Starmer's own guidelines ‘should have spared Lucy Connolly from jail'
The Prime Minister supported the conviction of Mrs Connolly for inciting racial hatred over an expletive-ridden post on X after the Southport attacks, but it has emerged that he had previously suggested that people who swiftly deleted offensive social media statements should not necessarily face criminal action.
On Thursday, Mrs Connolly will be released after being sentenced to 31 months in prison for posting the comments, which she deleted hours later.
The mother-of-one's supporters claim she has been subjected to an unfairly long jail term and made a scapegoat for the rioting last summer.
Sir Keir has defended Mrs Connolly's conviction, saying that while he was strongly in favour of free speech he was 'equally against incitement to violence' against other people. He added: 'I will always support the action taken by our police and courts to keep our streets and people safe.'
However, in 2013, when director of public prosecutions, he introduced guidance for prosecutors to consider a more lenient approach towards suspects who 'swiftly' deleted social media posts and expressed 'genuine remorse'.
The guidance urged prosecutors to consider four factors where 'a prosecution is unlikely to be both necessary and proportionate'.
These included if 'swift and effective action has been taken by the suspect and/or others for example, service providers, to remove the communication in question or otherwise block access to it'.
Mrs Connolly was jailed for a post on the day three children were killed at a dance class in Southport, on Merseyside, urging followers to 'set fire' to hotels that housed asylum seekers 'for all I care.'
At the time, the childminder had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times before she deleted it three and a half hours later, saying she regretted it.
Sir Keir's 2013 advice was caveated with a warning to prosecutors that it was 'not an exhaustive list' of mitigating circumstances and that 'each case must be considered on its own factors and its own individual merits.'
Legal experts who have followed Mrs Connolly's case noted that the guidance suggested public order offences, such as inciting racial hatred, should be treated separately and suspects would not therefore necessarily benefit from the same protections.
Sir Keir followed up publication of the guidance with interviews in which he said: 'There's a lot of stuff out there that is highly offensive that is put out on a spontaneous basis that is quite often taken down pretty quickly, and the view is that those sort of remarks don't necessarily need to be prosecuted.
'This is not a get out of jail card, but it is highly relevant. Stuff does go up on a Friday and Saturday night and come down the next morning.
'Now if that is the case a lot of people will say that shouldn't have happened, the person has accepted it, but really you don't need a criminal prosecution. It is a relevant factor.'
The 2013 guidance is repeated nearly word for word in the latest version for prosecutors.
However, the initial advice that the factors could make a prosecution 'unlikely' has been tempered to state that prosecutors should take 'particular care' to ensure prosecution is 'necessary and proportionate'.
Critics who have claimed Mrs Connolly was a victim of two-tier justice said it raised further questions over her treatment.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: 'Keir Starmer's enthusiasm for prosecuting Lucy Connolly appears to contradict his own guidelines. She rapidly deleted the message and showed remorse. This suggests Keir Starmer is guilty of hypocrisy and double standards by supporting a breach of his own prosecution guidelines.
'Lord Hermer personally authorised this prosecution, in what looks like another example of two-tier justice bearing in mind the very long sentence given when compared to others who committed actual acts of violence.'
Lord Toby Young, the director of the Free Speech Union, said: 'Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, should have listened to the advice of Sir Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, and urged the CPS not to bring charges against Lucy Connolly.
'Sentencing her to more than two and a half years for a single tweet which she quickly deleted and apologised for has undermined public confidence in the criminal justice system, particularly when Labour councillors, MPs and anti-racism campaigners who have said and done much worse have avoided jail altogether.
'The public have concluded – rightly – that it's one rule for people on the Right and another for people on the Left.
'The Free Speech Union urged Lucy to plead not guilty, and offered to pay for her defence. Had she done so, I'm confident she would have been acquitted. But she decided against that precisely because she wasn't granted bail and was worried that her case would take so long to come to trial that she would end up spending more time in jail than she would if she pleaded guilty.'
Richard Tice, the deputy Reform UK leader who visited Mrs Connolly in prison, said she should have pleaded not guilty. 'There was pressure in the legal system to get her to plead guilty. That was the establishment working in its mystical ways,' he claimed.
'The proof of my point is that Ricky Jones, the Labour councillor, can urge for people's throats to be slit live on TV in front of a big crowd and be found not guilty by a jury. It proves the whole point about two-tier justice and two-tier Keir. He is the biggest hypocrite that has been in Downing Street.'
Frank Ferguson, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service's special crime and counter-terrorism division, said: '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 admitted to doing.
'The prosecution case included evidence which showed that racist tweets were sent out from Lucy Connolly's X account both in the weeks and months before the Southport attacks – as well as in the days after. The CPS takes racial hatred extremely seriously, and will never hesitate to prosecute these cases where there is enough evidence to do so.'
The CPS also noted messages raised during her appeal on her remorse, in which she suggested she might claim that it was not her who had posted but that she was a victim of 'doxing', and that she had published the apology at the suggestion of a third party and her husband.
A Government spokesman said: 'Sentencing is a matter for independent courts, and we support the action taken by the courts, as well as the police, to keep our streets safe.
'In all cases where Law Officers' consent is required, the Law Officers carefully consider whether to grant consent, including all relevant factors to the public interest in the prosecution.'
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