A childminder married to a Conservative councillor has been jailed for 31 months for inciting racial hatred online on the day of the Southport attacks.
Lucy Connolly, the wife of West Northamptonshire Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, was sentenced Birmingham Crown Court after pleading guilty last month.
She pleaded guilty to publishing a social media post stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers.
Lucy Connolly was remanded in custody after admitting the offence at Northampton Crown Court on September 2- having called on X, formerly Twitter, for hotels housing migrants to be set on fire.
Connolly, from Northampton, posted after last month’s Southport knife killings. saying: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all I care…’
Lucy Connolly (pictured) has been jailed for stirring up racial hatred with a social media post
The 41-year-old has since deleted her post and blamed it on ‘a moment of extreme outrage and emotion’ when she was acting on ‘false and malicious’ information
Lucy Connolly’s Conservative councillor husband Raymond Connolly, pictured outside Northampton Crown Court, watched on as she pleaded guilty to stirring up racial hatred
The 41-year-old added: ‘If that makes me racist, so be it.’
She is married to Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, who serves as vice chair of West Northamptonshire Council’s adult social care committee.
After posting the vile tweet, Connolly was suspended on the platform Childcare.co.uk where she advertised her childminding services.
Passing sentence on Lucy Connolly, the recorder of Birmingham Judge Melbourne Inman KC said: ‘Some people used that tragedy as an opportunity to sow division and hatred, often using social media, leading to a number of towns and cities being disfigured.’
After noting that Connolly’s post on X inciting attacks on hotels had been viewed 310,000 times, the judge added: ‘When you published those words you were well aware how volatile the situation was.
‘That volatility led to serious disorder where mindless violence was used.’
The judge added that Connolly, who remained calm on the prison video-link, had encouraged activity which threatened or endangered life.
Mr Connolly declined to comment on the sentencing as he left Birmingham.
Following, Connolly’s guilty plea in September, Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit, said: ‘Using threatening, abusive or insulting language to rile up racism online is unacceptable and is breaking the law.
‘During police interview Lucy Connolly stated she had strong views on immigration, told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them.
‘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 has admitted doing.
‘The prosecution case included evidence which showed that racist tweets were sent out from Mrs Connolly’s X account both in the weeks and months before the Southport attacks – as well as in the days after.
‘Connolly wrongly thought that she could escape justice by hiding behind a screen, but today she has pleaded guilty and admitted her crime. She will now face the consequences of her actions.’
Lucy Connolly’s husband Raymond Connolly (pictured outside Northampton Crown Court today) is an elected member of West Northamptonshire Council
The councillor serves as vice chair of the local authority’s adult social care committee
Speaking after he guilty plea, Mr Connolly said the last few weeks had been ‘quite traumatic’ for his wife and children – and that he now feels ‘kind of relieved’.
He said his wife regrets making the post, which she deleted within two hours, describing her as ‘the opposite’ of a racist’ an ‘upset housewife’ posting about what transpired to be misinformation about the Southport stabbings.
He told reporters: ‘The stuff I hear on the TV is not really Lucy. She knows that she overstepped the mark and there is consequences for it. Hopefully she’ll be able to learn from this and move on with her life.’
The councillor, who represents Delapre and Rushmere, added that he had received messages of support from residents asking him not to resign, saying: ‘I’ve had really good support from my fellow councillors. It’s not affected my role.’
Connolly had earlier deleted the offending post and issued an apology, saying: ‘Acting on information that I now know to be false and malicious, and in a moment of extreme outrage and emotion, I posted words that I realise were wrong in every way.
‘I am someone who cares enormously about children, and the similarity between those beautiful children who were so brutally attacked and my own daughter overwhelmed me with horror but I should not have expressed that horror in the way that I did.
‘This has been a valuable lesson for me, in realising how wrong and inaccurate things appearing on social media can be, and I will never ever react in this way again.’
Connolly’s husband previously told the BBC after an online backlash against her that she had made one ‘stupid, spur of the moment tweet out of frustration and quickly deleted it’.
He added: ‘She’s a good person and she’s not racist. She’s got Somalian and Bangladeshi kids she looks after and she loves them like they’re her own.’
Flames erupted beside Sunderland police station during the riots breaking out on August 2 – part of widespread disorder across the country following the Southport stabbings
The disturbances in the north-eastern city were among a series of clashes earlier this month
The aftermath of violent disorder in Hull city centre which saw rioters tear through the shopping district
Father-of-three Tyler Kay, 26, was jailed for 38 months on August 9 after sharing online Lucy Connolly’s social media post about burning down hotels housing asylum seekers
Following the far-right riots that came after the killings of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 29, the courts have been packed with defendants.
The attack was wrongly blamed on a fictitious Islamist migrant, a theory spread through online misinformation.
Violence broke out in cities across England and also in Northern Ireland – and has been followed by a hundreds of charges including for children as young as 11, while those arrested also include a 69-year-old accused of vandalism in Liverpool.
A father-of-three was jailed at Northampton Crown Court for 38 months on August 9 after re-posting part of Connolly’s X message.
Tyler Kay, 26, of Ellfield Court, Northampton, admitted a charge of publishing material intended to stir up racial hatred.
Passing sentence on Kay after he pleaded guilty, Judge Lucking told him: ‘You posted as you did because you thought there were no consequences for yourself from stirring up racial hatred in others.
‘The overall tone of the posts clearly reveals your fundamentally racist mindset.
‘I am sure that when you intentionally created the posts you intended that racial hatred would be stirred up by your utterly repulsive, racist and shocking posts that have no place in a civilised society.’
This is a breaking news story. More to follow.
