The Case of Lucy Connolly

And whether someone with no criminal record should go to prison for a tweet.

It is lunchtime on Monday 29th July 2024 - the school summer holidays. News is breaking of a vicious knife attack against young children at a summer dance school in Southport. An early report states that a local resident has seen children covered in blood carried from the dance school. It soon becomes clear this is a major attack involving multiple injuries and fatalities.

Five and a half hours after the incident, police release a statement saying a local 17-year-old male has been arrested in connection with the attack. A further ninety minutes later, police confirm two young children have died and nine others are injured, six critically. Two adults have also been critically injured.

We soon learn that the dance class involved children aged 6-11 and that it had a ‘Taylor Swift theme’.

A third child dies from their injuries the following day. Pictures and names of the three murdered girls soon follow. They are: Elsie Dot Stancombe, age 7; Bebe King, age 6; and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, age 9.

The nation is shocked and appalled. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visits the scene the next day and lays flowers.

All of this set the backdrop for what happened next.

Rumours had already begun circulating on social media on the day of the stabbings - that the attacker was a non-white man, a migrant, and also more specifically a Muslim migrant, perhaps even one who had arrived here on a small boat.

While Starmer was visiting Southport on the afternoon of Tuesday 30th July - the day after the attack - Nigel Farage was recording a video which might be described as him cynically “just asking questions” based on social media rumours. Farage asked whether the attacker was being monitored by the security services - “some reports say he was”. He also wondered aloud whether this was really a non-terror incident as the police had claimed, adding “I just wonder if the truth is being withheld from us”. He then signed off with “I just know something is going wrong in our once-beautiful country”.

Coming from Nigel Farage - a political figure and now MP who has made a career from high immigration into Britain and has sometimes strayed into murky, race-related territory - the implication was there in his message.

Paraphrased (I hope fairly): ‘It’s probably a terror incident, it’s probably therefore Islamist, which is why we are not being told any more detail about the attacker, and this has come about as a result of high immigration completely changing our country and filling it with foreigners from different cultures’.

Anyway, the content of his statement seemed relatively mild compared to the ‘raw’ posts across social media during the previous 24 hours. Farage did not therefore start the social media rumours but neither did he do anything to quell them - quite the reverse. His statement appeared to chime with those rumours.

One ‘reaction tweet’ posted the day before the Farage statement - the day of the murders, when it was then clear two little girls had died - was written by a woman called Lucy Connolly. It read:

‘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 later that evening before going to bed, but not before it had been heavily retweeted, liked, viewed 310,000 times, and screenshotted.

This tweet would later become the centrepiece of the Crown case against Lucy Connolly.

Violent disorder began outside a Southport mosque on the evening of 30th July. In the coming days, rioting would spread across multiple towns, cities and settings. That is despite the police describing the then-unnamed Southport attacker on 30th July as a British citizen of Rwandan heritage who grew up in Cardiff.

On Sunday 4th August - less than a week after the Southport stabbings - an angry mob of far right protestors tried to burn down a Tamworth hotel housing asylum seekers while they were still in it. The same thing was attempted at a Rotherham hotel.

‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care…’

Farage’s political opponents started dubbing the spread of this violent disorder “The Farage Riots” after Farage’s less than helpful video statement on 30th July but also because of his racially charged rhetoric over many years. LBC presenter James O’Brien amplified this phrase on his show on Tuesday 6th August.

Also on Tuesday 6th August, about a week after the stabbings and just two days after the Tamworth hotel burning incident, Lucy Connolly was arrested for her incendiary tweet. By this time she had deleted her account after a ‘Twitter pile-on’.

She was charged with inciting racial hatred under the Public Order Act 1986 and was remanded in custody. To be clear, her case was far from isolated. Around a thousand people were both arrested and charged for various offences relating to the Southport Riots, including inciting racial hatred online. Keir Starmer had been clear early on that in such an inflamed and inflammatory environment, justice was going to be swift.

