Free the Southport speech criminals

What should be punished more harshly: vile, racist violence or a vile, racist tweet? According to our criminal-justice system, it is the latter. Obviously.

The case of Lucy Connolly – who has been appealing her sentence in the Court of Appeal this week – has exposed the warped priorities of contemporary Britain, in which it is no exaggeration to say that words are, in certain circumstances, treated more gravely than deeds.

Connolly, a childminder from Northampton, was given 31 months in prison last summer for inciting racial hatred. After the horrific Southport murders, amid online speculation the killer was a small-boats migrant, she opened X and wrote 51 words that would ruin her life:

‘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.’

She deleted it a few hours later, after it had racked up 310,000 views. On WhatsApp, she joked the tweet had ‘bit me on the arse, lol’. Clearly fearing a knock at the door may be coming, she said she would ‘play the mental-health card’ if arrested. Then she was.

She pleaded guilty, as so many Southport speech criminals did, but that didn’t buy her much mercy. Not only is her 31-month stretch longer than some violent criminals would expect to receive, it is also more than some violent criminals received for their part in the rioting that ensued after Southport. Philip Prescott was one of the scumbags who attacked the mosque in Southport a day after the killings. He got 28 months.

That what Connolly said was despicable goes without saying. But the notion that an ugly missive should concern the state as much as – or perhaps even more than – a mob menacing Muslims with bricks is demented. It’s this kind of thinking that has made the UK a world leader in the new authoritarianism, in which we’re comfortably arresting more people for speech crimes than America did during the First Red Scare.

At a time when the bar for what is considered ‘hate speech’ is comically low – even owning ‘very Brexity’ books can raise the eyebrows of police officers nowadays – Connolly’s words stood out for how genuinely rank they were. But that still doesn’t mean they should have resulted in a lengthy spell inside.

Incitement to violence is – and should be – a crime. This is where speech crosses the line into menacing behaviour, into the commission of violence. But incitement to hatred takes us into far more nebulous territory. After all, Connolly was not geeing up a torch-wielding mob or Telegramming location details, instructions and Molotov recipes to a receptive audience. She was raging into the social-media ether.

When sentencing Connolly, Judge Melbourne Inman baldly asserted that social-media loudmouths like Connolly had played a direct role in the violence that ensued, with their attempts to ‘sow division and hatred… leading to a number of towns and cities being disfigured by mindless and racist violence’. This is the theory underlying the offence of inciting racial hatred: that if you allow people to say hateful things, this will ‘stir up’ yet more hatred and ultimately lead to bloodshed.

The only problem is, it’s bunk. It relies on a low view of human beings that assumes we can be sent into a frenzy by influencers, that latent prejudices can be pricked by intemperate tweets. It also relieves the rioters of some of the responsibility for their own contemptible views and actions – as if they were mere putty in the hands of the accounts they stumbled across on X.

This is why people saying awful things online has become the great, paralysing fear of today’s elites – leading them to pursue speech criminals more vigorously than even violent criminals. Because they think ordinary people are stupid. Because they think we are morally and intellectually ill-equipped to resist, rebut or ignore the bloviations of haters and rabble-rousers. They see censorship as all that stands between civilisation and barbarism. And we are the barbarians.

The bottles thrown at mosques, the migrant businesses burned to the ground, the black and Asian people pulled out of their cars, beaten and racially abused… the post-Southport riots certainly exposed the racial hatred that still lingers in some pockets of society. Contrary to the comforting narrative that it was all the work of the organised far right, here was something more chilling: a disturbingly organic spasm of racist violence, stoked by a curdling white identity politics and simmering resentment over immigration and multiculturalism.

But to pretend – as the authorities seem to be doing – that this simply would never have happened if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter and loosened up the speech codes is as shallow and cowardly as it is implicitly authoritarian. It ignores the deeper problems that brought us to this precipice. And it abdicates responsibility for understanding and arguing against the poisonous ideas that are emerging on the fringes.

Lucy Connolly’s appeal is about the severity of her sentence, rather than the conviction itself. She disputes that she intended to incite violence, a key factor in her harsh punishment. Whatever the legal niceties, she has certainly been made an example of – what else would explain her inability to gain temporary release, which she’s been eligible for since November, despite having no previous convictions and winning credit for good behaviour while in prison?

But the more fundamental question we as a society need to address is should a hateful tweet ever land you in a prison cell to begin with. We at spiked say no. You can’t have freedom of speech à la carte. You either defend it for all, or for none at all. Censorship never sits within the bounds set for it. As soon as you concede that some views are so dangerous they must be criminalised, it is only a matter of time before all manner of views are criminalised, too – as the UK’s tragicomic descent into woke censorship attests.

So free Lucy Connolly. And free all the Southport speech criminals. Not because what they said was fine or justifiable, or a case of them getting carried away. But because they expressed hatreds and resentments that must be clocked, understood and confronted. And the only way to do that is with more free speech, not less.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater