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At 11.45 a.m. on 29 July, 2024, a 17-year-old boy called Axel Rudakubana walked into a community studio on Hart Street in Southport and attacked a class of children who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed bracelet-making workshop. Armed with a kitchen knife, Rudakubana killed two children, six-year-old Bebe King and seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and wounded ten others, one of whom, Alice da Silva Aguiar, aged nine, died the following day.
The unimaginable horror of this crime sent shock waves across the country. A group of little girls, enjoying a summer holiday activity, had been attacked by a stranger with a knife, and three of them were now dead.
Rudakubana had a long history of troubling behaviour. From the age of 13, he had become increasingly obsessed with violent online videos and had repeatedly made worrying comments about mass shootings to classmates. Teachers had reported him to Prevent, but his case was turned down on account of him not displaying any extremist tendencies.
However, Rudakubana had become ever more unpredictable, and he had caused considerable alarm among his school community. He seems to have been worried too, because in October 2019, he rang the NSPCC’s ChildLine and admitted to having murderous thoughts and confessed that he had often taken a knife into school.
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Matters came to a head when he was first accused of carrying a knife and then, having been excluded, returned to the premises and broke a fellow student’s wrist with a hockey stick. Permanently expelled from his school, he failed to settle anywhere else and became ever more the outsider, slipping through the system and falling largely out of sight before going on to commit that terrible crime.
However, none of this was public knowledge in July 2024 and so a scapegoat was needed.
As news of the attack broke, a 41-year-old, Northampton-based child minder called Lucy Connolly was following events, and she and others in her online world knew who to blame. Connolly was an avid X (formerly Twitter) user with a growing following among right-wing users, and as she drank in the barrage of disinformation circulating on the platform, she came to believe that the attacker was, (according to the CPS) ‘a Muslim asylum seeker who had come to the UK on a boat.’
It was untrue. Radakubana was born in Cardiff in 2006, four years after his parents, evangelical Christians, had emigrated from Rwanda.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Connolly was not the sort of X user who waits for facts to emerge and so, having returned home from work, at 8.30 pm that evening she sent out the following tweet to her 9,000 followers:
“Mass deportations now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
The post rapidly blew up. Amplified by far-right users, it was shared some 940 times, making about 310,000 impressions, until fearing repercussions – she deleted it four hours later. But by then, the damage had been done, and her words helped kindle the inferno of hate that followed.
The very next day, riots erupted. A mosque in Southport was besieged by a drunken mob yelling “No Surrender” and chanting Tommy Robinson’s name. The following day, supporters of Patriotic Alternative gathered in Whitehall, and more than 100 arrests for offences including possession of knives followed.
That same evening, another mob descended on a Holiday Inn at Newton Heath, Manchester, which was said to be housing migrants and four people were arrested. In Aldershot, another gang of thugs attacked a hotel and threw projectiles at its windows – and the police who were trying to protect the people inside.
Across the next few days, further gangs of ‘concerned citizens’ terrorised England; a rally in Sunderland on 2 August attracted hundreds who yelled ‘save our kids’ and ‘we want our country back’ before looting local shops and setting fire to a cab.
Connolly, meanwhile, was now firmly on the right-wing social media influencer map and was clearly enjoying her notoriety. On 3 August, she responded to an anti-racist protest in Manchester, tweeting: “I take it they will all be in line to sign up to house an illegal boat invader then. Oh sorry refugee. Maybe sign a waiver to say they don’t mind if it’s one of their family that gets attacked, butchered, raped etc, by unvetted criminals.”
The following day, the violence reached its crescendo. In Rotherham, about 400 people gathered in Manvers, where some tried to burn down a Holiday Inn that was housing migrants. Residential areas in Middlesbrough were attacked, and cars and bins were set on fire, and by the end of the week, not only had millions of pounds of damage been done and dozens of police officers been hospitalised, but communities up and down the country had been left reeling in fear and destruction.
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By 5 August the worst of the violence was over. That same day, Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a COBRA meeting and promised that justice would follow, that it would be hard and swift and that those responsible for the violence would be held to account for their actions.
The following day, Lucy Connolly, who had been identified as one of the online agitators, was interviewed by police, and three days later, on 9 August, she was charged. Connolly pleaded guilty to ‘inciting racial hatred’ and on 17 October 2024 was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison at Birmingham Crown Court.
In his sentencing remarks, His Honour Judge Melbourne told the disgraced childminder: “You intended to incite serious violence. What you did encouraged activity which threatened or endangered life.”
In a further statement, Frank Ferguson, head of the CPS’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism division, added: “Connolly wrongly thought that she could escape justice by hiding behind a screen, but today she has pleaded guilty and admitted her crime. She will now face the consequences of her actions.”
But even as those words hung in the air, Connolly was being turned into a hero.
As she began her prison term, her martyrdom was being forged across Telegram and X by far-right influencers, and soon it was bleeding into the mainstream. The narrative went as follows: a decent, honest, doting English mum, the wife of a Conservative councillor no less, who was simply exercising her right to free speech in expressing her concerns about ‘mass uncontrolled immigration’ and its consequences in the wake of a violent attack, had been wrongly banged up.
By the following year, her case was a right-wing cause célèbre.
