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A journalist with The Free Press recently detailed how a British mom was given a 31-month prison sentence for her social media post — which she had taken down four hours after posting — that a United Kingdom court determined was “written material which is threatening, abusive, or insulting” that intended “to stir up racial hatred.”
Meanwhile, a child molester, an attempted child abductor, and a man who assaulted two female police officers are among those who have recently received shorter sentences from UK courts, Dominic Green wrote in the June 3 Free Press report.
“Lucy Connolly is in prison today not because of what she said, but to send a political message: to ‘deter’ other British people from venting their dissatisfaction about immigration and its discontents on social media — outlets that, being American companies, the government cannot control,” Green wrote.
Connolly was sentenced in October 2024 and is currently in a women’s prison in Staffordshire. Shehas PTSD from losing her 19-month-old son to medical care failures in 2011, and her husband is fighting bone marrow failure, according to Green. She also has a daughter. Her requests to temporarily see her family through a Release on Temporary License — for which she is eligible — have been denied.
Connolly was arrested in her home on Aug. 6, 2024. The X post she published that led to her detainment was in reaction to a tragedy that occurred just days before, on July 29, when Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old whose parents immigrated from Rwanda to Britain, attacked a children’s party in northern England in a stabbing rampage, murdering three girls aged 6, 7, and 9, according to Green. Six other children and two adults were critically wounded.
After reading reports of the massacre, Connolly tweeted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** 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 a racist, so be it.”
She deleted the post less than four hours later “and disowned it in a later tweet as inspired by ‘false and malicious information,’” Green recounted.
After the mass stabbing, riots and protests broke out that spread across England and Northern Ireland. The Labour government arrested 100 people related to the riots, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing that he is “expecting substantive sentencing…. That should send a very powerful message to anybody involved, either directly or online, that you are likely to be dealt with within a week, and that nobody, but nobody, should be involving themselves in this disorder.” Green reported that since then, neither the government nor the police have formally clarified what type of online speech is classified as being involved in public disorder rather free speech.
The civil unrest “devastated the official image of Britain as a multicultural, multiracial success story, forced open a long-suppressed debate on immigration and crime — and, through the Lucy Connolly case, raised serious questions about whether or not the police and justice system treat crimes differently depending on the identity of the perpetrator,” Green wrote.
He reported that in May of this year London police arrested a man who shouted “God bless Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai” at pro-Palestinian marchers.
“Call for ‘Death to Israel’ in the street, and the police turn a blind eye,” Green wrote. “Criticize the British government on social media, however, and the police may come to your house and issue an Orwellian warning that you’ve committed a Non-Crime Hate Incident.”
Green’s full report can be read here.
