I WONDER how many people have written to their MP asking for Lucy Connolly to be released? I wonder, too, how many of them received an answer similar to that sent to me by my own MP, Sir Alan Campbell, which reads as follows:
‘As I understand it,’ he says of Lucy, ‘she used social media to urge people to burn down an hotel housing immigrants. The court found her guilty and decided the punishment. It is disappointing that those advocating for her release seem to be turning a blind eye to wrongdoing and turning their backs on the law.’
Of course, when your ‘representative’ is the Chief Whip, whose primary duty is not to appreciate and give due weight to the concerns of his constituents, but to keep MPs toeing the government line, nothing better could be expected. However, even many less-partisan commentators seem agreed that the words which Lucy briefly posted online were an incitement to violence and certainly deserved punishment. Ann Widdecombe, for instance, discussing the question of free speech in a recent interview (39.10 in) says, ‘If it’s incitement to violence, as in the famous case of Lucy Connolly, with whom I have no darn sympathy, if it’s incitement to violence, that, I think, should be dealt with at law. If it is simply the expression of an opinion . . . I mean, there’s a difference between saying, “Let’s burn down, you know, the hotels where the asylum-seekers are,” and between saying, “We shouldn’t have asylum-seekers in hotels.” They are two completely different sorts of statement. The one should be unlawful and, indeed, is unlawful; the other should not be unlawful, but very often people try to resort to law to stop it.’
So far, so good: however, Ann proposes only two distinct categories of free speech. I think there is a third category to be taken into account, and that Lucy’s comment falls into that category.
What did she actually write?
‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b****** for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them.’ (My emphasis.)
This is not, in fact, a statement at all, nor is it a rallying cry for an assault on either asylum-seekers (aka illegal immigrants) or the government. It is a cry from the heart, an outburst of raw emotion from someone thrown off balance in the immediacy of hearing news of the Southport atrocity. This is testified not only by the expletives (I doubt whether Lucy makes a habit of peppering her conversation with these) but, most particularly, by the qualifying words, ‘for all I care’. This is not ‘incitement to violence’, it is a cry of anger and despair, and it is swiftly followed by an outpouring of pain on behalf of the families who have lost their children: ‘I feel physically sick, knowing what these families will now have to endure.’
Lucy erased her comment a few hours later, when the emotion of the moment had subsided, and well before any disturbances began. Clearly Sir Alan is wrong to claim that she ‘used’ social media with intent to provoke arson attacks. Had she not followed her lawyer’s inappropriate advice to plead guilty, she would have qualified for a jury trial. This would probably have resulted in a fine, at most. Instead, she faced one of the judges virtually instructed by our ex-public-prosecutor prime minister to hit the people he classed together as far-right thugs’ where it hurt, and hit them hard. Mercy did not season justice. The imperative was to teach the great unwashed a lesson.
Lucy certainly should not be in prison. Unlike many of those released early to provide places for the truculent riff-raff, she poses no threat whatsoever to the public. No sensible person, in fact, would think her unwise words worth more than a tap on the wrist, since she herself was the first to acknowledge that she had done wrong in posting her emotional comment, and promptly erased it, well before the hue and cry had been raised. She did not need to be taught a lesson. She had learnt it all by herself.
When it comes to the question of incitement, it seems to me that it is succeeding governments, not the long-suffering British public, who have the most to answer for. For years now our rulers have been (to quote Sir Alan) ‘turning a blind eye to wrongdoing and turning their backs on the law’. Which, for instance, would you say was more likely to stir up resentment: emotional outbursts on Facebook, or the ever-increasing numbers of young men from unassimilable cultures being permitted to enter our country illegally, and now being allocated to towns and villages throughout the country on a ‘fair-shares’ basis? What do most to stoke the fires of civil unrest: popular demands, even if crudely enunciated, for our own laws and culture to be put first and respected, or the Government’s refusal to allow a comprehensive national inquiry into the racially targeted clan-rape of hundreds of thousands of working-class children, with the alleged complicity of those who should have been upholding the law?
Actions speak louder than words. In view of the rough treatment being dealt out to the indigenous/well-integrated majority of the population, while favours are heaped liberally upon unvetted foreign invaders and on sectarian minorities unwilling to assimilate, are we perhaps being deliberately pressed by our rulers beyond the bounds of endurance, in the hope of provoking open rebellion? As Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore pointed out, when he was accused of censorship and suppression, a hotch-potch of different, potentially warring cultures can be held together only by dictatorial rule: so what a wonderful excuse an eruption of fighting on the streets would be for a covid-style crackdown with even greater censorship, and the introduction of Tony Blair’s pet project, the digital ID! What a brilliant employment opportunity, too, for the fighting-fit young men with no attachment or loyalty to the people of this country who now pass their time loitering about town centres and pestering women!
For years now our rulers have been testing our patience and goodwill by rubbing our noses in diversity. They have enacted legislation which promotes the interests of minorities above those of the majority population, while failing to promote, indeed denigrating, our national history and cultural identity: the very things which attracted and inspired a sense of belonging in earlier generations of immigrants. If this is not incitement to civil unrest, I don’t know what is. Sir Keir should put an end to the inflammatory imprisonment of thousands of harmless people for thought crime or ill-considered bursts of emotion, and start dealing with the serious problem of demographic replacement which, as he himself has admitted, is making so many of us feel like strangers in our own land.
