Lucy Connolly has claimed she was Sir Keir Starmer’s “political prisoner” after she was jailed for over a year for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers on the day of the Southport murders.
The 42-year-old, from Northampton, said she felt authorities were determined to “throw the book at her” when she was arrested over a post on X (formerly Twitter) last summer.
The case centred on a post she wrote on the social media platform that said: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”
Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material after her post was viewed 310,000 times. She served 40 per cent of her sentence, before being released on Thursday on licence.
Speaking to The Telegraph following her release, she said she believed she had been targeted because her husband was a Conservative councillor.
“I’m just a woman from Northampton living in a three-bed semi that worked as a childminder with a husband as an engineer,” she said. “OK, he was a councillor. But that, people forget, that’s almost like a second job.
“His first job as an engineer, as a father, as a husband, we are nobody. We are not known to anybody. So I will never understand how it got to this.
“There’s people that have done far worse and people wouldn’t be able to name them, but they’d know my name, and I just find it all really, really bizarre.”
Connolly added that she had written the post in a “red mist” fit of anger, before later deleting it after returning from a walk. Eight days later, she was arrested at her home and questioned by police.
She claimed the authorities wanted to “hammer” her after she was refused bail, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) released a statement that suggested she had told officers in her police interview that she did not like immigrants.
A press release issued by the CPS after her guilty plea on 2 September included a quote from Frank Ferguson, head of the CPS’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division, which said: “During police interview Lucy Connolly stated she had strong views on immigration, told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them.”
Connolly claimed that her words had been “massively twisted and used against me”, and is now considering taking legal action, saying she didn’t believe she would have had a fair trial had she pleaded not guilty.
She said: “I don’t want to say too much because I need to seek legal advice on that, but I do think the police were dishonest in what they released and what they said about me, and I will be holding them to account for that.”
She also said she is set to meet with members of Donald Trump’s administration following her release from prison.
The former childminder told Dan Wootton on his YouTube show that the US president’s lawyers were “very interested in the way things are going in the UK” and “keen to speak” with her.
Asked what she knew about the meeting, she said: “Not much, just that they’re very interested in the way things are going in the UK, and they are obviously big advocates for free speech, and their lawyers are keen to speak with me.”
The US Department of State has previously accused the UK of having “significant human rights issues”, including restrictions on free speech.
A Northamptonshire Police spokesperson said: “We are aware of comments made by Lucy Connolly in an interview following her release from prison. We hope to contact Mrs Connolly in the coming days to understand the issues she has raised around Northamptonshire Police.”
