A Strange, Sinister Journey

Ben Wildsmith

‘Former-childminder’ isn’t much of a title for a woman of 41, but other than ‘mother’ it’s the best that the right-wing press has managed to dig up for the racist criminal, Lucy Connolly, who was released on Thursday after serving 10 months in prison.

To recap, during rioting in the wake of last year’s horrific attack in Southport, Connolly posted the following on X.

Since pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing threatening or abusive written material, Connolly has become a rallying point for figures on the right. Her case features several of the topics around which aspirant demagogues like to hang their rhetoric.

The first of these is free speech. In the dystopic portrayals of UK life that figures like Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon utilise to drive traffic on their social media feeds, the erosion of free speech is presented as indisputable.

That nobody with social media or a television can avoid the spewings of these three and their ilk doesn’t seem to disrupt that narrative.

Direct violence

In truth, racist speech is ubiquitous, especially on X, where Connolly committed her offence. She was criminalised not for her beliefs, but for directly urging the burning of migrant accommodation at a time when people were actively attempting to do just that. The famous exception to freedom of speech is shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded room. If anything, Connolly’s exhortation was more heinously reckless, as it called for direct violence.

She admitted the offence in her police interview, a decision which led to her being remanded rather than bailed before sentencing. Further investigations by police uncovered a string of previous racially inflammatory online posts. There was a pattern of behaviour.

Personally, I’m not a fan of jailing people for this sort of thing. I’m unconvinced that it serves wider society to do so. I’d have preferred to see Connolly sent on an extremely long series of awareness courses, during which she was required to confront the implications of her behaviour for the people she dehumanised. That her crime warranted her sentence, though, is beyond dispute.

So, her elevation as a folk hero is a new degradation of civic life in the UK. Here is commentator Dan Wootten’s take on her release this morning.

Lucy Connolly is a hero. She is you, she is me.
And, thank God, after 380 days in living hell, she is finally free.
I was the first to describe Lucy as Slippery Starmer’s political prisoner.
At the time, the entire MSM – including the Mail, GB News and Talk TV – were horrendously… pic.twitter.com/G8D94TPZiS

— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) August 21, 2025

You’ll notice the assumption that Connolly will somehow become a weapon to be used against the government. This flows from the second pillar of MAGA-inspired sedition that has infused the hysteria around her: the idea that the courts have been politicised by ‘the left’, and Keir Starmer in particular, to the disadvantage of ‘ordinary’ people.

This is where the foregrounding of this habitually unpleasant, but otherwise unremarkable, woman reveals forces at play in the national conversation which should alarm us all.

Everywoman

Connolly’s outburst has been posited as an understandable lapse of control by an everywoman who has been pushed to the limit by government policy. Like Trump’s insurrectionists at the Capitol, her criminality is portrayed as evidence of patriotism. Her loyalty, though, is to a supposed UK of the past, and, her supporters hope, the future. The actual country she lives in is her enemy and, her supporters claim, yours too.

As Yaxley-Lennon promotes his ‘festival of free speech’ in September, and the provinces of England are illegally plastered in flags, we shall see where the strange, sinister journey that Lucy Connolly has taken to infamy will lead her next.