There is a famous saying, usually given in French, about using arbitrary and harsh punishments such as killing to impress upon others the importance of staying in line: "Pour encourager les autres."
The reference in the case was the execution of Admiral Byng of the Royal Navy, who was ordered to save a garrison at the 1756 Battle of Minorca in a clash between the Royal and French navies. He failed in his mission and was accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy, and was sentenced to execution for failing to stop a French fleet from escaping, despite his judgment that he didn't have the forces to defeat them.
Voltaire, writing about the incident, quipped that Byng wasn't executed for cowardice, but to encourage others to fight to the death.
"Pour encourager les autres." The punishment isn't about fitting the crime, but is sent as a warning to others.
This describes the Lucy Connolly affair, in which a middle-aged mother whose child had died due to the neglect of the NHS, and who provided day care to children of all colors, was sentenced to more than two years of prison for sending an ill-considered tweet.
Lucy Connolly’s racial hatred charge was fast-tracked https://t.co/54sjTFUBfy
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) February 5, 2026
Lucy Connolly’s charge of inciting racial hatred was fast-tracked for approval by Attorney General Lord Hermer.
In the wake of the heinous Southport murders, Connolly — a mother and childminder — wrote an intemperate post on X, which was deleted within four hours.
She was later arrested and jailed for 31 months — a wholly disproportionate response, particularly given that a migrant who sexually assaulted a 12-year-old was recently spared a custodial sentence.
Because Connolly was charged under the Public Order Act 1986, approval from the Attorney General was required. Documents obtained by Connolly via a Subject Access Request (SAR) show her case was fast-tracked in an attempt to deter further disorder.
On a Friday night, Lord Hermer granted specialist counter-terrorism prosecutors permission within just 12 hours to prosecute her.
A mother was imprisoned for a social media post — and made an example of to others.
The General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, has described these revelations as “disturbing,” particularly when compared with the CPS’s treatment of Kneecap rapper Mo Chara.
This shows the sinister priorities of those in charge of the British state.
The Lucy Connolly case was never about Lucy, what she wrote, whether it could be argued to be incitement, or any of the issues that the justice system claimed, and now there is incontrovertible evidence that this is so.
Not that there was any real doubt. But direct evidence carries more weight than pure common sense.
Allison Pearson, who had her own run-in with the speech police, was only saved from a fate similar to Connolly by virtue of her being a columnist for The Telegraph, and therefore has a passion for the topic only matched by Graham Linehan and perhaps JK Rowling, who keeps daring the Scottish government to jail her for speech that others get prosecuted for.
One of the quirks of living in a Western country is that certain rights have yet to be taken by the government, such as access to documents that government officials would prefer you not see. They can delay, redact, and use all sorts of chicanery to make it difficult, but the truly persistent can sometimes claim victory.
As Connolly has in this case. While she was judicially tortured by the state, she has the goods to prove that they circumvented the law.
Last year, as I was researching the story of Lucy Connolly, I gradually became convinced that Lucy was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Or, at the very least, the Northampton childminder, wife of Ray, a Tory councillor, and mother of two children (only one of them living, Harry was lost to NHS negligence aged 19 months) had been made an example of by a British state that was increasingly nervous that people no longer accepted its narrative on multiculturalism – “Diversity is our strength!”.
So terrified was the criminal justice system by the threat of social unrest it was determined to clamp down on anyone who dared challenge it.
As most of you will know, on July 29 2024, on the evening of the Southport massacre of three little girls, Lucy was in quite a state. Diagnosed with PTSD after Harry’s death, she was easily triggered by any report of children suffering. The horrific incident, in which an unidentified male ran amok with a knife at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on the first day of the summer holidays, had tipped her over the edge.
The fact that Axel Rudakubana was originally said by the media to be a Cardiff-born “quiet choir boy” angered Lucy, as did the insistence by police and MPs that the attack was not “terror related”, despite the targets being young Western girls enjoying moving their bodies to “decadent” pop music (not unlike the jihadist attack on the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena which I have always attributed to Islamist misogyny), the discovery (we later learnt) of an al-Qaeda training manual on Rudakubana’s computer, and the presence of enough ricin under his bed to poison everyone in his street.
Connolly's case began with government lies about a horrific event, and Lucy's anger—shared, I should say, by most sane Britons—about the attacks on girls dancing to Taylor Swift. The British government has a decades-long history of lying about migrants, migrant crime, rape gangs, and its complicity with "South Asian" gangs. Its attitude seems to be that the wonderfully "diverse" are blameless no matter what they do, and suggesting otherwise is a criminal offense.
Connolly violated the latter norm, and had to be punished.
In the heat of the moment, Lucy put an angry and deeply unpleasant post on X – “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f---ing hotels full of all the b-----ds 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.” She then took the dog for a walk, got home, thought better of what she’d said and took the tweet down within three hours of posting it.
Lucy was deeply ashamed of the tweet. “It doesn’t represent who I am”. That should have been the end of it, but somebody (believed by the Connolly family to be a Labour councillor) screenshotted it.
