❓WHAT HAPPENED: A woman convicted of “inciting racial hatred” via a social media post following the mass murder of young girls in Southport, England, by a teen of migrant background has been released from prison after serving 40 percent of her sentence.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Lucy Connolly, 42, a mother and wife of a Northampton town councillor, and various legal and political figures, including Judge Melbourne Inman and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Connolly posted to X (formerly Twitter) on July 29, 2024, and she was arrested on August 6, 2024. She was released from His Majesty’s Prison (HMP) Peterborough in August 2025.
🎯IMPACT: The case has reignited debates over free speech and two-tier justice in the United Kingdom.
A British woman who was imprisoned for a social media post calling for mass deportations has been released early, with her case having ignited fierce debate over what critics are calling the UK’s two-tier justice system.
Lucy Connolly, 42, was freed from HMP Peterborough after serving roughly 13 months of a 31-month sentence for “inciting racial hatred.” Connolly was convicted over a tweet posted after the Southport stabbing attack in 2024, where three young girls were brutally killed by the son of two Rwandan asylum seekers.
The post read: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f**king 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.”
The post was deleted a few hours later, but it triggered swift police action. Connolly was arrested just days later, on August 6, 2024. Connolly, who is married to a local councillor for the Conservative Party in Northampton, pleaded guilty, in large part because she was refused bail—despite being a nonviolent first-time offender—and faced a lengthy spell in jail ahead of her trial, possibly as long as a reduced sentence for pleading guilty.
Many have noted that the draconian length of her sentence—31 months—was far longer than many sentences handed to pedophiles and violent criminals. Notably, Salman Iftikhar, a Pakistani businessman with the British equivalent of a green card, in recent weeks received only 15 months for physically accosting an air stewardess, calling her a “white sheep-shagging bitch,” and threatening that she would be “gang raped and set on fire” after the hotel she was staying at was “blown up.”
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, of the far-left Labour Party, defended the conviction during Prime Minister’s Questions, stating, “I am strongly in favor of free speech… but I am equally against incitement to violence against other people. I will always support the action taken by our police and courts to keep our streets and people safe.”
The Trump administration in the United States takes the view that you cannot claim to be in favor of free speech while imprisoning people for social media commentary, with a recent State Department human rights report warning of “serious restrictions on freedom of expression” in Britain that have “worsened” under Starmer.
Connolly will complete the remainder of her sentence out on license in the community, with the possibility of being returned to prison if she breaches her license conditions.
Image by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street.
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