On 31st October 2024, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Until then, some self-styled ‘free speech advocates’ had been more focused on a woman called Bernadette Spofforth - known to some in the Populist Right bubble - who had been arrested after spreading an Islamic-sounding (false) name of the attacker within hours of the stabbings. But Cheshire police eventually dropped her case later in September.

At that point, Lucy Connolly steadily became the Right’s new free speech ‘cause celebre’. This fact was on full display by the time of Connolly’s appeal in May 2025 - an appeal that failed, prompting the entire political Right including Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch to express their displeasure. Former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss joined in, Johnson with absurd hyperbole.

It is worth taking time to read the full appeal judgement (PDF) and also a commentary on the case (post-appeal) by legal commentator David Allen Green. These make the details of the case very clear, including mitigating and aggravating factors, and why the sentence of 31 months was legally correct.

I don’t wish to delve into the whole ‘free speech’ topic here - it is a contested term in the culture wars and I will return to it at a later date. Suffice it to say, the Right had from the start viewed Lucy Connolly’s case, verdict, and sentence in free speech terms, with the following thoughts in mind:

1. ‘The guilty verdict was essentially a miscarriage of justice when considering Connolly’s mitigating factors and when balanced against general rights to free speech.’

2. ‘If Connolly was guilty under the law, the sentence of 31 months imprisonment was unduly harsh, again when considering Connolly’s mitigating factors but also when comparing the case to other unrelated crimes that society might generally consider more heinous. One might note that her sentence came against a backdrop of the new Labour government releasing prisoners (in September 2024) to reduce overcrowding, and Keir Starmer generally wanting to reduce the numbers sent to prison in the first place.’

3. ‘The guilty verdict and/or the apparently-harsh sentence may represent a political message or lesson being sent to all of the Southport rioters and would-be rioters (but visited upon Connolly personally), and perhaps even a political message being sent to anyone with right-wing Farage-esque beliefs about immigration.’

There is a lot to unpack here, and to be frank, the Right struggled to unpack it in a consistent and effective way. Their reaction was generally wrapped up in broader claims of free speech being constrained and of “two-tier justice” - a claim that certain protests and groups are more harshly treated by the law than others, with the so-called Far Right being punished more harshly than, say, demonstrators who were seemingly pro-Hamas.

The Telegraph, and in particular the journalist Allison Pearson who became something of a champion for Lucy Connolly, suggested Connolly was a political prisoner, and that the judges were part of a new intolerant left-wing establishment pursuing it’s hatred of anything that went against multi-cultural orthodoxy. As is often the way, substantive points of debate could get hidden by some people’s need to push emotive culture war buttons.

By the end of May 2025, the entire Conservative-Reform movement had somehow reached a position of making a hero out of someone who had called for people to be burned alive in hotels. With a different cast of characters, perhaps with the Lucy Connolly figure being a Muslim man calling for churches to be burned down, one could well imagine the Conservative party and Reform UK calling that person a terrorist and demanding severe justice.

So let’s try and break this down, and for this I’m grateful to Ed West and David Shipley - two commentators associated with the Right who have written thoughtful narratives on the case.

It seems clear that Lucy Connolly’s crucial tweet made her guilty of the particular offence - inciting racial hatred under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986. One could feasibly argue in her defence that she somehow ‘didn’t really mean it’ or that very few had seen what she had written. It was impossible for Connolly’s defence to argue the latter since the tweet had clearly been seen and/or shared many thousands of times.

That left a defence of ‘she didn’t really mean it’ and here there were factors to consider: she deleted the tweet after a few hours reflection; she had no previous convictions and had good character references; she had lost a child twelve years before and was therefore sensitive to the death of children; and the fact that she tweeted later that week:

“I do not want civil unrest on our streets. Tommy Robinson is not going to say but this is not going to get anyone anywhere. Protests yes but not riots.”

