The Lucy Connolly scandal reveals the folly of policing hatred

So Lucy Connolly has finally been released from prison, nine months into her 31-month sentence for ‘inciting racial hatred’ on X in the wake of last year’s Southport murders. Good. This childminder from Northampton should never have spent a day in prison, and even so will now serve out the rest of her sentence at home under as-yet-unkown release conditions. Now, we must ensure this authoritarian farce is never repeated.

Let’s start with the obvious. What Connolly tweeted on 29 July 2024, when the bodies of knifeman Axel Rudakubana’s three tiny victims were barely cold, was inexcusable. ‘Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care’, she raged to her 9,000 followers. ‘While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them… If that makes me racist, so be it.’

Like so many others, Connolly was horrified by Southport – not least given that she had previously lost a child herself. Like so many others, she had seen the swirling online misinformation that the killer was a Muslim small-boats migrant. But startlingly few will have begun jabbering darkly online about burning human beings alive – albeit with that caveat, ‘for all I care’.

Was it ugly, bigoted, vile? Obviously. But should she have been locked up for it, held on remand, denied bail – twice? Should she have been handed down, what is believed to be, the longest prison sentence ever issued for a single social-media post – all after she had pleaded guilty, in the vain hope of getting home to her husband and daughter sooner? Obviously not. As a society, we continue to stub our toe on this crucial distinction, with disastrous consequences for all of our freedoms.

There has been a lot of discussion today about whether or not Connolly’s sentence was excessive, and understandably so. Indeed, the punishment meted out to her exceeded that meted out to actual rioters. Philip Prescot was one of those scumbags who menaced Southport’s mosque. He got 28 months. Hateful speech punished more severely than hateful violence – the insanity of our censorious times summed up.

But there are deeper questions. Was this really the law being blindly, impartially, applied? Was that even possible amid the post-Southport crackdown, in which government social-media accounts were blaring out the words, ‘Think before you post’. When the director of public prosecutions was taking to the airwaves, insisting that even retweeting hateful content could land you in prison. When attorney general Lord Hermer, who has to sign off on all ‘inciting racial hatred’ offences, was making bombastic statements, telling hate-speakers they ‘cannot hide behind [their] keyboard’. I’d say not.

Most importantly, should the state be in the business of punishing ‘hatred’ anyway? Incitement to violence is rightly illegal, though it should be more tightly defined. After all, this is the point where speech ceases to be mere speech and breaches into the commission of illegal action. In America, the standard is speech which is both intended and likely to spark imminent violence, which Connolly’s tweet, posted then deleted, would not have met. But our much more nebulous offences of inciting hatred invite the authorities into the realm of thought and emotion. Frankly, I do not trust any police officer, prosecutor or judge to hold that kind of power.

No wonder Lucy Connolly’s case – and the state of free speech in Keir Starmer’s Britain more broadly – has excited so much attention in the US, land of the First Amendment, with vice-president JD Vance airing his concerns at every given opportunity. Over the past 60 years, America has been a beacon to the world where freedom of speech is concerned. The legal battles of the civil-rights movement, as anti-racist activists fought censorious laws in the courts, gave the First Amendment the teeth it had hitherto lacked. Struggle from below and rulings from above delivered the freest, most open public square the world has ever seen.

Britain has been on the precise opposite journey. Over the past 60 years, we – and much of Europe – have been pioneers in a new, insidious form of censorship, beginning with the passage of the Race Relations Act 1965, which made inciting racial hatred an offence for the first time. Since then, we have added censorious law after censorious law to the statute book. To the point that we are comfortably arresting more people for speech today than America did during the First Red Scare.

You’ll be surprised to learn that we have not succeeded in eradicating hate, as the explosion of anti-Semitism since 7 October, or indeed the post-Southport riots, can attest. But we have corroded the fundamental freedoms that we once considered to be our inheritance. If we are to ensure no one else is thrown in jail for some rash words spoken, then regretted, we need to rediscover our long-dormant liberal tradition. Hate speech is free speech. And free speech is our best weapon against hate. Anything else spells fear, loathing and censorship.

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