00:00Lucy Connolly has failed in her appeal against a sentence for inciting racial hatred.
00:05The wife of a conservative councillor was jailed for an incredible 31 months last October
00:10after calling for mass deportations and for migrant hotels to be burnt down for all she cared
00:16in the wake of the Southport attacks last summer when, of course, three girls were brutally murdered
00:21at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party.
00:24Well, we can now speak with the barrister and the writer Stephen Barrett.
00:28Stephen, welcome to the show.
00:30A case I know you've presided over and thought deep and long and hard about.
00:35A lot of people saying today this is a clear indication of two-tier justice.
00:41Throwing the book at somebody to teach them a lesson.
00:45What's your take?
00:47Well, it's very difficult to avoid that conclusion.
00:50The judges went to a particularly, I think, extreme degree to try and paint Lucy Connolly
00:59as racist.
01:00They highlight two of her tweets, which don't strike me as particularly racist.
01:07They dismiss out of hand every piece of evidence that she gave.
01:12Now, remember that she's a woman of good character prior to this one incident.
01:17She's not charged with a dishonesty offence.
01:19Nobody thinks that she lies.
01:21So why her evidence was dismissed so categorically is beyond me.
01:27They are hagiographic, which means just so I'm not being elitist here,
01:33it means they were ridiculously falling over themselves to praise the duty solicitor,
01:38who any lawyer in their right mind is, it's very difficult to see why she pled guilty.
01:49And they put an awful lot of emphasis on that, despite the fact that she's a stay-at-home mum
01:54who is a childminder to children of mixed races, which obviously should indicate that she's not,
02:00in fact, unto mention, which is how they effectively treat her.
02:03They have basically deemed her racist and they've decided that that is the ultimate moral sin.
02:09Perhaps it is in their world.
02:11I remember when I was a child, the Labour Party used to rile against what it saw as the Conservative
02:16establishment.
02:17Well, the Conservative establishment is quite clearly dead.
02:20We now have a Labour-supporting establishment.
02:22And if this is their inherent moral evil, that the minute you can get painted as a racist,
02:28even though you're obviously not a racist, you become a second-rate citizen.
02:31I note that a Palestinian man who came here illegally was given nine months for supporting
02:38Hamas, a terrorist-prescribed organisation, and for calling for the death and the killing
02:42of Jews, which seems to me far more serious, far more intense than this mother could have
02:49ever intended.
02:50They dismiss, Martin, the idea that the words that she used were not incitement.
02:55Now, I don't think that they were incitement.
02:57So actually, on a technical level of their ability to interpret words, I'm disappointed
03:03in these judges.
03:05I'm disappointed in what I see as their basic ability.
03:08They simply dismiss that out of hand.
03:10They don't really explain why it's a very declarative judgment.
03:14I don't think they explain themselves at all.
03:15They hide behind the modern technique of writing a judgment, which is to put in endless, entirely
03:21pointless words that nobody needs to do.
03:23If I were a law student now, Martin, I'd be in utter despair.
03:27You get to page...
03:29Let me just check, Martin.
03:30I don't want to mislead anybody.
03:32You get to...
03:33Oh, it doesn't have page numbers.
03:34But you get to about paragraph 55 before anything of any importance is said.
03:38The entire rest of it is presumably just a cudgel to beat everybody into submission to
03:43make sure that journalists don't point out that these people don't actually have very
03:46sophisticated reasoning.
03:47I am embarrassed and ashamed for my country, Martin.
03:51This is patently ridiculous.
03:53We have become a country full of laws and no justice.
03:57I don't think anybody of any political persuasion wants this mum languishing in prison, yet there
04:03she languished.
04:04If the judges feel that by taking three working days and a weekend to write this utter...
04:10I shouldn't say a word that would embarrass me later, but it's not impressive.
04:16If they think that that vindicates them in any way, then they are much mistaken.
04:20I am disgraced on their behalf.
04:23I am embarrassed to have them as members of the judiciary for my country.
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