Lucy Connolly is not a hero.
The right has a new poster girl. And she's an unrepentant bigot.
Lucy Connolly was released from prison a few weeks ago now and already she’s being courted as the right’s new poster girl in Britain.
This shows you how far our political standards have fallen.
She will serve the remainder of her sentence on licence. Some corners of the right-wing commentariat, and the usual conspiracy-addled cesspits online, have already started the work of framing her as some kind of victim, a martyr to free speech, even a “hero” of sorts.
Let’s be clear about something at the very start: Lucy Connolly is not a hero. She never was, she never will be. She is a bigot who used a social media platform to call for violent attacks on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Her conviction was not a miscarriage of justice; it was the system finally working the way it should.
What she did was simple enough to state, if sickening to read. In the aftermath of the tragic stabbings in Southport last year, as tensions ran high and misinformation already flooded the internet, Connolly logged on to X (formerly Twitter) and posted the following:
“Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
That wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It wasn’t a heated argument. It was a deliberate, premeditated message, broadcast to an audience of hundreds of thousands. By the time it was deleted, it had reached more than 300,000 views, nearly a thousand reposts, and over a hundred bookmarks. It was viral. And what was it calling for? Arson. Violence.
Terrorism, by any fair reading of the word.
The thing about free speech is this: it stops at the point where your words put lives at risk. You can call ministers liars, denounce the monarchy, rail against the government, mock religion, satirise leaders. That is dissent. That is protected.
But to openly advocate the burning down of buildings where asylum seekers live? That’s not dissent — that’s a blueprint for murder.
Connolly admitted guilt to the charge of incitement to racial hatred. She was sentenced to 31 months in prison, with 40% to be served in custody. Her appeal failed. The courts were unequivocal: this was serious, this was harmful, this could not be tolerated.
And yet, as soon as her sentence was passed, a chorus began. You’ve heard it before. That this was an overreaction. That she was punished for her “opinions.” That this is proof of a “two-tier justice system.”
It’s the same refrain every time a far-right agitator finds themselves facing consequences: they weren’t dangerous, they were just “telling the truth.”
It’s nonsense. Dangerous nonsense.
The context here matters enormously.
Connolly’s post came in the middle of an already febrile atmosphere. The Southport killings — a horrific act which claimed the lives of children — had already been hijacked by the far right. Misinformation swirled on social media.
A false claim that the attacker was an asylum seeker spread like wildfire. Angry mobs descended on towns across Britain. Hotels housing asylum seekers were targeted. There were riots. Shops were smashed, cars torched, people beaten.
Into that maelstrom, Connolly poured petrol — metaphorically and, had anyone acted on her words, quite literally. When she wrote “set fire to the hotels,” it wasn’t idle chatter. Those hotels were already under siege. Some had already been attacked. She was calling for escalation, for more of it, for flames.
This is what makes her defenders so grotesque. They pretend her words were harmless, as if context doesn’t matter. But context is everything.
When you stand in a crowded theatre and shout “fire,” that’s not free speech, that’s a reckless act with foreseeable consequences. When you call for hotels full of desperate people to be torched, while those same hotels are being attacked by mobs, you are not a commentator. You are an inciter.
Connolly even revealed, in messages to friends, that if the police came calling, she would “play the mental health card.”
She planned to use anxiety and depression as a shield, a way of dodging responsibility. That alone tells you she knew exactly what she was doing. This wasn’t the work of someone out of control, lashing out blindly. It was calculated, deliberate, cynical.
Worse, it cheapened real struggles with mental health. People genuinely wrestling with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other conditions don’t deserve to have their experiences weaponised as a get-out-of-jail-free card by someone who just didn’t want to face the consequences of her actions.
Here’s the real risk: if we allow the Lucy Connolly’s of this world to be framed as martyrs, we shift the whole Overton window of what is acceptable. Hate becomes framed as courage. Incitement becomes framed as truth-telling.
The people who suffer aren’t Connolly or her ilk — they’re the refugees, the asylum seekers, the minorities who find themselves targeted, isolated, and vulnerable.
Every time someone says “she was just speaking her mind,” what they’re really saying is “burning down hostels is a legitimate topic of debate.” It isn’t. It never was.
And yet this is the trap our media and political class keeps falling into. They indulge the idea that the far right are the “authentic voice of the people,” that their bile deserves a platform, that their rage must be listened to.
That’s how we got Nigel Farage on Question Time a hundred times. That’s how we got Suella Braverman in the Home Office. That’s how we get the Lucy Connolly’s of the world rebranded as “mums silenced for speaking up.”
It is also impossible not to notice the double standards.
When Palestinian solidarity activists chant slogans or unfurl flags, the press screams about extremism. When climate protesters block roads, they are hounded as criminals. When trade unionists take action, they’re smeared as wreckers. But when a far-right agitator calls for literal firebombing, the right-wing press goes soft-focus. They humanise. They plead for understanding. They suggest she’s been treated “harshly.”
It is the same tired hypocrisy, dressed in new clothes. The system always finds sympathy for the bigot, never for their targets.
Nobody is denying that free speech matters.
But Connolly’s case is the textbook example of what free speech is not. She wasn’t punished for her views on immigration.
She wasn’t jailed because she said she didn’t like asylum seekers. She wasn’t silenced for voting Tory or backing Brexit or grumbling about politicians. She was jailed because she advocated a specific, violent act against specific, vulnerable people.
That’s not speech. That’s threat. That’s incitement. And if we can’t draw the line there, then we might as well have no line at all.
Lucy Connolly will continue to be treated as a martyr by the far right.
She’ll probably get speaking slots at rallies. She may even be offered a platform by some of the usual suspects in the media. It will be tempting to ignore it, to shrug and move on. But silence is complicity. Every time she is described as a “hero,” someone has to answer back. Someone has to say: no. She is not a hero.
She is a bigot. She is a criminal. She incited violence.
And she was punished, rightly, for doing so.
If there is a wider lesson here, it is that our politics and our media need to stop indulging the far right as if they are just another voice in the room. They are not. They are a threat to democracy, a threat to vulnerable communities, a threat to social peace.
Every time we play along with their framing, we embolden them. Every time we allow their “heroes” to become household names, we legitimise them.
The left must not make that mistake. The centre must not make that mistake. Civil society must not make that mistake.
The danger is not Lucy Connolly herself. It is the ecosystem that produces her, defends her, amplifies her, and tries to rebrand her as a freedom fighter. That ecosystem is growing bolder. It feeds on silence. It feeds on cowardice. It feeds on complicity.
The only antidote is clarity. To keep saying it, without fear or compromise: Lucy Connolly is not a hero. She is a racist who deserved what she got.