failure and Boris Johnson’s door opening to further legal migration. James O’Brien doesn’t like Brexit voters much. Is that a crime? If attitudes to immigration have become more negative it is down to successive governments’ failure to control it, indeed encouragement of it to the extent that the face of the country has changed almost beyond recognition in a very few years, certainly in urban areas where indigenous British are a minority.
But what really horrifies me most is the lack of consideration of Connolly as a woman and a mother in prison. Everything I have read on this emphasises that women fare much worse in prison than men, that psychologically they cannot cope with confinement. It is (or was) recognised that separating a mother from her child is cruel to both.
Yet when we heard that Connolly was being denied release on temporary licence (granted to fellow inmates convicted of more serious crimes) there was not a peep from feminists or the progressive left.
Why, they should have been asking, was she not granted bail? She was no danger to the community, she was not going to offend again, ‘utterly shocked by the experience’, and hers was a first offence by a respected childminder of good character.
Pearson has reported that as the deadline for her release approaches, prison authorities have outrageously warned Connolly that she should not expect to go straight home. Due to ‘media interest’, they’d rather put her in ‘approved premises’ with key workers first. Pearson wrote:
‘What you have to understand, Allison,’ an eminent lawyer told me yesterday, ‘is the reason they don’t want to free Lucy Connolly is because their worst nightmare is you sitting down for a face-to-face interview with Lucy and everyone realising she’s not the racist witch it suited them to paint her as, just a really lovely person.’
The doubling down on Lucy Connolly is purely political, as Pearson argues. She is the example held up for all to see of what happens to you if you protest against savagery by someone from a migrant background. As Daniel Jupp put it in a recent post:
‘On the street and community level, the current British government and the judiciary and police and media have all been very clear. If you are white English and gather in public to protest against mass immigration, terrorist atrocities, the murder or rape of children, and particularly against Islam or crimes performed by Muslims, you will be ruthlessly suppressed. If you are from the protected and favoured Muslim minorities, you can walk armed on British streets, you can rape white English children for decades with the authorities aiding and abetting you, and you can openly support terrorist groups.’
