Britain’s Two-Tier Justice Problem

One of the most urgent and wounding criticisms of the British regime to emerge in recent years is that the justice system we live under is “two-tier.” Today, it seems increasingly obvious to much of the public that minorities and those on the left are treated far more favorably by the law than those who are white or on the right. Readers may be familiar with the case of Northamptonshire childminder Lucy Connolly, which has emerged as the paradigmatic example of this unfair treatment. 

Distraught on the night of the Southport murders in July 2024, when a second-generation Rwandan teenager attacked a children’s dance class near Liverpool, stabbing three of them to death, Connolly responded by sending a tweet. With the authorities keeping quiet about the attacker’s identity, many initially believed the appalling crime must have been the work of an illegal migrant. In anger, Connolly tweeted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f**king [migrant] hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” She added, having once lost a young child herself: “I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”

A few hours later, she deleted the tweet, but not before a screenshot of it was taken. Soon she had been charged with a hate speech offense and remanded in custody, and knowing that she would remain behind bars for months even if she protested her innocence, she pleaded guilty. She ended up with a 31-month prison sentence, during which time she was denied various privileges routinely afforded to far more serious offenders, including to those in her own prison, such as temporary leave to care for her young daughter. The case particularly stings because in our increasingly soft-touch legal system, the perpetrators of violent, sexual, and acquisitive crimes will frequently get off with a more lenient sentence—if they are caught at all.

There are still some who would deny there’s any unfairness in Lucy being sentenced to a longer prison term for a tweet than, in one case, the members of a child-rape gang. Last year, when her appeal against the severity of the sentence was rejected, I found myself debating a prominent legal commentator who insisted that Connolly couldn’t have been the victim of two-tier justice, since “this is an offence for which the maximum sentence is seven years in prison” as laid down by Parliament, and her 31-month stretch was thus within the sentencing guidelines. He was wholly missing the point—though it’s hardly unusual in the British elite to be more comfortable in the realm of bloodless legalism than having to consider any genuine moral and political controversy.