Lucy Connolly: a 'free speech martyr'?

Former childminder Lucy Connolly has become a cause célèbre for the political right since being handed a 31-month prison sentence for inciting racial hatred with an online rant about migrants on the day of the Southport attacks.

In her post on X, viewed 310,000 times, the 41-year-old wife of a Conservative councillor called for "mass deportation now" and urged her followers to "set fire" to hotels housing asylum seekers. Her supporters have loudly criticised the length of her sentence but, this week, the Court of Appeal ruled there was "no arguable basis" for it to be judged "manifestly excessive".

'Ruthless' speech laws

Britain's "supposed adherence" to free speech is being "whittled away year by year", said Christian Calgie in the Daily Express, and Connolly has "inadvertently" become a "martyr for those pushing back at this disgraceful erosion". The government is releasing criminals because prison space is at an "all-time low" but our "best legal bods" think that "keeping a mother in prison for over a year over a tweet" is "sensible" and "fair". Connolly's case should "make all of our stomachs turn".

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Britain's "two-tier justice system means you can get more jail time for an ill-judged tweet than for some of the worst offences imaginable", said The Telegraph. When child rapists and domestic abusers are getting lighter sentences than Connolly, her treatment looks "unduly harsh".

We've a "real problem" with our speech laws, said Ed West in The Spectator. The state has "endless compassion for habitual criminals", always "willing to give them 'one more chance'", but is "utterly ruthless against those who breach its speech codes and transgress its sacred values". This "shouldn't be a right-wing talking point" but one that concerns every British citizen.

'Populist bonfires'

"Leftists" like me deplore "dehumanising" and "violent language", said India Block in London's The Standard. But prison isn't the place to "disabuse" Connolly of her prejudice. Restorative justice would have been "so much better": "she should have been offered the chance to take accountability, to meet and make amends to the people she wished harm upon".

Targeting migrants is "a hobby horse for politicians" who blame them for our "fraying" social fabric. Connolly was "encouraged" to hate migrants and then "punished" for wishing them harm. "Locking her up" is simply "turning up the temperature on the debate". She's the "perfect martyr for the right: a nice white woman and mother imprisoned for thought crimes".

Suella Braverman, Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch have all spoken up for Connolly but all three care more about lighting "populist bonfires" than the actual plight of women in prison, said Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The i Paper. This furore is "nothing to do with fairness", and everything to do with "right-wing drives" to "politicise and interfere with the criminal justice system".