by Sam Ashworth-Hayes, Telegraph
The Ricky Jones and Lucy Connolly cases have put the system’s hypocrisy on full display
After Labour councillor Ricky Jones stood at a demonstration in Walthamstow decrying “disgusting Nazi fascists” and telling a crowd through a microphone that “we need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all”, a jury of Mr Jones’s peers cleared him of any offence.
When Lucy Connolly – married to a Tory councillor – posted on social media “set fire to all the f—–g hotels full of all the b——s for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it”, she chose to plead guilty under apparent pressure from the state. Ms Connolly is currently serving a 31-month prison sentence, at times on a 23-hour lockdown confined to her cell with no privileges, for her ill-tempered words. Others, who stood their ground, walked free. The results were still unpleasant – the process is in part the punishment – but better than they might otherwise have been.
It is hard not to feel that the difference between the two cases is less a matter of law than politics. Lucy Connolly was denied bail as Sir Keir Starmer and the judiciary worked on their “shared understanding” that anyone expressing sentiments that could have encouraged last year’s riots needed to be made an example of. Sir Keir himself told the nation that individuals would be held on remand. The Home Office openly risked prejudicing trials by labelling those arrested, charged but not yet convicted as “criminals”.
If there’s a lesson here, it may well be that people can say stupid things without the world collapsing around them. And that the public – which did not visibly respond to either exhortation – can be trusted, for the most part, to recognise the distinction between genuinely threatening language and idiocy, both on the streets and in jury deliberations.
Read also: The Ricky Jones acquittal shows us the wisdom of juries by Tom Slater, spiked
Watch: Is this PROOF: Two-Tier Justice Now? BlackBeltBarrister explains