The treatment of Lucy Connolly shows free speech is lost in Britain

The notion that anyone could be interrogated, arrested, tried or imprisoned for the written word would have been absurd to our grandparents.

Ahead of Lucy Connolly’s appeal, members of the Free Speech Union and her husband, Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice (via Alamy/ 3BBA676)

If you want a parable of the state of Britain today, look no further than the case of Lucy Connolly, whose appeal for early release was rejected by three judges on Tuesday. She was jailed for a term of two years and seven months, for a tweet posted in horrified reaction to the murders of three young girls at Southport, which she deleted within four hours; but, in our society of censors, someone had taken a screenshot and made a complaint, in the classic protocol of East Germany, circa 1965.

When Lucy Connolly was arrested on the charge of distributing material inciting racial hatred, she was surrounded by the small children for whom she was a childminder and whose Nigerian, Bangladeshi and Jamaican parents paid warm tribute to her, insisting she was not racist, as they were in a position to know.