Childminder married to Tory councillor admits stirring racial hatred
A childminder married to a Conservative councillor has pleaded guilty to publishing a social media post stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers.
Lucy Connolly was remanded in custody after admitting the offence at Northampton Crown Court today – having called on X, formerly Twitter, for hotels housing migrants to be set on fire.
Connolly, from Northampton, posted after last month’s Southport knife killings. saying: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all I care…’
The 41-year-old added: ‘If that makes me racist, so be it.’
She is married to Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly who serves as vice chair of West Northamptonshire Council’s adult social care committee.
Lucy Connolly (pictured) has pleaded guilty to stirring up racial hatred with a social media post
After posting the vile tweet, Connolly was suspended on the platform Childcare.co.uk where she advertised her childminding services.
Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit, said after Connolly’s guilty plea today: ‘Using threatening, abusive or insulting language to rile up racism online is unacceptable and is breaking the law.
‘During police interview Lucy Connolly stated she had strong views on immigration, told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them.
‘It is not an offence to have strong or differing political views, but it is an offence to incite racial hatred – and that is what Connolly has admitted doing.
‘The prosecution case included evidence which showed that racist tweets were sent out from Mrs Connolly’s X account both in the weeks and months before the Southport attacks – as well as in the days after.
‘Connolly wrongly thought that she could escape justice by hiding behind a screen, but today she has pleaded guilty and admitted her crime. She will now face the consequences of her actions.’
Adjourning Connolly’s case for sentence at Birmingham Crown Court on October 17, Judge Adrienne Lucking told her the ordering of pre-sentence reports was no indication of the likely sentence.
The judge said the case was being transferred to Birmingham to avoid any potential appearance of bias given Connolly’s husband held a political post in the local area.
The judge told her: ‘Sentencing will entirely be a matter for the judge on the next occasion but it’s likely to be a substantial custodial sentence. In the meantime, you are remanded in custody.’
The defendant’s husband Raymond Connolly watched from the public gallery in courtroom four at Northampton Crown Court as she pleaded guilty, entering her plea via video-link to HMP Peterborough.
Wearing a flower-patterned short-sleeved dress, Connolly spoke only to enter her plea and confirm that she could hear the judge during a hearing lasting seven minutes.
Connolly had earlier deleted the offending post and issued an apology, saying: ‘Acting on information that I now know to be false and malicious, and in a moment of extreme outrage and emotion, I posted words that I realise were wrong in every way.
‘I am someone who cares enormously about children, and the similarity between those beautiful children who were so brutally attacked and my own daughter overwhelmed me with horror but I should not have expressed that horror in the way that I did.
‘This has been a valuable lesson for me, in realising how wrong and inaccurate things appearing on social media can be, and I will never ever react in this way again.’
Connolly’s husband previously told the BBC after an online backlash against her that she had made one ‘stupid, spur of the moment tweet out of frustration and quickly deleted it’.
He added: ‘She’s a good person and she’s not racist. She’s got Somalian and Bangladeshi kids she looks after and she loves them like they’re her own.’
Courts have been packed with defendants after far-right yobs rioted in towns and cities across the UK following the killings of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 29.
The attack was wrongly blamed on a fictitious Islamist migrant, a theory spread through online misinformation.
Violence broke out in cities across England and also in Northern Ireland – and has been followed by a hundreds of charges including for children as young as 11, while those arrested also include a 69-year-old accused of vandalism in Liverpool.
