The British state has apparently learnt nothing from the Lucy Connolly scandal. You might have thought successive governments would want to avoid the international embarrassment of the UK becoming a byword for censorship and crushing dissent. Instead, the figures show that online hate speech convictions have actually increased recently.
According to Ministry of Justice data reported last week, convictions for “publishing or distributing written material intending or likely to stir up racial hatred”—the offence most often used for posts on social media—have soared in the past decade. While there was just one conviction in 2015, there were 44 in 2024.
The majority of online hate convictions took place in the last three years. In fact, almost a third of them were in 2024, in the wake of the riots. One of the most high-profile and outrageous cases was that of Lucy Connolly, the mother and childminder who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for a single tweet. In the aftermath of the horrific murders of three young girls in Southport, Connolly posted on X that she wanted “mass deportations” and that people could “set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards [migrants] for all I care.” For this post—deleted within a few hours—Connolly was handed an almost three-year prison sentence. After serving 380 days, she was released last week to complete the rest on licence.
Whatever you think of Connolly’s post, the fact remains that she was put in prison for a tweet. And while her case became high profile due to its absurd disproportionality, it is by no means isolated. Right-wing activist Samuel Melia was sentenced to two years in prison last year for making and distributing stickers. Melia had been producing digital, downloadable designs featuring slogans like “It’s okay to be white,” “Britons Build Britain,” “Equality or Quality—you can only have one,” and “Why are Jews censoring free speech?” Once again, you are free to think what you like about the content of these stickers—they range from the mundane to the crackpot—but, at the end of the day, they are stickers. Serving two years in prison for the ‘crime’ of making offensive stickers is something you’d expect in a third-world dictatorship, not a supposedly Western democracy.
In Melia’s case, it was clear that his actual crime was not the stickers, but his ideology. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), describing his arrest in 2021, said that the stickers found in his wallet were evidence of “views of a nationalist nature.” Searching his home, police “discovered a book by Oswald Mosley” and “a poster of Adolf Hitler,” which, according to the CPS, were “key signs of Melia’s ideology.” In other words, it was never about the stickers. The charge of stirring up racial hatred was merely an excuse to put a man behind bars for his odious, but perfectly legal, political views.
Had Melia or Connolly been on the left of the political spectrum, the outcome of their cases likely would have been very different. Earlier this month, a jury found former Labour councillor Ricky Jones not guilty of encouraging violent disorder after he called for the throats of right-wing rioters to be slit at a protest last August. Connolly pleaded guilty, expecting a slap on the wrist and a quick turnaround, only to be denied bail. Jones, meanwhile, pleaded not guilty, was allowed out on bail, and was later able to make his case before a jury—which, rightly, found that he had committed no crime. It’s hard not to see this disparity between Connolly’s treatment and Jones’ as more the result of politics than justice.
Cases like Connolly’s and Melia’s are just the ones that make it to court. It’s estimated that UK police make a shocking 30 arrests per day on average, or 12,000 each year, for speech crimes. Like that of Bernadette Spofforth, who had four police vehicles turn up at her home to arrest her on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred last year. Spofforth had, in the information vacuum created by the authorities’ silence over the Southport killings, posted information on X about who she believed to be the murderer. She speculated that the killer was a small-boat migrant called Ali Al-Shakati, who was known to intelligence services and had Islamist motives. “If this is true,” she wrote on X, “then all hell is about to break loose.” We later learnt that this wasn’t true—the killer was 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, who was born in the UK to Rwandan parents and who had no religious motivation that we know of. Regardless, British police saw fit to arrest Spofforth for having spread misinformation on the internet. She was thankfully released without charges, but not before being detained for 36 hours.
Some of these interactions with the thought police were thankfully caught on camera; otherwise, they would be too insane to believe. Consider the case of Julian Foulkes, a retired police officer who was arrested in 2023 because he had posted online that he was concerned about the rise of antisemitism in the UK. In bodycam footage released earlier this year, police can be seen searching Foulkes’ home and leafing through his bookshelf. The copper wearing the camera can be heard remarking that Foulkes had a “very Brexity” book collection, which included titles like Douglas Murray’s The War on The West. In another incident, from 2022, police were caught on camera arresting army veteran Darren Brady for a retweet that had “caused anxiety.” Brady had shared a meme of the Pride flag arranged in the shape of a swastika, poking fun at the way LGBT ideology has become so authoritarian.
Believe it or not, the situation is even worse up north in Scotland. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 came into force in April 2024 and immediately triggered a deluge of complaints—thousands in the first week alone—for instances that police decided mostly weren’t crimes. On the day the law took effect, J.K. Rowling even dared officers to arrest her for her gender-critical tweets, which were technically supposed to be illegal hate speech according to a straightforward reading of the Act. Luckily, the police decided her posts weren’t criminal. People even piled in to mass report then-first minister Humza Yousaf for hate crimes. In 2020, he had given a speech complaining that too many of Scotland’s high offices were occupied by white people. As amusing as this all was, it showed just how crazy Scotland’s hate speech regime had become, and served as a warning to the rest of the country.
As it is, the UK has become a place where mothers can face jail time for their social media posts and veterans can be arrested for provoking “anxiety.” This is not the behaviour of a free and civilised country. How have we reached a point where words on a screen are treated the same as, if not worse than, real-life violence? While British thought police knock on dissenters’ doors, paedophiles, rapists, and terror offenders are being spared prison. This is how the UK is being forced into silence.
