If this goes on much longer, I really think the great moderate mass of the British public will finally explode with irritation.

This is not meant to be communist Albania. This is not Ceausescu’s Romania.

Our country is not supposed to be the kind of place where you lie awake in the small hours waiting for the police to knock on your door – just because you were so foolish as to say something a bit off colour online.

This is Britain, birthplace of John Stuart Mill. This is the land of Wilkes and Liberty. This is the country that stood out against totalitarianism throughout the 20th century.

We denounced the Gestapo, resisted them and finally destroyed them. We despised the brutality and intimidation of the KGB, the Stasi, the Securitate. We hated the culture of spies and informers, where people monitored what you said and then sneakily reported it to the authorities.

We were right, and we were vindicated by history, because in the end those east European populations could take it no more, and they chose freedom.

My friends, it is therefore a sickening and shaming fact that in Britain today there are reportedly more arrests every day for online comment than there are in Putin’s Russia; not just per capita, but absolutely.

We would like to tell ourselves that the two regimes are not comparable – and we would be right, in the sense that the punishments in Russia are far worse, and there are more Russians in jail simply for what they have said. There is no real moral equivalence between Britain, for all our faults, and a Moscow regime where journalists are shot and political opponents poisoned or sent to the Gulag.

There are all sorts of reasons for believing that a prison sentence for this mother Lucy Connolly, the author of an admittedly dreadful tweet about the Southport murders, was not just wrong but positively insane

There are all sorts of reasons for believing that a prison sentence for this mother Lucy Connolly, the author of an admittedly dreadful tweet about the Southport murders, was not just wrong but positively insane

But ask yourself: is the gulf between the UK and Putin’s Russia quite as wide and as stark as it should be?

Can we really say that we are not quietly turning into a police state, when so many good police officers spend so much of their time glued to the internet, watching out for members of the public who have said something out of line?

We are not just losing our freedom, but across the world, as I am afraid US Vice President JD Vance has correctly pointed out, we are losing our precious reputation for freedom – and common sense.

The other day we heard the case of the gentle retired police officer from Kent who opened his door to six Kevlar-swaddled officers from his own former force. They searched his home, scanned his wife’s shopping lists, and having noticed some ‘Brexity looking’ books on his shelf, they handcuffed him, took him down to the local nick and held him for eight hours while they questioned him about what they took to be a dodgy tweet about Israel and Hamas.

The poor man was desperate to escape, because he had to fly to see his daughter in Australia. So, against his better judgment he accepted a caution for ‘malicious communication’ even though the officers had got hold of the wrong end of the stick and misunderstood a completely innocuous tweet. The Chief Constable of Kent has now apologised to the retired officer.

He had done nothing wrong, and nor had Allison Pearson, the journalist, who tweeted something equally innocuous about the pro-Palestinian protests and found the hi-vis posse at her door, tasers at the ready.

Nor had the poor couple who were again taken to the station, and detained for eight hours, because they had put something critical of the local primary school on a WhatsApp group.

The whole rigmarole sounds ludicrous, but there are now 30 such arrests every day, and as Pearson has so ably recounted, it is very far from funny to be the victim of this kind of state persecution. You don’t know how long it will last. You don’t know how it will end.

You don’t know whether you will end up in prison, like poor Lucy Connolly, the author of an admittedly dreadful tweet about the Southport murders – but one she rapidly regretted and deleted. There are all sorts of reasons for believing that a prison sentence for this mother was not just wrong, but positively insane.

She has no previous criminal record. She has a 12-year-old daughter who obviously needs to have her mother around.

She lost another child at the age of only 19 months, in miserable circumstances, and was deeply distressed to hear about what had happened at Southport.

Was it not entirely understandable that she should feel horror at this event?

Wasn’t she entitled to feel rage at the idea of a young man running amok and butchering a group of seven-year-olds at a Taylor Swift themed dance party?

Which of us can honestly say that we would not blurt something, on hearing such news, that we did not really mean and that we later might regret? That’s what she did; and the trouble was that she did it on X/Twitter.

Lucy Connolly did not mean to start a riot. She did not seriously mean to incite violence against asylum hostels or politicians; and when the Southport riots began, she actively begged everyone to stop.

She deserved, at most, some kind of suspended sentence or a fine. It is absolutely disgraceful that she is still in prison, six months later, unable to see her daughter. It is bewildering that the appeal court has turned down her early release.

It is beyond parody that this week, the very week that Lucy Connolly was told she had to remain incarcerated for one stray tweet, the Labour government has announced that they are on the point of releasing literally thousands of serious sexual and violent offenders, because they haven’t got room in the jails.

Why are we locking a mother up for stuff on Twitter – and letting these scumbags out?

Be in no doubt that as a result of Labour’s hopelessly soft penal policies, a lot of people will get robbed, a lot of people will get hurt and some I am afraid will almost certainly be raped and murdered – by people who should be behind bars.

There will be criminals out early on the street who pose a real threat to the public, while this mother continues to serve out her 31-month sentence when the British public knows that she is no conceivable danger to anyone.

Yes, it is true that the prison population is at an all-time high; but the answer is not to let them all out. The answer is to fight the crime wave, starting with the epidemic of organised shoplifting that is one of the hallmarks of Starmer’s Britain.

Stop letting the bastards off. Stop turning a blind eye. The crucial lesson of zero tolerance crime fighting is that if you really sweat the minor crime – I mean real crime not thought crime – the serious crimes magically start to fall away too.

That’s how you restore confidence in the criminal justice system; that’s how you ultimately cut the number of crimes and the number of people in jail.

In the meantime, if Shabana Mahmood wants to empty at least one cell she should do whatever she can to free Lucy Connolly now.

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