What Lucy Connolly tweeted and deleted on July 29 2024 is indefensible. She called for migrants’ temporary accommodation to be set on fire with them inside. The next day, far-Right mobs went on to set fire to the hotels where asylum seekers lived. She pleaded guilty, and admitted she had intended to “incite serious violence”. But who is served by Connolly spending 31 months in prison?
As a prison abolitionist, obviously I am already on the side of not locking anyone up. Unless in the most serious cases, where the danger to the public is so great and rehabilitation so unlikely that an offender should be held in psychiatric care. How can anyone be expected to turn their life around locked in a cell for upwards of 23 hours a day? When they are often moved to a facility too far for their family to come visit, causing irreparable damage to their closest relationships? With a criminal record that will make employment harder when they return to society? Punishment like that doesn’t work, it just ruins people’s lives when they weren’t going so great to begin with.
The speed with which Connolly and others were processed through the justice system was alarming. It brings to mind the 24-hour courts following the 2011 London riots, following the police shooting of a black man. A 20 year old and a 22 year old got some of the lengthiest sentences of all for trying (and failing) to organise disorder in their hometowns of Northwich and Latchford. Did that fix anything?
Another summer of riots, another attempted demonstration of strength after the Government visibly lost control. Politicians want to whip up — and benefit from — anti-immigrant sentiment. When it tipped over into violence on our streets the knee-jerk reaction to fast-track people through the courts was the same. Never mind that prisons are overcrowded, and sexual assault victims are waiting years to get to trial.
Prison will not be the place to disabuse her of prejudice
Connolly went to prison after expressing violent sentiment towards migrants, but prison will not be the place to disabuse her of prejudice. If restorative justice principles had been applied, instead of a two-and-a-half-year sentence, it could have been so much better. She should have been offered the chance to take accountability, to meet and make amends to the people she wished harm upon, to volunteer her time in their communities. Restorative justice seeks to offer healing to both the offender and the victims — surely what was needed most in the wake of the riots last summer.
Restorative justice would also require Connolly to confront her racism. Accurately naming her words as racist is not the insult that her husband and the right-wing press believes it to be. Anyone is capable of letting hateful attitudes and prejudices sneak into their minds. It’s not a defence that she cared for black and Asian children as a childminder — it’s disturbing that she could be left in charge of these tiny vulnerable humans while calling for attacks on non-white people. But Connolly is also a victim of the anti-migrant rhetoric coming out of the mouths of seemingly all our top politicians.
Connolly began her post by calling for mass deportations. If she’d just stopped there, her missive would have been indistinguishable from what has become mainstream political messaging. When leftists talk about violent language this is what we are describing. If you can dehumanise someone to the point that you can call for them to be taken from their homes, it’s a short slide into wishing them bodily harm by destroying said homes.
But Nigel Farage is free to bang on about his dream of hiring a minister for deportations. Keir Starmer appeared to parrot Enoch Powell in his “island of strangers” speech and plots to set up return hubs in third-party countries. Kemi Badenoch says she would “absolutely” support the kind of mass deportations to foreign super prisons that Donald Trump is undertaking in America. If you make your statements at dog whistle pitch, it’s not a case for the courts. But when Connolly’s call for mass deportations mutated into inciting arson, she triggered the tripwires of the law.
She is a criminal, and the perfect martyr for the right
Targeting migrants has become a politically convenient hobby horse for politicians. Instead of addressing the root cause of people’s problems — the lack of affordable housing, long waits for GP appointments, unemployment and low wages, a generally lacklustre economy — it’s all conveniently pinned on immigration being “too high”. If people notice that our social fabric is fraying, that too is supposedly the fault of people from different cultures not integrating fast or well enough. Not because our youth centres have shuttered, or that we have to move each time the rent is raised, or the rich keep getting richer.
Prejudice is cultivated if it wins votes. Connolly was encouraged by the state with one hand to hate migrants, and punished with the other. Now she is a criminal, and the perfect martyr for the right: a nice white woman and mother imprisoned for thought crimes. Locking her up hasn’t made the UK safer, far from it. It’s turning up the temperature on the debate, with potentially dangerous consequences.
India Block is a columnist for The Standard
