Document just wrote about how the UK government arrests 12,000 people a year for speech.

Sometimes you need to drill down into the details to understand how this harms individuals. The story of Lucy Connolly is a good and terrifying example.

Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for an ugly social media post. Her treatment is a testament to the British practice of a two-tier justice system, this time affecting a mother who loses contact with her daughter and seriously ill husband.

Journalist Allison Pearson has experienced the tyranny of the British government herself, and can recognise it first-hand. This is evident when she writes about Lucy in a commentary in The Telegraph.

Lucy is one of the 1,500 people jailed for reactions to the Southport killings. She wrote something mean on social media, which isn’t necessarily entirely defensible. But a sentence of 31 months in jail might be a little overkill?

Connolly wasn’t involved in the riots, but a tweet she posted on the same day that Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King and Alice da Silva Aguiar were killed by Axel Rudakubana was enough for her to be arrested eight days later and charged under section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986.

She was accused of publishing material intended to incite racial hatred.

What she wrote she deleted after a few hours, but of course a bunch of people had taken screenshots. And what she wrote, in her grief in the aftermath of the murders of three British little girls, was probably reprehensible. But over two years in prison? This is what she wrote:

«Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it, take the traitorous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.»

This was written during an emotional crisis for Connoly. Having lost a child herself, the infanticide had a profound effect on her.

In 2011, the Connollys lost their firstborn, Harry, aged 19 months, as a result of cruel failures in the UK’s NHS.

After several hospital visits, and after Lucy begged a paediatrician to put the apathetic child on a drip, the Connollys took Harry home and put him in a cot next to their bed. When they woke up at four in the morning, they found the lifeless body of their young son.

A devastating battle to «get justice for Harry» followed. Although the coroner found a number of catastrophic failings at the hospital, it was not convicted of committing gross negligence manslaughter, as Harry’s devastated parents had wanted (Those doctors have got away with killing my son, said Lucy).

Lucy and her husband Ray eventually had another child, but Lucy was so devastated by the loss of her firstborn that she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

That’s the state Lucy Connolly was in when she posted the 51 words that would ruin her life for a second time, making her the ideal postergirl for Starmer’s pledge to severely punish «far-right thugs».

It’s also somewhat understandable that her trust in the government was weakened, as the NHS had to some extent caused the death of Lucy’s first-born son. Hearing about a mass killing of little girls in Southport was enough to tip her over the edge.

Her husband, incidentally, was a local representative of the Conservative Party.

This is the background to her reaction after three little girls were killed by a young Rwandan boy inspired by Islamist terrorists.

Lucy’s comment may have been reprehensible, but was it worth more than two years in jail?

In addition, she is denied leave from prison to visit her daughter and keep in touch with her husband, who is seriously ill. However, this is available to criminals convicted of violence and abuse.

Lucy overreacted just a little bit after the murders in Southport, deleting the message she had written after a few hours. No one was hurt by Lucy’s reaction.

She wasn’t a racist. She ran a private nursery at home, caring for children who were Nigerian, Somali, Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Lithuanian and Polish, as well as white British children. «It’s like the United Nations in here,» Lucy is reported to have said.

Lucy had lost a child herself, but this didn’t help her in the courtroom. She was diagnosed with PTSD, but it was ignored. Then she was denied standard leave to keep in touch with her surviving child and seriously ill husband.

Is this what you call a liberal democracy?

The UK is called the United Kingdom or Great Britain.

Now it is neither united nor great. At the same time, it is becoming less and less British, so soon there will be nothing left.