The White House has said it is “monitoring” the case of Lucy Connolly in an escalation of free speech tensions with Sir Keir Starmer. The Telegraph has more.
State department officials are examining the treatment of Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, who was jailed for 31 months over a social media post about the Southport attacks.
Judges threw out an appeal brought by the 42-year-old last week, meaning she will not be released before August.
Campaigners raised her case with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, as part of a wider effort to challenge what they regard as draconian hate speech laws across Europe.
A spokesman for the state department said: “We can confirm that we are monitoring this matter.
“The United States supports freedom of expression at home and abroad, and remains concerned about infringements on freedom of expression.”
It is the latest sign of Donald Trump’s willingness to intervene in domestic British affairs amid a growing transatlantic rift over the protection of freedom of speech.
On Saturday, the Telegraph revealed Mr Trump sent US officials to meet five British pro-life activists over censorship concerns.
The diplomats from the US bureau of democracy, human rights and labor (DRL) travelled to London in March in an effort to “affirm the importance of freedom of expression in the UK and across Europe”.
They met with officials from the Foreign Office and challenged Ofcom on the Online Safety Act, which is thought to be a point of contention in the White House.
Since then, Connolly’s case has raised eyebrows of Trump administration officials who question her conviction and the length of her sentence.
British politicians who have criticised her sentence were praised the White House for its intervention.
Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary, said: “Lucy Connolly is effectively a political prisoner and should be freed immediately. She made an ill-judged tweet, soon deleted.
“That the US is investigating this case is a sad indictment of the dire state of free speech under Two-Tier Keir. Free speech is in crisis under Labour.”
Connolly expressed her outrage on social media platform X hours after Axel Rudakubana murdered three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport.
She posted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the b——s for all I care, while you’re at it, take the treacherous government politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these [Southport] families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
Connolly deleted the post less than four hours later, but by then it had been viewed 310,000 times. She was arrested on Aug 6th following widespread riots across the country over the stabbing attack, and later jailed for 31 months.
Connolly, who has no previous convictions, also sent another tweet commenting on a sword attack, which read: “I bet my house it was one of these boat invaders.”
Last week, the Court of Appeal judges said they did not accept that the original sentence for inciting racial hatred was “manifestly excessive”.
The judges also said they did not accept that Connolly had entered her guilty plea without fully understanding what it entailed.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “In recent months, shoplifters with hundreds of prior convictions have avoided prison. A domestic abuser with 52 prior offences got off with just a suspended sentence, as did a paedophile with 110,000 indecent images of children.
“And yet Lucy Connolly has received a 31-month prison sentence for an appalling – albeit hastily deleted – message on social media. How on earth can you spend longer in prison for a tweet than violent crime? This crazy disparity will only fuel perception that we have a two-tier justice system where the law is enforced selectively.”
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader and an ally of Mr Trump, said: “Our American Republican friends seem to care more about free speech in the United Kingdom than our own government.”
Lord Young, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, which helped fund Connolly’s appeal, said: “This is the third national humiliation in a week under Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.
“Has it really come to this? That the US Government now has to monitor human rights abuses in the United Kingdom?
“Britain is rapidly becoming the North Korea of the North Sea.”
Worth reading in full.
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Hmm. The Telegraph misquotes Lucy Connolly’s tweet.
They say: “…while you’re at it, take the treacherous government politicians with them…”
The screenshot I’ve seen shows: “…while you’re at it, take the treacherous government & politicians with them…”
Too subtle a difference?
As it happens I don’t think anything else Connolly wrote in that tweet broke the law. She said if a fire happened she didn’t care and if all she wrote made her a racist she wasn’t concerned. She should have defended the charges. The only thing she advocated for was ‘taking the treacherous government and politicians with them’. That was a call to an illegal action, but should have been dismissed as purely rhetorical nonetheless.
When the local King descends into despotism one appeals to the Emperor.
