Lucy Connolly’s early release from jail is a travesty. Because she should never have been imprisoned in the first place.

There are undoubtedly more dangerous, malicious, and truly hateful individuals roaming Britain’s streets than this young mother who, overwhelmed by emotions, ended up saying things she shouldn’t have during a heated moment.

However, Connolly wasn’t imprisoned for her actions alone; her sentence reflects who she is and what she stands for. As the spouse of a Tory councillor, a middle-class white woman, and crucially, a mother frustrated by what she perceived as the authorities’ constant neglect—or reluctance—to put her own 12-year-old daughter’s safety above that of young men from alien cultures with differing values. These men’s presence in Britain is not only accepted but frequently indulged under the guise of ‘human rights’, as we’ve seen repeatedly.

For someone like Connolly, emotionally affected by the loss of a baby and vulnerable to online conspiracies and rumors, the (false) idea that an asylum seeker had entered a room of little girls and started attacking them, fatally harming three and injuring many more, caused her to temporarily lose her reasoning.

Who wouldn’t be enraged by such a crime? In a moment of furious anger, she posted an outraged message online, only to soon regret her rashness and take it down. But by then, the damage was done.

There’s no denying her comments were unacceptable. Following the Southport riots, she should undoubtedly have faced reprimand and appropriate punishment.

But that’s the precise problem here. She was not punished accordingly. Her sentence was simply not proportionate to the crime.

She is like the proverbial butterfly caught on the wheel—fragile and shattered by forces beyond her control, namely, a government’s need to suppress social unrest after another incident and deflect blame from the systemic shortcomings that facilitated it in the first place.

Lucy Connolly was given a 31-month prison sentence last October at Birmingham Crown Court after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing ‘threatening or abusive’ written material

Connolly’s post on X which led to her arrest. She deleted the post shortly afterwards, by which time it had already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times

This is the fundamental injustice of Connolly’s case. She was not judged simply for her ‘crime’, she was judged in the context of events well beyond her control.

She was harshly sentenced primarily as an example to others who might also feel furious, desperate and powerless in the face of case after case of misogynistic violence against women and girls, perpetrated by men whom no one in authority seems to have the courage to confront. It’s a sentiment shared by many, and not without cause, as we have repeatedly seen.

In the heat of the moment, she went too far and got burnt. It’s true, of course, that the Southport killer was not an asylum seeker: his parents had come here from Rwanda, and he grew up in the UK.

But the fact that Connolly and so many others jumped to that conclusion was important. It showed how, when people feel powerless or frightened, they lose all sense of proportion. They put two and two together and make five. Which is wrong. But should it be punishable with prison?

Hardly.

Admittedly, Lucy Connolly was posting regularly on X before her arrest, robustly expressing her fears about mass migration. But she had no previous convictions of this nature, and was by all accounts a perfectly ordinary mother and wife – fun-loving, kind, popular.

When mums like her start to lose their minds as she did, you know something is really wrong with society. You know there’s a level of discontent, fear and malaise bubbling under the surface that just can’t be ignored. And since her conviction, hundreds of other women like Connolly have come forward to express similar worries, such as the local mums protesting outside asylum seeker hotels in Epping and elsewhere.

Connolly has garnered huge public support for her cause not just because people see how unfair and harsh her punishment was, but also because, let’s face it, many of her concerns about those arriving on our shores have been vindicated in a variety of other incidents in the past year.

She has become a symbol not so much of a silent majority but one silenced for too long by political correctness, who increasingly are finding their voices. By punishing her disproportionately and then doubling down on bad judgement, the state made her into a martyr.

But there is a bigger picture here too. It’s because of what has been done to her that Britain’s status as a liberal democracy is in question.

After all, we now live in a country where the authorities will not prosecute a rap band named after a form of IRA torture – Kneecap – for telling an audience ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’, because that, apparently, is free speech. And they will tolerate endless examples of anti-Semitic sentiment both online and at pro-Palestinian marches because, well, Jews are apparently fair game. As are Tory MPs.

And as for two-tier justice, Labour councillor Ricky Jones, who called for protesters to have their throats slit and who was charged on similar grounds as Connolly, was acquitted by a jury who saw his words as a disgusting remark made in the heat of the moment, not a call to action.

I’m glad Connolly has finally been released. I hope she can go home and recover with her family, spend time with her daughter and try to rebuild her life. But I also hope that she can see that, for all the personal trauma and heartache, it has not all been for nothing. Her case has exposed the fundamental injustice of our system. This does not end here.