Lucy Connolly is in prison where she belongs. But free speech truly is under attack elsewhere

Telegraph

26-05-2025

Last October, Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months for putting up a post on X. The dismissal of her appeal this week has provoked a chorus of complaints about the suppression of free speech by the courts. Her appeal was supported by the Free Speech Union. She has been portrayed as a free speech martyr and even as a political prisoner.
I have been a vocal supporter of freedom of speech and a critic of the many ways in which it is currently under attack. But I shall not waste any sympathy on Mrs Connolly. What she did was a serious offence. After learning that three children had been murdered in a knife attack at a holiday club at Southport, and believing (wrongly) that the murderer was an immigrant, she wrote: 'Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f-ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care.'
English law has generally been on the side of freedom of expression. But it has always drawn the line at threatening language which is likely to provoke a breach of the peace. To be criminal, words had to be 'threatening', i.e. inflammatory and intended or likely to stir up hatred against vulnerable categories of people.
This limitation on our freedom to write or say what we think is not new. It has been embodied in statute since 1936. At common law it is much older than that. It is perfectly rational. A person's rights always have to be qualified at the point when they conflict with the rights of others. You cannot use your right of free speech to expose other people to violence.
If a rabble-rouser stood on a soap-box in front of a howling mob and urged them to head for the nearest immigration hostel and burn it down, this point would be obvious. Doing it on social media is worse because the reach of social media posts in much greater. Its algorithms thrust words like Mrs Connolly's under the noses of people who are already likely to agree. The internet can whip up a howling mob in minutes.
Mrs Connolly soon regretted her post and deleted it three and a half hours later. But in the short time that it was up it was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. It was one of a number of wild statements on the internet following the Southport murders which provoked serious riots across England and violent attacks on mosques and immigration hostels. That was why her repentance did not count for much by way of mitigation.
Protests about her fate risk discrediting the free speech movement and distracting attention from the real threats which the current state of our law poses to freedom of expression.
The most serious threat to freedom of expression is not the public order offence for which Mrs. Connolly was convicted. It is the growing number of statutory provisions and police practices which attempt to suppress opinions that make other people cross but have no impact on public order. Over the past thirty years the Public Order Act 1986, which is the basic statutory code, has been amended to add ever broader kinds of 'hate crime' to the criminal calendar. Words may now be criminal if they are 'abusive' or 'insulting' even if they are not threatening and put no one in danger. This marks a significant move towards censorship.
'Non-crime hate incidents' are a further move in the same direction. They are not even criminal offences, but are simply incidents which the police are administratively directed to record. They will show up on enhanced criminal record checks and may stop people getting jobs. Yet there is no legal basis whatever for NCHIs. Action against them has simply been adopted as a practice by the police.
Because they have no legal basis, they have no legal definition either. The vagueness of the whole concept means that in reality action depends on the discretion of individual police officers. This is not a proper function for a statutory public service. The job of the police is to enforce the criminal law, not to regulate behaviour which is perfectly lawful but loutish, offensive, politically incorrect or contrary to received opinion.
The problem is made worse by the way that prosecutors and the police interpret 'hate crimes' and 'hate incidents'. They have agreed on a definition of their own devising, which covers anything 'perceived by the victim or any other person' to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, they have adopted a subjective definition dependent on the feelings of the victim and not on an objective assessment of the conduct of the perpetrator.
Extraordinarily, the current guidance issued by the College of Policing declares that 'the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident to be recorded as a hate crime or non-crime hate incident.'
Thus the police have arrested Christian preachers for their street sermons and parents engaged in a dispute with their daughter's school. They have recorded as 'hate incidents' gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, and even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration.
Harry Miller, who was visited by the police at his workplace and questioned about his gender-critical tweets, took the police to court. Their conduct, the judge said, offended against a 'cardinal democratic principle'. 'In this country,' he said, 'we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.'
As a matter of history, the judge was right. The British state has not in the past penalised words, however objectionable or offensive, unless they were a threat to the peace. It should not be doing so now.