Now we have proof free speech is a joke in two-tier Britain
When Lucy Connolly – married to a Tory councillor – posted on social media 'set fire to all the f-----g hotels full of all the b------s for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it', she chose to plead guilty under apparent pressure from the state. Ms Connolly is currently serving a 31-month prison sentence, at times on a 23-hour lockdown confined to her cell with no privileges, for her ill-tempered words. Others, who stood their ground, walked free. The results were still unpleasant – the process is in part the punishment – but better than they might otherwise have been.
It is hard not to feel that the difference between the two cases is less a matter of law than politics. Lucy Connolly was denied bail as Sir Keir Starmer and the judiciary worked on their 'shared understanding' that anyone expressing sentiments that could have encouraged last year's riots needed to be made an example of. Sir Keir himself told the nation that individuals would be held on remand. The Home Office openly risked prejudicing trials by labelling those arrested, charged but not yet convicted as 'criminals'.
If there's a lesson here, it may well be that people can say stupid things without the world collapsing around them. And that the public – which did not visibly respond to either exhortation – can be trusted, for the most part, to recognise the distinction between genuinely threatening language and idiocy, both on the streets and in jury deliberations.
Unlike our American cousins, British people have only a very qualified right to free speech. While the human rights system appears to go out of its way to undermine attempts to control borders or crack down on crime, protection of speech is heavily caveated.
And the British state makes full use of these carve-outs in its attempt to maintain its fragile grip on the country it has built. Its most important aim is to prevent tensions between groups. Speech that might inflame them is subject to stringent oversight and exacting scrutiny by officials terrified of what might spiral out from a frank examination of the country as it is.
People on the Left, however, can speak with relative security. The result, in the words of Reform's Zia Yusuf, appears to be 'a country in which those who have the correct 'regime' political views can openly call for their political opponents to be brutally murdered, be filmed doing so, and face no criminal consequences'.
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