Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers online on the day of the Southport murders, has been released from prison.
Connolly, 42, the wife of Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, was driven from HMP Peterborough in a taxi on Thursday morning, a prison source said.
It is understood that Connolly was a passenger in a white taxi which left HMP Peterborough via the vehicle airlock, a set of two gates exiting the prison, shortly after 10am.
Once the external gate of the airlock had opened, the taxi drove off down the road past reporters.
She was handed a 31-month sentence in October after she posted on X: “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 pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material on X and was jailed at Birmingham Crown Court in October last year.
The former childminder, from Northampton, was ordered to serve 40% of her sentence in prison before being released on licence.
Connolly’s case has sparked debate, with some criticising her sentence as excessive.
A bid to challenge her sentence at the Court of Appeal was dismissed in May, which was described by Mr Connolly as “shocking and unfair”.
The Northampton town councillor, and former West Northamptonshire district councillor, said his wife had “paid a very high price for making a mistake”.
But Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer defended it earlier this year.
He was asked in May about Connolly’s case after her Court of Appeal application against her jail term was dismissed.
Asked during Prime Minister’s Questions whether her imprisonment was an “efficient or fair use” of prison, Sir Keir said: “Sentencing is a matter for our courts and I celebrate the fact that we have independent courts in this country.
“I am strongly in favour of free speech, we’ve had free speech in this country for a very long time and we protect it fiercely.
“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.”
Connolly 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.
Lord Young of Acton, founder and director of the Free Speech Union, said: “The fact that Lucy Connolly has spent more than a year in prison for a single tweet that she quickly deleted and apologised for is a national scandal, particularly when Labour MPs, councillors and anti-racism campaigners who’ve said and done much worse have avoided jail.
“The same latitude they enjoyed should have been granted to Lucy.”
