I’ve been following the story of Mrs Lucy Connolly ever since she was arrested and imprisoned in 2024 for committing one of Britain’s many speech crimes, the sort of ‘crimes’ that my many American readers do not have to fear arrest for but Britons do. It’s very possible that my American friends could take the story of Mrs Connolly as a cautionary tale of what happens to countries that have no Constitutional protection for freedom of expression and maybe they might appreciate more the rights that your ancestors fought for on the battlefields and in the courts.

Lucy Connolly was an ordinary middle class housewife, a child minder married to Ray who was involved in Britain’s centre-Right Conservative Party. She was, from what I can gather, liked and respected by people of different classes, races and religions many of whom entrusted their children to Mrs Connolly. About the only thing that would mark Mrs Connolly out was that she,like so many other Britons, including myself, had lost a loved one because of the poor medical treatment dished out by Britain’s nationalised healthcare system the National Health Service (NHS). In Mrs Connolly’s case she lost her young son, a child who might have been saved had the NHS not been so incompetent or indifferent to the medical plight of her child.

There are thousands upon thousands of decent women like Mrs Connolly, in stable families up and down the country who are similarly respected and well liked by people from across the communities. However, they live in anonymity but what the State did to Mrs Connolly took away that anonymity forever and the State subjected her to terrible unjust treatment and the State did so on the grounds of the words that Mrs Connolly used to express herself following yet another preventable atrocity.

Mrs Connolly was living her ordinary but contributory life when a tale of horror intruded into her life as it did into the lives and consciousness of many other Britons. A teenager from a family of Rwandan imports, a young man with a whole flagpole of red flags flying with regards to his obsessions with violence, genocide and terrorism and record of carrying weapons, committed the most terrible atrocities in the North West English town of Southport. This savage, who I will not dignify by naming, caught a cab to a local community centre where a room full of young pre-teenage girls were taking part in a Taylor Swift themed dance event, went into the building and stabbed and slashed at the children and the adults there. Three children were killed and eight other children and two adults were injured. The savage who did this is now in gaol and is unlikely ever to be released.

Many of us at the time and still do have a high level of disgust and horror at this atrocity. Street riots broke out, often in the working class areas that have been forced by the government to bear the brunt of sometimes incompatible forms of immigration and immigrant. Many others including myself expressed our views in print online not just on the Southport Atrocity itself but on the policies of successive governments that ultimately allowed a Rwandan savage to wreak murder and havoc on Southport and also the blatantly two tier policing that was going on in response to street fighting and related issues. Rabble rousers of the far Left were treated by the State with kid gloves and police seemed reluctant to intervene impartially or even follow the law when confronted with a group of armed Muslims telling them only to ‘take the weapons back to the mosque’(see link below). It was a different story for those indigenous Britons and those others who have thrown their lot with us who took to the streets to protest the Southport Atrocity even if they were protesting peacefully or who spoke about these issues online in a more ‘fruity’ manner. The Britons on the streets faced arrest and imprisonment or police violence and the Britons who spoke out often found themselves falling foul of one of Britain’s many and oppressive ‘speech crime’ laws. The differential treatment of those who came out to protest over the Southport Atrocity was also seen clearly when you look at the violent policing used against Southport protestors and the kid gloves way that police treated rioters following a riot in Harehills, Leeds over a Social Services visit to a family of Roma.

‘A Tweet Too Far’ is Lucy Connolly’s story of how the State arrested her for saying words along the lines of ‘I couldn’t care less’ should one of the many hotels that have been commandeered by the State to house illegal migrants, go up in flames, adding ‘if that makes me a racist then so be it’.

Mrs Connolly sent the post on X but a few hours later thought better of it and took it down. The problem was this Tweet had been screenshotted and distributed incredibly widely. So what you might think should you live in a country with a First Amendment? But Britain is not one of those countries. Britain has on its law books quite a few bits of legislation that have been added piecemeal over five or more decades that suppress or inhibit the free speech of Britons which has had the consequence that Britons now feel scared to talk about issues that might be classed by the State as ‘controversial’. We might not have the Lord Chamberlain censoring plays at the theatre any more but woe betide the person who says that women don’t have penises or who stands up and decries the high levels of third world migration to Britain or who makes comment on how a so called ‘religion of peace’ has a monthly death toll (hint it ain’t the Jews or the Methodists).

