IN JULY 2024, three girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in Southport. Within hours, false rumours spread online that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived by boat.

Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor, was at home when the news broke.

At 8.30pm on July 29, she posted on X: ‘Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f***ing 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 tweeted to about 10,000 followers. She deleted it three and half hours later and has repeatedly expressed remorse. The post was nevertheless seen by 310,000 people. For speaking her mind, she received a penalty once unimaginable in a genuine liberal democracy.

As she admitted, the tweet was crude and angry. But Britain’s judicial system decided it was a crime of incitement to violence, and a cause of public disorder.

On the stated ground of public safety, the Government criminalised Connolly with unusual haste, which in turn led to unusual truncation and distortion of the judicial process.

She was arrested eight days after the tweet, on August 6. She was formally charged on August 9. She appeared in magistrates’ court via video link the next morning, a Saturday. Her case was sent straight to Crown Court. A plea and trial preparation hearing was scheduled for August 12. It was adjourned – not for months, as would be normal, but to September 2, when she pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred.

Connolly was pressured by the prosecutor and even her own legal counsel to plead guilty on promise of quicker resolution.

After all, nobody acted violently as an effect of her tweet so far as the CPS could prove. Yet the CPS argued that racial hatred was likely to be incited by her tweet – a standard the judge accepted at sentencing.

Connolly expected to be fined or given a suspended sentence, and to go home to her family. Instead, she was sentenced to 31 months in prison.

Read More – How Lord Hermer fast-tracked Lucy Connolly to a travesty of justice