I WAS glad to see Lucy Connolly finally walk free today, but the fact that she has spent more than a year in prison for a single tweet — quickly deleted and apologised for — is a national scandal, particularly when Labour MPs, councillors and anti-racism campaigners who have said and done much worse have avoided jail.
The same latitude they enjoyed should have been granted to Lucy.
PAThe same latitude enjoyed by Labour MPs, councillors and anti-racism campaigners who have said and done much worse should have been granted to Lucy[/caption]
picture Stone LtdThe moment Lucy was driven away from jail[/caption]
Sir Keir Starmer said in May that Lucy’s sentence was justified because her tweet was “incitement to violence against other people”. But was it?
The test we employ when deciding whether to prosecute someone for supposedly inciting violence should be the same as it is in the United States, namely, was it intended to cause violence and was it likely to?
I don’t think Lucy’s tweet met either limb of that test (and for speech not to be protected by the First Amendment in America it has to meet both).
Had she urged her followers to burn down a particular asylum hotel, maybe it would have failed those tests.
But she did not and she added the words ‘for all I care’, suggesting she was indifferent as to whether asylum hotels in general were burnt down and not inciting people to set fire to them.
Had she pleaded not guilty, she might well have been acquitted by a jury, just as the ex-Royal Marine Jamie Michael was after being charged with the same offence.
The Free Speech Union, the organisation I run, paid for Jamie’s defence and we offered to pay for Lucy’s.
But unlike Ricky Jones, the Labour councillor who urged people to cut the throats of anti-immigration protestors, she was not granted bail and worried that if she pleaded not guilty she would have to spend longer in prison awaiting trial than if she pleaded guilty.
As it turned out, she was wrong about that, but then she was not expecting to be sentenced to more than two-and-half years, which is longer than some members of grooming gangs have received after pleading guilty to child rape.
What Lucy has suffered at the hands of the British state is a clear case of injustice.
She has become Exhibit A for those of us raising the alarm about the assault on free speech in Starmer’s Britain.
And if it’s any consolation to her, that alarm is now being heard across the world, from the White House to Quinta de Olivos in Argentina.
Let’s hope the people of Britain wake up to this attack on their right to freedom of expression before they lose it entirely.
Lord Young is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union.
dartfordlabourLabour councillor Ricky Jones urged people to cut the throats of anti-immigration protestors[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
