What Lucy Connolly tweeted on 29 July 2024 was abhorrent. She called for migrant accommodation to be set ablaze, with those inside. The post was swiftly deleted, but the damage was done. Just a day later, far-right mobs did set fire to the very hotels housing asylum seekers. Connolly pleaded guilty to inciting serious violence and was sentenced to 31 months in prison. But here’s the question — what good will that actually do?
I say this not as an apologist, but as a prison abolitionist. I do not believe locking people up solves anything, unless they pose a genuine and ongoing danger to society. Connolly’s crime was serious, no question. But prison, with its 23-hour lock-ins, family separation, and lifelong stigma, is not where you rehabilitate someone. It’s where you bury them.
The way her case was rushed through the courts felt all too familiar — a repeat of the 24-hour justice during the 2011 London riots. Back then, two young men received some of the harshest sentences simply for trying (and failing) to spark unrest in sleepy Cheshire towns. Harsh sentencing didn’t heal anything then, and it won’t now.
We’ve seen this pattern before: unrest in the streets, then politicians, scrambling for control, decide to appear “tough on crime” by making an example of someone. This time, that someone is Lucy Connolly. Meanwhile, the same leaders continue to fan the flames of anti-migrant hysteria. The Prime Minister warns of an “invasion”, Farage fantasises about a “minister for deportations”, and even Keir Starmer evokes language dangerously close to Enoch Powell’s infamous speech.
Connolly’s tweet — rightly described as racist — was the logical endpoint of mainstream rhetoric that paints migrants as threats. Her online outburst was vile, yes, but not entirely surprising when one considers how frequently migrants are scapegoated for everything from housing shortages to overwhelmed public services.
This is the double standard we cannot ignore. Connolly becomes a criminal when her words cross a legal line, but prominent politicians get away with inciting the same sentiments — albeit dressed up in suits and speeches. The line between dog-whistle politics and outright hate speech is thinner than many admit.
What if, instead of 31 months behind bars, Connolly had faced restorative justice? Imagine a process where she had to confront the impact of her words, meet members of the communities she wished harm upon, and engage in real acts of reparation. Volunteering in migrant support centres, listening to the stories of those fleeing war and persecution — that’s how you change someone’s heart. That’s how you address hate, not by isolating and embittering it behind prison walls.
More Read
It’s also time we stop treating her past as a childminder of minority children as a defence. It’s not. If anything, it makes her comments more disturbing. But still, even racists are not beyond reform — if they’re given the opportunity and challenge to change. That doesn’t happen in prison.
Now, of course, the right is using her as a symbol. A white woman, mother-of-two, branded a racist and locked up for what they call “thought crimes”. It’s political theatre. But justice shouldn’t be about theatre. It should be about healing the harm done — and preventing it from happening again.
Connolly’s incarceration won’t make Britain safer. What it will do is distract from the real issues: spiralling poverty, neglected communities, and the deliberate sowing of division by those in power. Until we tackle those root causes, someone else will tweet something hateful, and another fire will be lit.
