Lucy Connolly has said she will meet officials from Donald Trump’s administration on Saturday to discuss free speech - and described herself as a “political prisoner” while in jail for inciting racial hatred.
The 42-year-old was jailed for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers online after the Southport murders last year.
The former childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor was released from HMP Peterborough on Thursday.
In one of her first interviews since she was released, she said she would be meeting US officials but did not know what they would discuss.
“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,” she told Dan Wootton on his YouTube channel.
Vice president JD Vance is among those in the US who have expressed concerns about freedom of speech in Britain.
A recent US State Department assessment, which analysed human rights conditions worldwide, flagged “serious restrictions” on freedom of expression in the UK.
After the 2024 Southport attack, the report said Government officials “repeatedly intervened to chill speech”.
Connolly conceded that her tweet last year was “wrong” but told Wootton she was “no far-right activist”.
“You’re shutting people’s voices down. It’s ‘let’s give them a label. Let’s tell them they’re bad people and then they will be quiet’,” she said.
Connolly posted on X on July 29 2024: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”
She was arrested on August 6, by which point she had deleted her social media account, but other messages which included further racist remarks were uncovered by officers who seized her phone.
The post was viewed 310,000 times in three and a half hours before she deleted it.
Connolly was asked if she considered herself “Sir Keir Starmer’s political prisoner”.
“Absolutely. Me and several other people,” she replied.
“I think with Starmer he needs to practise what he preaches. He’s a human rights lawyer, so maybe he needs to look at what people’s human rights are; what freedom of speech means; and what the laws are in this country,” she told The Telegraph.
She said she was considering legal action against the police over a statement which suggested she told officers in her police interview that she did not like immigrants.
She called the police “dishonest” and said her words were “massively twisted and used against me” in a statement released by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Connolly disputed suggestions that police discovered racist tweets before and after the Southport post, telling Wootton “there was no racism there”.
A press release from the CPS after her guilty plea on September 2 included a quote from Frank Ferguson, head of the CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit, 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.”
The CPS said it had nothing to add to the statement made on Connolly’s conviction.
An updated statement from the prosecuting body issued in October, once Connolly had been sentenced, said she told officers she did not like “illegal immigrants”.
Both versions of the statement added: “It is not an offence to have strong or differing political views, but it is an offence to incite racial hatred – and that is what Connolly has admitted doing.”
A Northamptonshire Police spokesperson said the force was aware of comments made by Connolly after her release from prison.
The spokesperson added: “We hope to contact Mrs Connolly in the coming days to understand the issues she has raised around Northamptonshire Police.”
Connolly said she will release the content of the police interview eventually so people can see what the police and the CPS said are “two very different things to what I said in my interview”.
A bid to challenge her sentence at the Court of Appeal was dismissed in May.
Connolly was freed from prison after serving 40% of her 31-month term, the automatic release point for her sentence.
She will remain on licence until the end of her sentence.
She told the Telegraph she pleaded guilty because she thought it would be the “quickest route home” from prison time to spend Christmas with her daughter.
