
The Free Press

LONDON — On Monday, Britain sentenced Hamit Coskun, 51, to pay £240 (roughly $325) for burning a copy of the Quran and shouting “Islam is religion of terrorism” outside the Turkish embassy in London.
Coskun’s behavior was obnoxious, but not illegal: Britain abolished its blasphemy laws in 2008. His case shows that they are returning under the guise of maintaining “public order.” In a tense and divided society, free speech is a luxury that the government cannot afford.
Coskun got off with a fine. Lucy Connolly, prosecuted under the same law, was not so lucky.
Lucy Connolly is Britain’s foremost political prisoner. Connolly, a 41-year-old childminder and the mother of a 12-year-old daughter, is currently serving a 31-month sentence for “stirring up racial hatred” in a single tweet that she deleted less than four hours after posting. On May 20, a court rejected Connolly’s application to appeal.
Connolly’s case is the latest in a series revealing the decline of free speech in Britain and the rise of a “two-tier” justice system that treats ordinary people like enemies of the state.
Before we get into the legal technicalities, let’s review what happened:
On July 29, 2024, Axel Rudakubana, the 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants to Britain, went on a stabbing rampage at a Taylor Swift–themed children’s party in Southport, northern England. Rudakubana murdered three girls—ages 6, 7, and 9— and critically wounded six children and two adults.
Inaccurate claims on social media said the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker. In response, the police described the man they had arrested as having been born in Cardiff, Wales. Locals, however, knew something of his background, and that fed the online rumor mill.
Rudakubana was not identified until he appeared in court on August 1, 2024. He was charged with murder, attempted murder, and knife possession (and later with possession of homemade ricin and an al-Qaeda manual). By then, protests and rioting had erupted in Southport, where a crowd attacked police officers and the local mosque.
The rioting spread across England and Northern Ireland—the worst outbreak of disorder in Britain in more than a decade. It devastated the official image of Britain as a multicultural, multiracial success story, forced open a long-suppressed debate on immigration and crime—and, through the Lucy Connolly case, raised serious questions about whether or not the police and justice system treat crimes differently depending on the identity of the perpetrator.
Connolly, who suffers from PTSD after losing her 19-month-old son to failures in medical care in 2011, issued her tweet before the rioting began. At 8:30 p.m. on the day of the killings, enraged by what she had read and seen online, she tweeted:
“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards 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 a racist, so be it.”
There is little doubt that Connolly’s statement broke British law. Under Section 19 of the Public Order Act (1986), anyone who “publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting” is liable to prosecution and up to seven years in prison.
There is, however, growing doubt that Connolly’s punishment fit her crime. Plenty of more serious offenders escape prison terms. In 2023, the year before Connolly’s tweet, the UK government’s National Crime Agency found that eight in 10 of those convicted of possessing child abuse pornography in Britain avoided prison.
From the beginning, the Labour government politicized its response to the riots that broke out after Rudakubana’s rampage. Without citing evidence, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his ministers, and police leaders accused the “far right” of organizing the disorder.
Starmer, a human rights lawyer by training, called for accelerated trials. “I’m now expecting substantive sentencing before the end of this week,” he said, announcing that 100 people had been arrested in relation to the riots, some for speech offenses. “That should send a very powerful message to anybody involved, either directly or online, that you are likely to be dealt with within a week, and that nobody, but nobody, should be involving themselves in this disorder.”
Nearly a year after the riots, the government has still not asked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) why it prosecuted Connolly for racist incitement under the Public Order Act, rather than under other, less punitive laws, such as the “inchoate offenses” clauses of the Serious Crime Act (2007). These are used when there is no clear connection between “encouraging or assisting an offense” and its commission, and can lead to noncustodial sentences.
Instead, the CPS recommended a Public Order Act prosecution. That required the consent of the Attorney General. He was Richard Hermer, a longtime friend and erstwhile legal colleague of Starmer. Hermer and the CPS have yet to comment on the case.
Nor have the government or the police issued a clarification of what kind of online speech might constitute “involving” yourself in public disorder, rather than lawfully expressing your opinion about issues of public concern. Connolly’s tweet was a single sentence. Its first clause called for the mass deportation of foreign-born criminals. Since the riots, this has become official Labour policy.
The impression that the CPS and the Attorney General sought to send Starmer’s “very powerful message” is suggested by what happened next.
