Lucy Connolly, the UK mother jailed over a social media post made in the aftermath of the Southport tragedy, has described herself as “Keir Starmer’s political prisoner” in her first major interview since release.
Speaking to Dan Wootton on the Dan Wootton Outspoken podcast, Connolly insisted she is not a racist or far-right activist, but a grieving parent and childminder whose words were taken out of context and weaponised in a highly charged political climate.
Connolly said her offending tweet came at the end of a day spent caring for several children during the school holidays while processing the horror of the Southport killings.
Having already endured the death of her own 19-month-old son Harry in 2013 due to NHS neglect, she admitted she was overwhelmed by grief, anger and frustration. “It was just a very flippant, unnecessary comment… out of pure rage,” she recalled, explaining that she went out walking her dogs to calm down, then deleted the post herself. “I thought, you cannot write that. That is not an okay thing to write.”
Days later, screenshots of her tweet resurfaced online, sparking political controversy because of her husband’s role as a Conservative councillor. Connolly believes activists deliberately targeted her to damage him. “It seemed more about Ry than me,” she said. Within days, police arrived at her home, arrested her in front of children she was minding, and placed her in custody.
Connolly described her shock at being denied bail and swiftly remanded, something she says was “all by design” to make an example of her. She alleges her police interview statements were twisted, painting her as anti-immigrant when she says she only raised concerns about unchecked individuals in asylum hotels. Legal advice pushed her into pleading guilty, with warnings that she could otherwise face up to seven years in prison.
Ultimately, she received a two-and-a-half-year sentence despite her guilty plea, with the judge referencing diversity and national security in his remarks. Connolly insists this was a political show trial designed to deter others from posting online. “I regret pleading guilty,” she admitted, though she believes her “card was marked” from the outset. “I was Starmer’s pinup girl… I was jailed to send a message.”
Time to be racist, again!
Let’s cut the crap. The idea of “race” as some biological destiny is a load of historical crap, cooked up to justify slavery, colonialism, and every other power grab in the book. Here’s the brutal truth: race has never really been about pure DNA—cause, after tens of thousands of years of human mixing, migration, and interbreeding, that genetic mixing blurred every supposed “pure” line into oblivion. No, race is virtually all cultural: forged from shared place, history, ideals, norms, ethics, morals, values, and work ethic. It’s the worldview that binds or breaks us, as Theodore Dalrymple nails in Life at the Bottom, where he exposes how rotten attitudes, not genes or poverty, trap people in hellish cycles of failure.
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/reimagining-racism?