Lucy Connolly got dragged into a maelstrom of publicity and State overreach because of her comment and this book tells her story, a very gripping, informative and moving one. It tells of her realisation that she was going to be arrested, the advice from her State supplied duty solicitor that she should plead guilty to a speech crime offence and the State’s insistence that Mrs Connolly be made an example of in order to scare the public into not speaking. As an aside, several others who were arrested for speech crimes following the Southport Atrocity chose to plead not guilty and took their case to a Crown Court where they were ultimately cleared by a jury.

I must say I really enjoyed Mrs Connolly’s story but it also scared me. It scared me because the British state can and does imprison people for words, words that are not likely to credibly incite violence but words that have merely offended or might offend someone. It’s wrong for the State to have such power especially when there are a multitude of people out there who are more than willing to be ‘offended’ by something and make use of these speech crime laws especially if it causes problems for someone they politically disagree with.

It’s obvious from reading Mrs Connolly’s account of her tribulations at the hands of the British government that she was subjected to politically inspired lawfare and that’s not something I say lightly. However, it should arouse suspicion of politicisation of the justice system when a person like Mrs Connolly is fast tracked through court, held on remand after only a very brief period on bail and sentenced to 31 months in prison for breaching the 1986 Public Order Act. She was denied leave to appeal against what many Britons thought was an inappropriate sentence for a post that had only been up for a few hours and certainly would not have incited any reasonable person to go and do bad stuff. She was treated appallingly in prison and denied rights that she was entitled to. I believed that Mrs Connolly was a political prisoner when she was gaoled but after reading Mrs Connolly’s account of her ordeal I believe this even more now.

I’ve got to say however that this is a strangely set out book. I ordered this book from the excellent Oldspeak Books (link below) and expected it to be, as many memoirs are, to be Mrs Connolly’s story alone. However, this book is laid out thus: There is a chapter by someone called Adam, whose identity is not made entirely clear if you miss the preface until a few chapters in, a chapter by Mrs Connolly then another chapter by Adam and so on and so on. Whilst I liked some of what Adam wrote and there were few factual howlers in his stuff apart from Adam claiming it was the Attlee government who granted Israel independence when it was the UN that did that and Britain’s promise to the Jews of returning to their ancient homeland was made during the Premiership of Lloyd George in 1917, much earlier than Attlee.

On the whole I liked Adam’s stuff, he’s got a darkly sarcastic turn of phrase that fits well his quite detailed descriptions of some of Britain’s many problems, many of them caused by Britain’s political classes of varied political shades. But, because I had bought this book primarily for Mrs Connolly’s story I found the way the book was set out with the two authors being interleaved intrusive and a bit annoying. This was one book but I can clearly see that it might and maybe should have been two books. This complaint is I need to make clear one of layout rather than any slight on the quality of writing.

I would certainly recommend this book to others though despite the issues I have with the twin author layout. If you don’t know just how bad things are in Britain then you will learn much from Adam’s sections. If you want to know just how hard the British state will go to protect their narratives or silence opposition then you will find that in Mrs Connolly’s sections.

This book is a vivid and frightening portrait of a failing state. It shows a state that cannot protect its citizens from danger both home grown and imported. It’s a state that cannot provide them with a healthcare system that is not a lethality lottery, that doesn’t deal with problems only symptoms of problems. In many cases these symptoms are merely people who speak up about inconvenient truths and is a state whose government views its own indigenous citizens in the same contemptuous way that King Richard II looked upon the pissed off peasantry in 1381, not as people whose voices should be hard but as a mob that needs to be quelled and crushed.

The British state tried to crush Lucy Connolly but they failed. Mrs Connolly came through her ordeal not broken as the state may have liked but stronger. Her case has highlighted just how bad things are with regards to freedom of expression in the United Kingdom and it has had a massive ‘Streisand Effect’ in that it has publicised to Britons and others how much the State hates the voices of the ordinary Briton. If the state thought that they would silence Lucy Connolly or others like her then it has failed. All the State has achieved is to make more people hate more intensely the censorship that pervades all our daily lives.

Links

The infamous clip of a police officer saying to a group of Muslims ‘take the weapons to the mosque’

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hPIzhKklxBQ

Oldspeak Books

https://oldspeakbookshop.co.uk/