Lucy posted again, this time saying that “violence is not the answer”, but by then her original post had gone viral. The police came to arrest her at the start of a day when her living room was full of the small children she looked after. After an interview, it was reported by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that Mrs Connolly had told police she “did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them”. She said nothing of the sort, but by the time the CPS admitted it the damage was done. Within hours, she was all over the media as “Tory councillor’s racist wife”.
Ah...her husband was a prominent Tory.
It turns out, as Lucy always asserted, that the police lied about what she said. Not only did she not express racist sentiments to them—her day care clients were often non-white, and their parents testified to her generosity to them—but they were regularly telling the judges that she said and did things that she had not.
But even that is hardly the worst part of the story: her prosecution and her sentence were both decreed at the highest levels of government, and her case was deemed an "emergency" that must be prosecuted as soon as possible.
Much of this was surmise and not easy to prove. Questioned about the case, the Prime Minister said he had no knowledge of it. Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, was said not to have been involved in the sentencing of Mrs Connolly and others arrested in connection with the Southport riots. When Lucy applied to the CPS for her files, they said they didn’t have them.
Like many things Lucy was told, that wasn’t true. She put in a SAR (Subject Access Request) and this week was finally sent all the relevant documents. Some of what they contain is utterly damning – not of Lucy but of the criminal justice system that was clearly in a hurry to punish her as harshly as possible.
Lucy was charged on the night of August 9. By 9.45am the following day – a Saturday, when good lawyers are hard to find – the CPS had got confirmation that Lord Hermer had signed off the prosecution. Up early, was he? Emails said the case had gone through as an “emergency prosecution”, what one senior barrister described to me as “almost certainly unlawful”.
“They have to prove it’s an emergency – and it clearly isn’t,” he said. “What is it they’re trying to prevent? Mrs Connolly had already deleted her tweet. Saying it’s an emergency prosecution is clearly political.”
On email, the CPS continued: “There is evidence of other racist tweets sent on L.C’s account. Both before and after the particular tweet. This demonstrates that this was not a one-off regrettable tweet but part of her dislike for immigrants and a desire for…” [The final word of the sentence is redacted.]
Not true. “No further racist tweets were found on my phone or my Twitter account,” Lucy says. “This is confirmed by Northamptonshire Police in a reply to a complaint I made against them. There is one charge for one tweet on the indictment.” If the police or CPS claimed there were other racist tweets then they “misled the court,” says the barrister, “which is very serious.”
It turns out that much of what the public was told was fabricated. There is no question that the original tweet had, for THREE hours, been up on Twitter, and seen by fewer than a hundred people. But pretty much everything else was a lie, including the denials that the top levels of the Labour government forced through the prosecution.
My God, this is like a Soviet star chamber. There is no free speech in Britain any more. Insanity https://t.co/O5oIDuooKg
— Marc Thiessen 🇺🇸❤️🇺🇦🇹🇼🇮🇱 (@marcthiessen) September 28, 2025
There is much more to Allison's column and Lucy's story, but I will not belabor the point. You can and should go read it if you are interested in how things REALLY work. What really matters in this part of the story is that almost everything that the government said was a lie. Even the claim that the government punishes "hate speech" itself is a lie—Labour Councillors have talked about slitting the throats of their opponents without consequence. Hate speech laws are about punishing wrongthink, and especially wrongthink from Tories and Reform supporters.
BREAKING: Moussa Kadri, the knife-wielding Muslim who repeatedly assaulted Hamit Koskun as he burned the quran outside the Turkish Consulate, has been spared jail.
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) September 23, 2025
Despite pleading guilty to assault and being in possession of a 'bladed article', Kadri was handed a suspended… pic.twitter.com/pbxSdJE0fJ
Despite pleading guilty to assault and being in possession of a 'bladed article', Kadri was handed a suspended sentence of just 20 weeks. No jail time. The judge said he had “lost his temper".
Hamit, meanwhile, is living in hiding, having been warned by the police that there are several credible threats to his life.
This sentence will do nothing to dispel the suspicion that Britain has a two-tier criminal justice system. Had a knife-wielding white male pleaded guilty to attacking a Muslim for breaching a Christian blasphemy code, you can bet your bottom dollar he would have gone to prison.
The point of these speech laws and the prosecution of British people for speaking ill of illegal migrants who commit crimes, is to punish people for dissent from the "diversity" crowd.
We have a real serious problem with our UK 🇬🇧 justice system
— 🇬🇧British and Proud🇬🇧 (@unionjackspirit) September 25, 2025
Tell me how the hell the judges come to these decisions ?#starmerout#labourout pic.twitter.com/wUVr3glB5I
Even if you believed in hate speech codes, it's clear that the government finds dissent to be far more harmful than actual violent crime.
Lucy was railroaded for a reason, and it had nothing to do with even a perverse sense of what should or should not be criminal. It was a political prosecution, and she was a political prisoner.
"Pour encourager les autres."
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