The Labour councillor Ricky Jones, who during the Southport unrest last year rose to notoriety after calling for the throats of “disgusting Nazi fascists” to be cut at a Walthamstow “anti-racism” rally, has this week been found not guilty of encouraging violent disorder. He was acquitted by a jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court after 30 minutes of deliberation on Friday, following a one-day trial.
Many seeing the acquittal have instinctively compared this to the case of Lucy Connolly, who is still behind bars for her tweet on the night of the Southport massacre, and said that the acquittal is evidence of two-tier justice. They are quite right to do so: Connolly was indeed treated unfairly compared with Jones.
However, in my view — valid concerns about the viability of jury trial in multi-ethnic societies notwithstanding — the injustice here lies not, as some have suggested, in the fact that the jury acquitted Jones. Jones’s speech was nasty, but whether it was directly inciting – both likely and intended to cause imminent serious violence – is dubious. From a free-speech point of view, it is welcome that juries generally take a dim view of prosecutions for speech. (In fact, the only two defendants charged with stirring up racial hatred after Southport to go before juries, former prison officer Mark Heath and former Royal Marine Jamie Michael, were both acquitted — the latter in just 17 minutes. In the view of the Free Speech Union and many legal experts, Lucy Connolly would also likely have been found not guilty at trial.)
Rather, it is everything else about these two cases that make the treatment of Connolly undeniably unfavourable compared with that of Jones.
First, consider the charge. Jones was charged only with encouraging violent disorder — not stirring up racial hatred, as Connolly was — despite his comments at least implicitly being targeted at a group of white people (Connolly herself never explicitly named any racial group either, only referring to “the bastards”). As I have written elsewhere, the British justice system does its best never to acknowledge anti-white animus in criminal behaviour — here is another prime example.
The difference between the two charges is important. For one thing, stirring up racial hatred carries a maximum penalty of seven years, compared with only five for encouraging violent disorder. And since it rests on the nebulous concept of merely “stirring up” an emotion, rather than immediately occasioning violence, it is also easier to convict. As critics of the offence have pointed out since it was first introduced 60 years ago, its effect is essentially to outlaw disfavoured opinions. Connolly’s charge was thus undoubtedly political: indeed, it was personally approved by the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, as part of a crackdown on online speech that flowed from the top. Because of the political priorities of the justice system, the wife of a Tory councillor’s hastily deleted tweet — which included the caveat “for all I care” — was treated more seriously than a Labour councillor’s comments made in person at a rally.
The gravity of the stirring up racial hatred offence seems to have played a role in the crucial fact of Connolly being denied bail, with District Judge Rahim Allen-Khimani ruling that the matter was “too serious for this [Magistrates’] court to deal with” at Connolly’s initial hearing on 10 August 2024. The beloved mother and childminder had no prior criminal record, yet because of a single tweet, she was remanded in custody as if she were a violent criminal. Behind bars, struggling to speak to a solicitor and with a trial date potentially months away, Connolly became panicked and demoralised. “Whatever I’d done, [the] police made it quite clear I was going down for this”, she told the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson earlier this year, “their intention was always to hammer me”. Despite standing a strong chance of going free at trial, she was thus pressured into pleading guilty. She did so in the knowledge she would get a shorter sentence, expecting to be out by Christmas.
Jones, however, was granted bail, and with multiple delays to his trial, he enjoyed more than a year to prepare his defence. This week he was able to make arguments about his having ADHD, that he got caught up in the heat of the moment, and to bring character references. He told the court his comment did not refer to protesters involved in the riots at the time, but to those who had reportedly left National Front stickers on a train with razor blades hidden behind them. He was “appalled” by political violence, he also said. The granting of bail was undeniably a crucial difference between the cases: even if Connolly had pleaded not guilty, she would still have spent many months behind bars away from her family waiting for trial.
Then there is how the state responded to the speech itself. It is well known that Connolly’s sentencing judge lectured her about diversity. Often overlooked about Connolly’s case, as I have noted elsewhere, is that one of the reasons Melbourne Inman treated her so harshly (31 months after her discount for pleading guilty) was his disapproval of other tweets she had made, which he called “racist remarks”. In the first of these, Connolly had reacted with a vomiting emoji to a video of a black migrant who had allegedly been masturbating in a park, and speculated whether he was Somalian. In the second, she mocked the hypocrisy of “Refugees Welcome” pro-open borders leftists for not personally accepting the unvetted migrants they cheer for into their own homes. Refusing her appeal in May, the Court of Appeal (which referred to these people sympathetically as “anti-racism protest[ers]”), backed Inman’s decision to hold those tweets against Connolly, agreeing that they suggested she was not “against violence and hatred”. Having sat through the hearing myself, we were all shocked when the state prosecutor went after her about whether she had anti-immigration views. In summing up, he argued that the tweets were evidence of her “racist mindset”. In short, Connolly had the book thrown at her because the British state doesn’t like her views. It wasn’t just the judges. The police misrepresented an interview she gave to them to make her appear less sympathetic; and the media monstered her as “Tory councillor’s racist wife”. In prison, she was denied release on temporary license, a privilege often granted to murderers.
Jones, meanwhile, faced little censure for his apparent animosity to anti-immigration protestors — who were understandably angry at the murder of three little girls — and for his venomous comments about “disgusting Nazi fascists” and slitting throats. Instead, at trial, his case turned only on the legal question of whether his speech constituted incitement — not a politicised assessment of whether his speech was offensive to social sensibilities.
The blame for her two-tier treatment lies with the actions of the whole British state
This is as it should be — the reason it’s unfair is that this so manifestly wasn’t the case for Connolly, or the many others thrown into jail alongside her after the Southport massacre. Denounced as “far-Right” by the prime minister and the whole political establishment, they were denied fair treatment and made an example of for nakedly political reasons.
The two-tier justice suffered by Lucy Connolly has been brought into sharp relief by the acquittal of Ricky Jones. But as tempting as it is to think so, this is not the fault of the 12 men and women at Snaresbrook Crown Court. The blame for her two-tier treatment lies with the actions of the whole British state: the police, the CPS, her solicitor, the judges — both at her sentencing and her appeal — the prison authorities. And most importantly, the authoritarian human rights lawyer double act of Lord Hermer and Sir Keir Starmer.