Well the woke lefties are always asking for sanction against countries for human rights violations. It’s about time other countries did the same to the UK. So I hope this is spread around the world to prove that the UK is well and truly in the gutter.
It is targeted censorship. It is not a ‘free speech issue’. As Churchill predicted, it is the Gestapo-Fascist program targeting:
Whites, Christians, Heterosexuals, ‘Nationalists’, ‘Patriots’, Corona ‘deniers’, Climate ‘deniers’, ‘Trans-Queer deniers’.
The anti-speech fascism is not directed at: Musulmans, Blacks, Browns, BLM, anti-White racists, anti-English bigots.
There is not a single case of the above being arrested for a thought crime.
Once again, it is remiss of the Telegraph reporter to fail to mention others in the same predicament as Lucy, so here’s a reminder of what happened to Wayne O’Rourke. Wayne had a very sizable following on Twitter which appears to have gone against him in court, because it seemed that the judge was implying that just because his posts got lots of views, that he was personally responsible for instructing people to go out and riot, which is absolute bollocks. Then there’s the rather significant fact that he was correct in his theory that the killer was Muslim.
He had to quit his job to become a full-time carer for his partner, but the judges only give the sympathy vote to nonces, when keeping them out of jail, or illegal migrant criminals, to stop them from being deported. No such compassion was shown for Wayne’s personal situation;
”A man who posted material on social media to stir up racial hatred during recent unrest across the UK has been jailed for three years.
Wayne O’Rourke, who had more than 90,000 followers to his X account, posted misinformation about the killing of three young girls in Southport on 29 July and praised the burning of a car in Sunderland.
The 35-year-old, of Salix Approach, Lincoln, admitted publishing written material online to stir up racial hatred between 28 July and 8 August.
Sentencing him at Lincoln Crown Court, Judge Catarina Sjolin Knight told him: “You were not caught up in what others were doing, you were instigating it.”
She added: “The flames fanned by keyboard warriors like you.”
The court heard among his posts on 29 July was a reference to the death of the three children in Southport, alleging it was a terrorist attack carried out by a Muslim.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3gre3y9yo.amp
Other victims of this blitzkrieg on speech should indeed be included in our concern, and come to public attention, but Lucy Connolly is the poster girl.
Has anyone viewed the Sonia Poulton piece suggesting LC is a psy-op? The guest found that LC previously had a significant prior media presence and an improbable level of social media activity amounting to 000s of tweets per day.
To me, this suggests she was ‘nobbled’ by some entity out to make trouble for a tory, rather than anything else.
I hadn’t heard of the PsyOp theory, actually. My concern is that, for people following this outside of the UK, such as with the Trump administration, they’d be forgiven for thinking it only involves Lucy, when there were many others wrongfully jailed also. I think they deserve to be household names in the same way as her, otherwise their miserable plight and unjust treatment is on nobody’s radar.
I’m not sure if the majority that were jailed are those that actually attended protests, but were arrested for petty things such as being a bit shouty and sweary. But nobody knows the current situation of who’s inside or who’s been released because nobody’s covering this, but if you remember, there were hundreds arrested for alleged ‘hate crime’ at the time.
The latest demonstration of just how farcical the police are was reported just yesterday, where a man got arrested and stuck in a police cell overnight for holding a picture of a terrorist with a pager, and accused of offending the Jew-hating terrorist supporters. Yes, you can be arrested for hurting the feelings of those that blatantly support Hezbollah, an actual proscribed terrorist organisation, in the UK.🤯
Thousands of tweets per day is far improbable, sadly. It’s how many people have their conversations, to the exclusion of any real ones.