In February 2025, US Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in Munich in which he declared that:“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
Vance did not specifically mention Lucy Connolly, but her example fitted his agenda, and that was enough. This ordinary ‘concerned citizen’ had been imprisoned for daring to exercise her right to free speech by a government that had used ‘disinformation’ as a cover for their authoritarian agenda.
Lionising Hate
Freedom of speech has its boundaries, and they do not extend to the freedom to incite violence. That is the case in English law, and the US Constitution’s First Amendment says exactly the same thing. But who cares about such details when there’s bullshit to be spread?
Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, predictably on board already and helping to fund Connolly’s appeal, was soon being joined by other Conservative voices.
In the first week of April 2025, Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson came out fighting for her. Connolly was a loving mother, a doting childminder (whose charges it was stressed came from diverse backgrounds) and more to the point, she had suffered tragedy of her own, losing her young son Harry when he was aged just 19 months due to NHS failure. That tragedy had politicised her – so the argument went – and given that she was a childminder the events in Southport might have caused her to respond in the way that she did. The sentence, in short, was disproportionate to the crime. And Connolly and her supporters began to complain that her incarceration had caused her daughter to start suffering at school.
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Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk, Laurence Fox and GB News, who were already amplifying her cause, now found themselves joined by a growing band of supporters and by the time of her appeal on 15 May 2025, there was a veritable clamour of them demanding her release.
Unperturbed by the hysteria, the three Court of Appeal judges solemnly concluded that Connolly’s principal ground of appeal “was substantially based on a version of events put forward by the applicant which we have rejected”. The sentence was upheld, and she went back to prison. Connolly was eventually released from HMP Peterborough on August 21 after serving 40% of her 31-month sentence, which is the automatic release point for a custodial sentence of this length.
By now, of course, she was a full-blown free speech martyr, and as noses sniffed the prevailing wind, Nigel Farage stepped forward to claim her as one of his own, tweeting: “Welcome to freedom, Lucy Connolly. You are now a symbol of Keir Starmer’s authoritarian, broken, two-tier Britain”.
Farage went on to say that he hoped that Connolly would accompany him on a trip to Washington next month to give testimony to a ‘free speech hearing.’
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who as far back as April had tweeted that “Lucy has been unfairly treated and it’s time to acknowledge this” also leapt on the bandwagon and in a long post included this: “protecting people from words should not be given greater weight in law than public safety.”
Tommy Robinson, singing from the same hymn sheet, albeit to a shriller tun,e called her a ‘political prisoner’ and demanded the release of the ‘rest of the political prisoners.’
The right had united.
Interviews followed in the Daily Mail and Telegraph and Connolly also popped up on disgraced former GB News presenter Dan Wootton’s YouTube channel, where much was made of the fact that no riots had begun when Lucy Connolly sent her tweet – with neither of them apparently grasping the paradox that lay at the heart of that line of thought.
In her interview, Lucy presented herself as a quietly spoken victim who just wanted “my children and other people’s children to grow up in a safe world.”
So, there you have it. The Ballad of Lucy Connolly, defender of children, wrongly banged up by ‘two-tier Keir’ for daring to express her opinion that there should be: “Mass deportations now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them.”
Is that the England people want? A distorted landscape in which hate and disinformation are normalised and in which a woman who helped foment a week of carnage is lionised like some latter-day Saint Joan?
holding farage to account #reformUNCOVERED
While most the rest of the media seems to happy to give the handful of Reform MPs undue prominence, Byline Times is committed to tracking the activities of Nigel Farage’s party when actually in power
Contribute to our #ReformUncovered crowdfunderLucy Connolly is no martyr or free speech warrior. She’s not a victim or a political prisoner. She’s a convicted hate monger. Her appeal, heard before three judges and not the court of blue-tick opinion, concluded that her sentence was not “manifestly excessive” and that in her original trial she had “willingly pleaded guilty” and accepted what she had done.
She is not only guilty as charged but accepted that she was.
Her words were part of the kindling that set fire to this country in 2024. They caused millions of pounds of damage to property and businesses, landed multiple individuals in hospital – and threatened the lives of asylum seekers and migrants in hostel accommodation. Many of those victims were very young children who have suffered enduring trauma.
Connolly and her supporters make much noise about how much they care about children but apparently that does not extend to these children.
It was these kids and their families, sheltering in accommodation while violent, drunken mobs screamed abuse and murder outside their windows who were the victims in all of this. It was they who became its scapegoats simply because they had come to this country in the hope of finding sanctuary and safety and better lives.
And there are other victims too – most notably the families in Southport whose tragedy was overshadowed and eclipsed by the terrible violence that was committed in the wake of their loss. While still coming to terms with those events, the family of little Alice da Silva Aguiar felt obliged to make a public statement decrying the violence that had broken out in their daughter’s name.
Speaking on their behalf, Serena Kennedy, Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, told reporters: “I know that you have asked that there is no more violence and that you are now given time as a family to grieve in peace. And that our traumatised community is allowed time to heal, the time it needs to start to heal.”
A year later, they, along with so many other people who were affected by events, have become little more than a footnote to the martyrdom of poor Saint Lucy. But then of course they have. The right has an agenda to feed, scapegoats to demonise, fake heroes to forge. There’s no space amidst that cacophony of fear and loathing to make space for the real victims – or a little thing like the actual truth.