The wife of a former Conservative councillor has lost her appeal against her 31-month sentence after being jailed for an online rant about migrants on the day of the Southport attacks.

The judgment handed down by Lord Justice Holroyd at the Court of Appeal on Tuesday said there was “no arguable basis” that Lucy Connolly’s original sentence was “manifestly excessive”.

“The application for leave to appeal against sentence therefore fails and is refused,” it said.

Connolly, whose husband Raymond Connolly was a Tory West Northamptonshire councillor until he lost his seat in May, was charged after publishing a post on her X account that called for “mass deportation now,” and for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire. “If that makes me racist so be it,” she wrote.

The post was viewed 310,000 times in the three-and-a-half hours before Connolly deleted it.

She was sentenced to 31 months in prison at Birmingham Crown Court last October, after pleading guilty to a charge of inciting racial hatred. She was ordered to serve 40% of the sentence in prison before being released on licence.

Image:
Raymond Connolly outside the Court of Appeal. Pic: PA

Connolly shared her X post on the day three young girls were killed in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on 29 July last year.

False information claiming the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker spread online, leading to riots and unrest in multiple locations across the UK.

Connolly, from Northampton, later apologised for acting on “false and malicious” information.

Southport murders resurfaced anxiety over son’s death

Lucy Connolly last week told judges she was “really angry, really upset” and “distressed that those children had died” in the Southport attacks when she shared her X post.

She said via videolink from prison that her own son died tragically around 14 years ago and that news of the children’s murders in Southport had caused a resurgence of grief-related anxiety.

“Those parents still have to live a life of grief,” she said. “It sends me into a state of anxiety and I worry about my children.”

Connolly also told the judges that, despite conversations with her legal team, she had not understood that by pleading guilty she was accepting that she intended to incite violence.

When asked if she intended for anybody to set asylum hotels on fire, Connolly said: “Absolutely not.”

But in his judgment on Tuesday, Lord Justice Holroyd said that the principal ground of Connolly’s appeal was “substantially based on a version of events put forward by [her]”, which he and his colleagues Mr Justice Goss and Mr Justice Sheldon have “rejected”.

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