Sometimes, something happens that is so deeply shocking, so profoundly disturbing, that it makes you ask: ‘Am I really living in the free, civilised, democratic nation I thought I was living in?’
At least, that’s what I asked myself when I read about the case of Lucy Connolly, who is fast becoming another powerful symbol of Britain’s spiralling free speech crisis.
Who is Lucy Connolly, you might ask? She’s a young mother, she’s the wife of a sick husband, and she is by all accounts a respected and well-liked childminder.
She is also a woman who, after the senseless murder of three little girls by the son of Rwandan migrants in Southport last summer, when emotions were running very high in the country, tweeted something very inflammatory.
‘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.’
Is it hard to read? Yes. Offensive? Sure. But does it justify what was then handed out to Lucy Connolly by our justice system – a prison sentence of two years and seven months?
Yes, you read that right. Despite having never physically touched, abused, or hurt a single person, despite having never started a fire or thrown anything at a hotel housing asylum-seekers, because of that tweet Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months. She was denied bail. She was urged to plead guilty. And she was sent to jail.
Now, despite becoming eligible for temporary release last November, which would have allowed this mother at least to spend some time with her 12-year-old daughter and sick husband, prison bosses are refusing to grant this temporary leave.
Which is exactly why I wanted to use whatever reach and influence I have through this Substack by writing about the case and drawing more attention to it.
Because, perhaps like you, I happen to think the way Lucy Connolly has been treated by the British state and the justice system, encouraged by Sir Keir Starmer at the top, is utterly outrageous. And like millions of others in this country, I see it as yet another powerful symbol of our two-tier justice system.
Just think, for a moment, about all we have seen alongside the case of Lucy Connolly. A justice system that recently, remarkably, released an assortment of hardened criminals to make room for the likes of Connolly in our crowded prisons, and which still threw her in jail even after she had realised her mistake and deleted the tweet after only four hours. I ask you, is thisreallythe kind of person the British state should be locking up alongside murderers, rapists and thieves?
A justice system, furthermore, that recently let Labour MP Mike Amesbury, who was filmed physically assaulting one of his constituents, escape jail while Connolly, who did not lay her hands on anybody, was sent down for the best part of three years.
A justice system which treats Lucy Connolly’s speech crime this harshly but which seemingly has no real issue at all with student mobs and trans extremists demanding we ‘kill all TERFS’ or radical Islamists and leftists singing highly offensive anti-Semitic tropes and celebrating mass murder on the streets of London for months and months on end.
A justice system that recently suggested, through the Sentencing Council, that people from racial, sexual, gender, and religious minority groups should have their identities and other mitigating factors taken into account when sentencing but which clearly does not think the same should apply to people from the white, straight, British majority, like Connolly, who lost her first baby at 19 months due to NHS blunders.
A system in which some lawyers and judges really do think we should consider the impact of the slave trade when analysing the contemporary behaviour of criminals from minority groups but which clearly did not care much at all about the fact that Lucy Connolly, who had been diagnosed with PTSD after losing her baby, might have struggled to process the mass stabbing of little girls in Southport.
As the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson pointed out in a forensic essay about the case, while Lucy Connolly was urged to plead guilty to reduce her sentence, ‘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’. Again I ask you: why has this woman been thrown in prison? And why, months on, is she still in prison?
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on April 8, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