“Last night was not protesting, it was rioting. People are playing right into the hands of the establishment and the media. We need to come together intelligently and articulately, not riots.”

“I know people are angry, but violence is not the answer.”

These tweets were apparently published before she knew she was in trouble with the law.

The courts did not accept her defence, and partly because Connolly herself had fully accepted during the initial trial that she was guilty of inciting racial hatred - a point she disputed at the subsequent appeal saying she had been wrongly advised by her initial defence solicitor. The appeal judge did not believe this account and gave detailed reasons, which were quite brutal.

WhatsApp messages written by Connolly in the days after the main tweet were hardly helpful to her case at both trial and appeal.

So Connolly was therefore found guilty and the guilty verdict was upheld at appeal, which brings us to sentencing. Here, both the trial judge and appeal judge were constrained by the fact this was a Category 1A offence within the relevant sentencing guidelines. This came with a minimum of three years imprisonment. As David Allen Green notes, Connolly’s sentence could have been worse than the 31 months handed down.

It is therefore fair to say that the logic of the Connolly verdicts and sentence have a sound basis in law.

One may then step back and ask whether both/either the verdict or the sentence are politically sound. In other words, the law may have done its job correctly but have we nonetheless ended up in an apparently perverse situation (in the ‘court of public opinion’) with Lucy Connolly in prison for 31 months?

Underlying it all and stripped of the wild political language about “two-tier Keir” and “lefty lawyers”, this is what I think Connolly’s supporters are really arguing. Yes, she broke the law but did the circumstances really warrant this outcome? As Ed West says:

“Connolly’s tweet may well have merited a criminal record and a fine; the question is whether a jail sentence represents justice...”

Even the ever-populist Daily Express agreed that the focus should be on the sentence:

“Lucy Connolly's breach of law is inarguable, but the length of her sentence is purely political”.

Also, the appeal supported by Allison Pearson and the ‘Free Speech Union’ was specifically an appeal against Connolly’s sentence, not whether or not she was guilty of an offence.

Then again - and this is important when discerning the Right’s various views on this subject - the appeal would have been necessarily approached this way after the trial judgment because it provided the best chance of legal success and it was the prison sentence that was by then causing anguish. In other words, the approach to an appeal was still very much following legal process and viewing the case - as it then had to - through a legal lens.

But politically, the Right’s primary belief was that this was a free speech case, in which free speech should be, at the very least, a balancing factor in law. As the Free Speech Union commented after the October trial:

“There’s no doubt that many people will find that comment ‘offensive’. But does that mean it should be illegal?”

The underlying political belief among some of Connolly’s supporters on the Right was that people should be able to say certain things that are currently classed as illegal. As David Shipley wrote after the appeal verdict:

“I believe that comments like Lucy Connolly’s, however unpleasant, should not be illegal in a civilised country.”

This is part of a wider and ongoing frame on the Right that free speech in Britain is under threat, a point now being supported by members of the Trump administration (which doesn’t exactly endear the argument to many British people). That whole framing is for another article, but suffice it to say, setting aside the culture war rhetoric, I think there is something to be debated here.

As for the Lucy Connolly case, it is possible to simultaneously hold the thoughts in one’s head that: Lucy Connolly broke the law; the response to that breach came about in a fevered atmosphere; what she called for actually happened days later (“set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care”); the guilty verdict at the initial trial was correct; the sentence, while legally sound, seemed objectively perverse when either considered alone or when compared to other crimes and sentences; and that sentences for other heinous crimes can themselves seem perverse.

Where, then, are the possible points of agreement across the ‘culture war divide’?

It almost goes without saying that not everyone across the divide will agree with this, but notwithstanding some views on the Right, I think we can find agreement - as per Ed West - that Lucy Connolly broke the law and that this required some kind of punishment. The sentence and perhaps more specifically how the sentence was implemented - for example, with no release on temporary licence - is where we may find scope for further agreement.