Miri AF does not accept the Lucy Connolly narrative. Worth a read for a different perspective if nothing else.
https://miriaf.co.uk/the-dirty-laundry-of-democracy-3-aired-by-lucy-connolly/
Starts with the assertion the Democracy 3.0 is an establishment scam to divert the money of real people away from real opposition causes, thus starving them of funds and ends with the assertion that it really isn’t a fundraiser at all but a covert way for intelligence services to channel money to “crisis actors” employed by them. In other words, the lady seemed to have forgotten the beginning of her writeup by the time she had rambled through to the end of it. Nothing of any substance in between.
Waste of time.
Having lived in a communist country I can confirm that these interventions can make a difference even if no government will publicly acknowledge that they hold political prisoners.
It’s probably too late for Lucy Connolly as I believe she will be released in a few months’ time. But even raising awareness to the facts that (a) there is no freedom of speech in the UK and (b) there are political prisoners in the UK will make a difference.
Personally I think the prosecution of Lucy Connolly and the grossly excessive punishment she received was a massive mistake by the government: her case has received a lot of media attention and now the US congressional delegation. Basically Labour overreacted and I predict they will regret it. (Let’s face it, if she had received a £500 fine, we wouldn’t be talking about her, would we?)
I have horrific stories from Central Europe. People scared to say anything in case the Stasi get them. Kids virtually locked in isolation for parents fear that they may say something untoward when they are out. Neighbours who hold a grudge reporting relatively trivial instances to the police. State persecution of citizens who step out of line. Dodgy judges who are all too ready to make examples of people like Lucy, who no doubt was shocked and fearful of what happened.
But Labour are the enemy of the people, so let’s make note of their atrocities and come the election get revenge on them. Hopefully their primitive behaviour will be their undoing.
To get revenge on Labour there would have to be an organised Opposition. The FSU had to be set up when a Tory government was in office. I suspect that the problem is vague laws, the instrument of tyrants the world over.
Translated into non-figurative and less emotive speech, Connolly’s statement becomes:
I’d really prefer if all illegal immigrants were deported and the politicians who let them in lost their offices.
That’s what she has been jailed for: Expressing opposition to the immigration policy of present and past UK governments and to the politicians who devised and implemented it. And that’s also why the judge who sentenced her accused her of being a racist and why the appeal judge could see no arguable basis for her appeal. It’s inconceivable that these learned people are too stupid to understand the intended meaning of her statements.
Exactly. They had their instructions.
Lucy’s only mistake (apart from using language which Oxbridge types think is rather uncouth) was to have trust in the British legal system and that it still operates according to the discretion of the individuals involved who mostly place the spirit of fair play above all else (hahaha).
She believed that by admitting guilt she would receive a slap on the wrist and perhaps a few hours of community service, at most (which IMHO would also have been excessive).
Her sentence came as a complete surprise to her. She didn’t realise the gravity of the crime to which she had admitted (but not committed), and the consequences of such.
The refusal of her appeal only strengthens the lesson for her. I hope she uses it to good effect, and becomes Keir Starmer’s worst nightmare in the years to come (never mind her defence lawyer’s worst nightmare).
Great quote to remember by Lord Young:
““Britain is rapidly becoming the North Korea of the North Sea.”
Just to reiterate two things:
1) RACISM IS NOT A CRIME anywhere on the planet except in WHITE COUNTRIES, where it has been forcibly shoved into the legal system in violation of the democratic will and human rights of the population, and is therefore ILLEGAL, NULL & VOID.
2) Coercive Remand to Force Confessions of Guilt is also a gross violation of human rights, directly comparable to Mediaeval Torture to force False Confessions of Guilt, and is therefore ILLEGAL, NULL & VOID.
Jenrick…” Lucy Connolly has received a 31-month prison sentence for an appalling – albeit hastily deleted – message on social media.”
Not appalling at all, she simply voiced an opinion. In a society which supposedly owns free speech this should be applauded.Jenrick simply will not upset those giving the orders and so the conservative party must die because it is of no use whatsoever to the people of this country.
I think Suella calling him 2 tier Kier sums the situation up beautifully.
Make no mistake, God sent President Trump