Disgraced MP Mike Amesbury won’t spend a day behind bars, while childminder Connolly was jailed for 31 months over a tweet
Daily Telegraph 27/02/25
On Monday, the disgraced ex-Labour MP Mike Amesbury was sentenced to 10 weeks in prison, for beating up a constituent in the street. Incredibly, as a result of an appeal by Amesbury, he has now been spared even that surprisingly short time behind bars, with a judge agreeing to suspend his sentence for two years.
This is extraordinary. Consider the following facts. For beating up a constituent in the street, Amesbury has been given a 10-week sentence that has now been suspended. Yet last year, for tweeting something nasty about asylum seekers in the wake of the Southport murders, a childminder named Lucy Connolly was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison.
The wife of a Tory councillor, Lucy Connolly, was arrested for racial hatred after tweeting rioters should set fire to all the migrant hotels in the wake of the Southport murders
The sentence for the latter crime is over 13 times longer than the sentence for the former crime. I don’t know about you, but I must confess that this somewhat puzzles me. I don’t for a moment deny that Connolly’s tweet was horrible (“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f---ing hotels full of the b------s for all I care.”) None the less, I find it hard to understand how tweeting your wish to see a violent act is a greater crime than actually perpetrating a violent act. Yet that is what these two sentences would seem to suggest.
At the very least, the situation prompts a number of peculiar questions. Such as: if Amesbury had merely tweeted that he wished to beat up a constituent, would he have received a longer sentence? And if Connolly had actually beaten up an asylum seeker, would she have received a shorter sentence? Indeed, a dramatically shorter sentence? In which case, if we ever find ourselves on the verge of writing something regrettable on the internet, are we best advised to take a deep breath, count to 10, and then punch a random passer-by on the nose instead?
I don’t know. But I do know that public faith in our justice system is only likely to deteriorate, if we can’t understand how such decisions are fair. They may well make perfect sense to judges themselves, and to learned legal commentators. To the poor old layman, however, it can seem bewildering – and even infuriating. In such circumstances, therefore, ordinary members of the public can scarcely be blamed if they conclude that we really are living in “two-tier Britain”: a land where tweeting offensive thoughts is deemed a worse crime than beating up a voter.
This conclusion, of course, becomes all the harder to avoid when we keep reading stories about foreign criminals who have escaped deportation citing reasons such as their children will only eat British chicken nuggets. And foreign paedophiles who have escaped deportation because it would be “unduly harsh for the children to be without their father”.
Still, we’d better not get too cross about this sort of thing, or we might end up in prison ourselves.
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