Kemi Badenoch’s view of the case, first tweeted in April 2025 (before the appeal), was notably in response to Connolly not being granted release on temporary licence and she focused in on that point. That question of how Connolly’s sentence might have been implemented has been regrettably drowned out by emotive culture war nonsense, stoked (ironically) by Connolly’s own political and journalistic supporters. Badenoch herself is no stranger to indulging in populist culture war attacks.

Badenoch’s tweet wasn’t perfect, but it at least focused on ‘easing the sentence’ rather than saying (like, for example, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman) that Connolly should have never been prosecuted in the first place. The Badenoch tweet also highlighted a “perception of bias in the application of the law”. She was clearly comparing Connolly’s sentence with those who had actually rioted, which would include, for example, Philip Prescot whose sentence was ‘only’ 28 months for actual rioting outside the Southport mosque and throwing missiles at police.

Again, I imagine there could be some scope for agreement here across the divide. The question is where such potential agreement takes us. The lowering of a sentence (or the lessening of the implementation of a sentence), may only be possible by some kind of resolution at a systemic level rather than just this one individual case. David Allen Green does intriguingly note on his blog that:

“The CPS could have elected to charge her under a lesser offence, such as under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which has a maximum sentence of six months.

But the CPS chose not do this, no doubt because of the violent disorder that happened following the tweet.”

So there was another less harsh route that the CPS could have followed, but the context of the Connolly offence really mattered. It’s that old point about falsely shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded cinema as opposed to an empty one.

It may be that the CPS could adjust its approach or that the sentencing guidelines could be amended to reflect the nuances of a case like Lucy Connolly’s. But neither may be easy. The government was recently criticised about changes to sentencing guidelines in a different context. Plus ‘guidelines are just guidelines’, and where is the nuance in inciting racial hatred and attacks on minorities just before such attacks take place? Ultimately the government could change the law, as it did in 2001 when it extended the maximum sentence for an offence under the Public Order Act from two years to seven. But that is also no small matter.

In the end, as noted earlier, one can mentally reconstruct a case like Lucy Connolly’s, make some mental adjustments like, say, changing the ethnicities or cultural backgrounds of the individuals involved, and it should rapidly become clear to all reasonable people that such laws and strong ‘deterrent punishments’ exist for good reason.

And so reaching some agreement across the culture war divide may be one thing. A proper ‘resolution’ that still stands up in law may prove quite another. But I think the failure to release Connolly on temporary licence was a missed opportunity and one that risks unnecessarily stoking the outrage further, and (if we are not already there) ultimately making a ‘free speech martyr’ of Lucy Connolly.

For what it’s worth, that is my admittedly limited conclusion.

Afterthoughts

A wider difficulty throughout this case is a point that tends to come up in ‘culture war battles’: that of the two sides talking past each other. On one side a legalistic interpretation; on the other, a ‘court of public opinion’ interpretation, supported in this case - often unhelpfully - by other grievances about free speech, lawyers, sentencing, and Keir Starmer. The former camp believes the latter regularly makes a fool of itself and therefore should not be taken seriously. The latter camp believes the former is insufferably smug and self-righteous.

I don’t know how we get past that without the latter camp first reining in the excesses of its populist wing, or at least no longer amplifying it as the modern Conservative Party tends to do.

If I have one final point it’d be this: we as a society treat social media posts too casually. It’s as if these platforms are just ‘scratch pads’ upon which we can scrawl any passing thought. It doesn’t help that writing a seemingly private Whatsapp message to a close friend is just as easy as writing a social media post that is broadcast to the entire world. It’s interesting that both Whatsapp and Twitter/X featured in the Lucy Connolly case, and that messages from both platforms formed part of the trial.

If any good comes from this sorry case, it’s that people may take a little more care when posting online.

Then again, the need for such care will probably prompt the Populist Right to demand ‘more free speech’.

But I think that’s a battle they are going to lose.