Her case has become a lightning rod for the British and American right.
As well as JD Vance and his MAGA-allies’ descent on the Cotswolds, something else alarming happened over the ‘silly season’ too. Lucy Connolly was elevated to hero-like status.
Connolly, the wife of a former Conservative councillor, was jailed for inciting racial hatred after she took to X to urge people to “set fire” to hotels housing asylum seekers during the Southport riots last summer. She pleaded guilty to the offence of distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred.
Yet her case has become a lightning rod for the British and American right.
Since her release on August 21, Connolly’s case has been embraced by far-right influencers and a sympathetic media, as a supposed miscarriage of justice, an alarming attempt to recast her actions, not as hate speech, but as courageous dissent.
Right-wing outlets have regularly splashed her image across their front pages alongside her claim that she was Keir Starmer’s “political prisoner.” No effort has been made to justify such a narrative, let alone prove it.
Among her most high-profile defenders is Nigel Farage. This week, the Reform UK leader was reportedly set to tell allies of Donald Trump that Connolly’s case represents a “clear example” of the UK’s decline in free speech, and even accuse Starmer of endangering future trade relations with the US.
It was the same with this summer’s wave of anti-immigrant protests, with Farage and others using them to energise their base and dominate the media narrative.
The protests themselves were small in scale, often drawing only a few dozen people. But content creators have been able to magnify their impact to millions. Posing as independent journalists, many creators are spreading debunked conspiracy theories about asylum seekers on the likes of X and TikTok, portraying them as inherently violent or a threat to British identity.
As Bloomberg reports, this misinformation is paying off. Reform UK is riding high in the polls, and right-wing influencers like Jack Hadfield have turned coverage of these protests into viral content. “It has been a massive boost,” he told Bloomberg. “I’ve gotten over 25 million views just in the past few weeks on this.”
Ironically, while the far-right lionises Connolly, the British public remains largely unconvinced. A poll by More in Common found that only 18 percent of people believe politicians should associate with her, while over half (51 percent) say they should steer clear. Among Tory voters, nearly half (48 percent) want politicians to distance themselves from Connolly. Even among Reform supporters, just 48 percent back political ties to her, with 28% saying she should be avoided.
Opinions on her sentencing are similarly revealing. A majority of respondents said her 10-month prison term was either appropriate (32 percent) or too lenient (20 percent), while 35 percent thought it was excessive.
Despite this, the Connolly narrative continues to thrive in the right-wing media space, and, worrying, it’s a script that feels familiar.
The strategy bears similarities to Hungary under Viktor Orbán, where media freedom has eroded under the weight of state control and loyalist ownership. Independent journalists are silenced, licences revoked, and oligarchs aligned with the ruling party dominate the media landscape. Connolly’s elevation to martyr status may be new in the UK, but the authoritarian playbook isn’t.
In both cases, the manipulation of media and misinformation seeks to reshape public discourse, casting hate as heroism, and bigotry as bravery.
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