By Lauren Smith, European Conservative.
Convictions for online hate speech are at a record high in a country that imprisons mothers for tweets and veterans for memes.
The British state has apparently learnt nothing from the Lucy Connolly scandal. You might have thought successive governments would want to avoid the international embarrassment of the UK becoming a byword for censorship and crushing dissent. Instead, the figures show that online hate speech convictions have actually increased recently.
According to Ministry of Justice data reported last week, convictions for “publishing or distributing written material intending or likely to stir up racial hatred”—the offence most often used for posts on social media—have soared in the past decade. While there was just one conviction in 2015, there were 44 in 2024.
The majority of online hate convictions took place in the last three years. In fact, almost a third of them were in 2024, in the wake of the riots. One of the most high-profile and outrageous cases was that of Lucy Connolly, the mother and childminder who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for a single tweet. In the aftermath of the horrific murders of three young girls in Southport, Connolly posted on X that she wanted “mass deportations” and that people could “set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards [migrants] for all I care.” For this post—deleted within a few hours—Connolly was handed an almost three-year prison sentence. After serving 380 days, she was released last week to complete the rest on licence.
Whatever you think of Connolly’s post, the fact remains that she was put in prison for a tweet. And while her case became high profile due to its absurd disproportionality, it is by no means isolated. Right-wing activist Samuel Melia was sentenced to two years in prison last year for making and distributing stickers.