The UK’s Censorship Regime Is Worse Than You Thought
Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
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The British state has apparently learnt nothing from the Lucy Connolly scandal. You might have thought successive governments would want to avoid the international embarrassment of the UK becoming a byword for censorship and crushing dissent. Instead, the figures show that online hate speech convictions have actually increased recently.
According to Ministry of Justice data reported last week, convictions for “publishing or distributing written material intending or likely to stir up racial hatred”—the offence most often used for posts on social media—have soared in the past decade. While there was just one conviction in 2015, there were 44 in 2024.
The majority of online hate convictions took place in the last three years. In fact, almost a third of them were in 2024, in the wake of the riots. One of the most high-profile and outrageous cases was that of Lucy Connolly, the mother and childminder who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for a single tweet. In the aftermath of the horrific murders of three young girls in Southport, Connolly posted on X that she wanted “mass deportations” and that people could “set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards [migrants] for all I care.” For this post—deleted within a few hours—Connolly was handed an almost three-year prison sentence. After serving 380 days, she was released last week to complete the rest on licence.
Whatever you think of Connolly’s post, the fact remains that she was put in prison for a tweet. And while her case became high profile due to its absurd disproportionality, it is by no means isolated. Right-wing activist Samuel Melia was sentenced to two years in prison last year for making and distributing stickers. Melia had been producing digital, downloadable designs featuring slogans like “It’s okay to be white,” “Britons Build Britain,” “Equality or Quality—you can only have one,” and “Why are Jews censoring free speech?” Once again, you are free to think what you like about the content of these stickers—they range from the mundane to the crackpot—but, at the end of the day, they are stickers. Serving two years in prison for the ‘crime’ of making offensive stickers is something you’d expect in a third-world dictatorship, not a supposedly Western democracy.
In Melia’s case, it was clear that his actual crime was not the stickers, but his ideology. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), describing his arrest in 2021, said that the stickers found in his wallet were evidence of “views of a nationalist nature.” Searching his home, police “discovered a book by Oswald Mosley” and “a poster of Adolf Hitler,” which, according to the CPS, were “key signs of Melia’s ideology.” In other words, it was never about the stickers. The charge of stirring up racial hatred was merely an excuse to put a man behind bars for his odious, but perfectly legal, political views.
Had Melia or Connolly been on the left of the political spectrum, the outcome of their cases likely would have been very different. Earlier this month, a jury found former Labour councillor Ricky Jones not guilty of encouraging violent disorder after he called for the throats of right-wing rioters to be slit at a protest last August. Connolly pleaded guilty, expecting a slap on the wrist and a quick turnaround, only to be denied bail. Jones, meanwhile, pleaded not guilty, was allowed out on bail, and was later able to make his case before a jury—which, rightly, found that he had committed no crime. It’s hard not to see this disparity between Connolly’s treatment and Jones’ as more the result of politics than justice.
Cases like Connolly’s and Melia’s are just the ones that make it to court. It’s estimated that UK police make a shocking 30 arrests per day on average, or 12,000 each year, for speech crimes. Like that of Bernadette Spofforth, who had four police vehicles turn up at her home to arrest her on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred last year. Spofforth had, in the information vacuum created by the authorities’ silence over the Southport killings, posted information on X about who she believed to be the murderer. She speculated that the killer was a small-boat migrant called Ali Al-Shakati, who was known to intelligence services and had Islamist motives. “If this is true,” she wrote on X, “then all hell is about to break loose.” We later learnt that this wasn’t true—the killer was 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, who was born in the UK to Rwandan parents and who had no religious motivation that we know of. Regardless, British police saw fit to arrest Spofforth for having spread misinformation on the internet. She was thankfully released without charges, but not before being detained for 36 hours.
Some of these interactions with the thought police were thankfully caught on camera; otherwise, they would be too insane to believe. Consider the case of Julian Foulkes, a retired police officer who was arrested in 2023 because he had posted online that he was concerned about the rise of antisemitism in the UK. In bodycam footage released earlier this year, police can be seen searching Foulkes’ home and leafing through his bookshelf. The copper wearing the camera can be heard remarking that Foulkes had a “very Brexity” book collection, which included titles like Douglas Murray’s The War on The West. In another incident, from 2022, police were caught on camera arresting army veteran Darren Brady for a retweet that had “caused anxiety.” Brady had shared a meme of the Pride flag arranged in the shape of a swastika, poking fun at the way LGBT ideology has become so authoritarian.
Believe it or not, the situation is even worse up north in Scotland. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 came into force in April 2024 and immediately triggered a deluge of complaints—thousands in the first week alone—for instances that police decided mostly weren’t crimes. On the day the law took effect, J.K. Rowling even dared officers to arrest her for her gender-critical tweets, which were technically supposed to be illegal hate speech according to a straightforward reading of the Act. Luckily, the police decided her posts weren’t criminal. People even piled in to mass report then-first minister Humza Yousaf for hate crimes. In 2020, he had given a speech complaining that too many of Scotland’s high offices were occupied by white people. As amusing as this all was, it showed just how crazy Scotland’s hate speech regime had become, and served as a warning to the rest of the country.
As it is, the UK has become a place where mothers can face jail time for their social media posts and veterans can be arrested for provoking “anxiety.” This is not the behaviour of a free and civilised country. How have we reached a point where words on a screen are treated the same as, if not worse than, real-life violence? While British thought police knock on dissenters’ doors, paedophiles, rapists, and terror offenders are being spared prison. This is how the UK is being forced into silence.
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