Connolly, the wife of a Conservative local councillor, was arrested at home on August 6, 2024. She had no criminal record and was not a flight risk. She had deleted her tweet and disowned it in a later tweet as inspired by “false and malicious information.” Yet she was, like most of the hundreds arrested, denied bail.
Legal counsel advised Connolly that she might be held for an extended period before trial. He recommended that, given mitigating circumstances, she should plead guilty.
Connolly feared that she would be unable to see her husband, who is fighting bone marrow failure, and her young daughter. She pleaded guilty to breaching Section 19 of the Public Order Act. By doing this, she forfeited her right to a formal plea hearing and a trial by jury.
Section 19 allows the prosecution of anyone who “publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive, or insulting.” There are two categories of offense. The most serious is speech which “intends thereby to stir up racial hatred.” The lesser offense is speech that, considering “all the circumstances,” is “likely” to incite “racial hatred.”
Connolly was charged with the first, more serious category: intent to stir up racial hatred. Beyond her tweet, no evidence of intent was produced at the time. The tweet did not refer to any specific racial group, either.
Plenty of evidence suggests, however, that Connolly is not a racist. Colleagues and parents at the childcare center where Connolly works attest that she is not a racist. One of them, a Nigerian doctor whose daughter Connolly cared for, called Connolly “the loveliest, kindest British person I know.”

At her sentencing hearing on October 17, her solicitor affirmed Connolly’s guilty plea that she had “intended to incite serious violence.” That obliged Judge Melbourne Inman to follow the sentencing guidelines. Their “starting point” is a three-year prison term. This is the same as the starting point for burglary, and only a little less than the four-year starting point for pedophile offenses.
Judge Inman adjusted Connolly’s three-year “starting point” sentence downward for her circumstances, then upward because he felt that they were outweighed by the “sensitive social climate” at the time of her tweet. After making the usual 25 percent reduction for a guilty plea, he arrived at 31 months, 40 percent of them (13 months) to be served in prison.
For comparison, Judge Inman sentenced Haris Ghaffar to 20 months for his part in the disturbances. In the climate of rumor that had stirred Connolly, 19-year-old Ghaffar joined a mob of Muslim men, donned a balaclava, and tried to kick in the door of the Clumsy Swan pub in Yardley, Birmingham, because he believed that members of the far-right English Defence League were drinking inside.
“It is [a] strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive,” Judge Inman said when sentencing Connolly. This was a political message. So was Judge Inman’s opinion that the law should “both punish and deter.”
Since the summer of 2024, it has become increasingly obvious that diversity is not Britain’s strength. To manage a divided society, and suppress the obvious truth that multiculturalism has failed, the government and police have resorted to “two-tier” policing. Rather than prosecute crime, they indulge favored minorities while intimidating the law-abiding majority into silence.
Street celebrations of Hamas’s massacre began on the night of October 7, 2023. The police struggle to control weekly anti-Israel rallies by leftists and Islamists that frequently feature incitement such as calls for “jihad” and speech that, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism said in 2023, might have breached laws against the “glorification of terrorism.” But the police do arrest supporters of Israel for the wrong kind of speech.
In September 2024, London police arrested a man for bringing a satirical cartoon of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to a pro-Palestinian protest near the London home of the Israeli ambassador. Upon being detained, he was asked if he knew that his cartoon would “stir up racial hatred” by offending protesters who supported Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist organization.
On May 24, 2025, London police arrested a man for shouting “God bless Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai” at pro-Palestinian marchers.
Call for “Death to Israel” in the street, and the police turn a blind eye. Criticize the British government on social media, however, and the police may come to your house and issue an Orwellian warning that you’ve committed a Non-Crime Hate Incident.
The prisons in this country are so full that in July 2024, the Labour government released thousands of prisoners early. On May 13, the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced further plans for the early release of serious offenders. This, she said, will free up more space for incoming offenders.
Yet the British state has room for Lucy Connolly. She is currently held in His Majesty’s Prison Drake Hall, a women’s prison in Staffordshire.
Since November, Connolly has been eligible for a Release on Temporary Licence (RoTL) that would give her a night at home with her husband and child. Her requests have been repeatedly denied, for unclear reasons.
Connolly mentioned this to Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who herself was investigated for a November 2023 tweet that the police were soft on “Jew haters.” After this interview, Connolly said, the prison governor told that her RoTL application had been canceled over her “speaking to the media.”
Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and senior Home Office official, said that the “multiple detriments” in Connolly’s treatment include “psychological damage” and “potentially impeding a faster release.” He attributed this to her “notoriety.”
Somehow, there is no room in prison for Tariku Hadgu, the Ethiopian asylum seeker who punched two female police officers, climbing on top of one of them after he had knocked her down so he could continue attacking her, in April. (Judge Michael Snow said that the 21-year-old Hadgu’s brain is not “fully formed.” Hadgu walked free, with his 16-week sentence suspended for a year.)
In May, Paul Jones was convicted of grooming and molesting a teenage boy. Jones received a two-year sentence, suspended for 18 months.
Also in May, Adnan Khan got bail before his trial on charges of trying to abduct 10 children for the purpose of sexual abuse.
In February, the Labour MP Mike Amesbury received a 10-week sentence for drunkenly attacking a constituent in the street.
In March, a Palestinian named Abu Wadei claimed asylum in Britain. Allegedly, he has posed with guns online, called for the killing of “all” Jews, and said his “loftiest aspiration” was to “die for Allah.” On May 19, he received a nine-month sentence for entering the country illegally.
On August 7, 2024, the day after Lucy Connolly’s arrest, now-suspended Labour councillor Ricky Jones addressed a left-wing rally in London. He called the rioters “disgusting Nazi fascists” and said, “We need to cut their throats and get rid of them.”
Jones got bail. He has not yet come to trial.
This is not the only whiff of politics in the handling of offenses around the 2024 riots.
In her application for permission to appeal, Lucy Connolly claimed that she was not fully aware of her legal position and the risks entailed. The three-judge jury rejected this as implausible. Yet in March 2023, the lead judge at Connolly’s hearing, Lord Justice Holroyde, reduced the sentence of Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, a Labour peer convicted of sexual offenses against children, because of errors in sentencing.
Meanwhile, Labour’s narrative of the 2024 riots has collapsed. The police published its official report on its handling of the riots on May 7. It found no evidence that the riots were “deliberately premeditated and coordinated by any specific group or network.”
The riots, the report found, were incited “mostly [by] disaffected individuals, influencers, or groups,” not by “criminal factions or extremists.” Social media spread the word—and the police were slow to respond.
In the interim, no evidence has arisen linking the criminal acts of individual rioters with specific material on social media. Connolly may have broken the law, but the idea that her reckless tweet had real-world consequences is baseless.
Starmer has given no explanation or apology for calling the peaceful majority of lawful protesters “far-right thugs.” Nor has he explained why he rushed to blame the disorder on the organized “far right.”
This claim’s repetition at the time by politicians, police, and most of the media may have fanned tensions. There was no evidence for it at the time of the riots, and the police now confirm its falsity.
Public trust in the police, the courts, and the political class was low before the Southport killings and the riots that followed. It has flatlined since then. This explains Starmer’s recent pivot to immigration hawk, boasting of how many foreigners he has deported, and warning that allowing mass immigration without “rules” risks making Britain into an “island of strangers.”
Free speech, Starmer insisted during a visit to the White House in February, is alive and well in Britain. The evidence suggests otherwise. The government is stifling free speech and making examples of people like Lucy Connolly because it fears the anger of the majority.
The Free Speech Union, a pro-free speech alliance led by the journalist Toby Young, has taken up Connolly’s case. A crowdfunded appeal to help her “rebuild her life,” started by Allison Pearson, has raised nearly £150,000 (about $200,000).
“How can it be right for Lucy to have been condemned to spend more than two-and-a-half years in jail for a single tweet when members of grooming gangs who plead guilty to the sexual exploitation of children get lower sentences?” asked Young following the denial of Connolly’s appeal.
Former prime minister Boris Johnson has called the denial of Connolly’s appeal “crazy and inhuman.” Johnson, who is rumored to be plotting a return to politics, said that Britain is “losing its reputation for free speech” and “turning into a police state.”
Lucy Connolly is in prison today not because of what she said, but to send a political message: to “deter” other British people from venting their dissatisfaction about immigration and its discontents on social media—outlets that, being American companies, the government cannot control.
The Trump administration reportedly linked a U.S.-UK trade deal to improvements in the UK’s speech climate. That deal was announced on May 8. Perhaps it is time for the Trump administration to send another message: no free speech, no trade deal.
On May 26, the State Department announced it was “concerned about infringements on freedom of expression” in Britain.
Read more on British politics from Dominic Green: