On the 29th of July last year, in Southport in the United Kingdom, Axel Rudacubana entered a Taylor Swift-themed dance class with the intent of murdering as many small children as he could. Three children lost their lives, many more were injured. In the immediate aftermath, there was much online anger at those events. Some of it was expressed calmly and rationally. Some of it was not.
One of the people who did not express their anger calmly and rationally was a then 30-year-old mother of two (including a son who tragically died in infancy) Lucy Connolly, from Northampton. Ms. Connolly took to X (formerly twitter) and typed out the following words, before hitting “send”:
“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.”
Lucy Connolly was subsequently arrested for that tweet, and charged with a criminal offence under part III of the UK’s public order act of 1986, which considers that a person is guilty of a criminal offence if they:
“19 Publishing or distributing written material
(1)
A person who publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if –
(a)
he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
(b)
having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.”
Connolly was charged under section 1(a), meaning that the Crown claimed that her tweet was “intended” to stir up racial hatred. After considering her prospects in court, Ms Connolly pleaded guilty to that offence and was sentenced to 31 months in His Majesty’s prison, a sentence that included a 25% reduction for her guilty plea.
Yesterday, the Court of Appeal in London upheld that sentence, after Ms. Connolly appealed against its severity. She will serve her full term. Those are the basic facts of the case.
It is patently obvious to any reasonable person that what Lucy Connolly wrote was deeply wrong. It should also be patently obvious to any reasonable person that what Lucy Connolly wrote is not what western justice systems exist to arbitrate.
The prison system traditionally has two functions: To punish and deter wrongdoing, and to protect law abiding people from those who would do them harm. In Connolly’s case, you would be hard-pressed to imagine that a 31-year-old mum of two is a pressing risk to society because she once sent a stupid tweet. As such we can only conclude that the purpose of her imprisonment is not to protect the rest of us from the danger she poses, but to punish her for her crime and to deter others from committing similar crimes.
The problem here, though, is identifying her crime in the first place. The legislation under which she was prosecuted was written and conceived in the pre-internet age. When it talks about “distributing written material”, it very clearly refers to what that would have meant in 1986, at the time the law was written: Printing a pamphlet or a publication urging a particular course of violent action.
It was not designed for the twitter age, when people have been empowered to share every stray thought that they have, almost casually. My own twitter feed, for example, will range widely between outrage over the latest offences committed by VAR against my beloved Manchester United, to pointless thoughts about some political development in the Trumpist United States. These thoughts do not form a coherent call to action or concrete worldview, unless you could synthesise it by reading everything I have written over the course of 16 years on the platform and drawing some conclusions, which even then would not be complete.
The entire popularity of the platform is based on this: What twitter sells – it’s great appeal – is the ability to read other people’s brainfarts. You’re as likely to go viral for a tweet wondering idly about the sex lives of ducks than you are for a 40,000 word thesis on philosophy.
Lucy Connolly’s tweet, by any measure, was a brain fart. A stupid, emotional, over-wrought and angry reaction to a tragic event. It didn’t even amount to a coherent argument for burning down hotels. Indeed if you read the sentence with some added emphasis – “burn down the hotels for all I care” then it is readily apparent that she wasn’t actually calling for anything to be burned at all – simply making the point that she would no longer care in that moment if the hotels were burned. Stupid, but evidently not incitement. If you or I were to write for example that we do not care if Joe Bloggs dies, that would not be the same as saying “I would like you to kill Joe Bloggs”.
But of course, this is all to debate esoteric points, because Lucy Connolly is not in prison because she actually incited violence, or because she is a threat to anyone else. She is in prison for that third raison d’etre of the prison system: Pour encourager les autres.
It is, as my friend and colleague Laura Perrins says, all about “the treatment”. The point that Lucy Connolly is a relatively harmless 31-year-old-mother-of-two is essentially the reason that she is in prison: If we will do this to her, just imagine what we’ll do to you. The point is to strike fear into the heart of every momentarily angry person with a twitter account who wants to verbally lash out at the state or its agents: “Be careful how you phrase that, or you’ll get a visit from Uncle Plod.”
In this sense, those like the eminent British writer Allison Pearson who say that she is both a martyr and a political prisoner are entirely correct. She is not in prison to protect the public. Nor is she in prison because she did something worthy of punishment. She is in prison so that those who imprisoned her can make an essentially political point about what you are allowed to say in the society in which you live. It is a modern day version of locking Annie Askew up for heresy, though Lucy Connolly has at least been spared the rack, unlike poor Annie. That sordid affair too, of course, was about encouraging les autres.
To genuinely incite violence, it is a pre-requisite that you should be in a position of some influence over the people you are inciting: They should have reason to trust your judgment. They should have good reason to listen to you more than others. There should at least be a “reasonable man” test, as there is in defamation: IE, would a reasonable man, hearing these words, be convinced to carry out a violent act?
I guarantee you that if you exposed any single one of Lucy Connolly’s persecutors to that test – asked them on pain of death whether they themselves read her tweet and thought it a good idea to burn down hotels – they would answer in the negative. They, like every other rational person, would have instead written her words off as the brainfart of an upset and possibly not very smart person.
In fact, there is a much stronger case to be made in this respect in relation to the Republican band Kneecap: That trio infamously told their audience to “kill their MP”. Kneecap are in a much greater position of cultural influence over others than some random 30 year old housewife. That, I think, is indisputable.
But yet, she languishes in prison while Kneecap have not so much as been charged. While, as an aside, many actually violent criminals also escape imprisonment. This is a deep injustice. Her tweet was unspeakably stupid and moronic. But if we are to lock people up for being stupid and moronic, our universities would soon be devoid of lecturers and our Governments on these islands might vanish overnight.