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Lucy Connolly, who was jailed in the aftermath of last summer’s riots for an expletive-ridden social media post calling for followers to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, has been released from prison.
The former childminder who is married to the Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, left HMP Peterborough on Thursday morning in a taxi after serving 10 months of her sentence.
She was jailed for two years and seven months in October last year after she posted on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”
The post was viewed 310,000 times with 940 reposts, 58 quotes and 113 bookmarks before it was later deleted.
Connolly pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material on X and was jailed at Birmingham crown court.
Before she was arrested, she told a friend that she would “play the mental health card” if she was questioned by police.
During the investigation, police found other posts that were described by the judge at her sentencing, Melbourne Inman, as “racist”, some of which happened before the murder of three girls in Southport that triggered the far-right riots.
Four days before the stabbing, in response to a video of a black man being tackled to the ground for allegedly carrying out a sex act in public, she wrote: “Somalian, I guess. Loads of them.” She followed this with a vomiting emoji.
In the aftermath, responding to an anti-fascist protest, on 3 August she wrote: “I take it they will all be in line to sign up to house an illegal boat invader then. Oh sorry, refugee.
“Maybe sign a waiver to say they don’t mind if it’s one of their family that gets attacked, butchered, raped etc, by unvetted criminals.”
Her sentence has come under criticism, particularly in far-right and anti-immigration circles.
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Reacting to her release, the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said Connolly’s sentence was “harsher than the sentences handed down for bricks thrown at police or actual rioting”.
In May this year after Connolly’s court of appeal application was dismissed, Keir Starmer defended it, saying: “I am strongly in favour of free speech, we’ve had free speech in this country for a very long time and we protect it fiercely.
“But I am equally against incitement to violence against other people. I will always support the action taken by our police and courts to keep our streets and people safe.”
