[Cherie]

Originally Posted by Crimson Dynamo

Ray Connolly knew how easily his wife was triggered by the suffering and death of children. He says she was always writing to MPs and to the papers if there was ever a case of neglect or kids being harmed on the news. In 2011, the Connollys lost their firstborn, Harry, aged 19 months as a result of atrocious failures in NHS care. After multiple hospital visits, and Lucy pleading with a paediatrician to put the listless toddler on a drip, the Connollys took Harry home and laid him in a cot by their bed. They woke at 4am to find the lifeless body of their tiny son. Lucy screamed at Ray to do CPR while she called an ambulance and Ray, who is an immensely practical chap, best person in a crisis, did his best. “But rigor mortis had already set in,” he tells me, the horror of that moment never to be extinguished.

There followed a bruising battle to “get justice for Harry”. Although the coroner found a catalogue of catastrophic failures at the hospital, it was not ruled to have committed gross negligence manslaughter as Harry’s devastated parents had wanted. (“Those doctors have got away with killing my son,” Lucy said.) The Connollys went on to have a “rainbow baby”, two years later, a daughter called Holly*, now aged 12, but Lucy, who received a diagnosis of PTSD after she lost her baby, never truly recovered. Hearing about a mass stabbing of little girls in Southport was enough to tip her over the edge.

When Ray got home that day, he found her in the kitchen with the six toddlers she looked after. “Lucy was crying.” In the absence of any clear information from the authorities about the killer’s identity (Rudakubana was initially described to a disbelieving public only as a Cardiff-born choirboy) and with Merseyside police and Government ministers still insisting the massacre was “not terror-related” the situation on social media was extremely volatile. There was widespread anger that such a monstrous attack had been targeted at the most vulnerable members of our society. That was the state Lucy Connolly was in when she posted the fifty-one words that would ruin her life for a second time, and turn her into the ideal poster girl for Starmer’s pledge to impose heavy sentences on “far-Right thugs”.

Ray knew nothing about the tweet until the police turned up at the house and took his wife away. It was around 8am and all of the infants Lucy looked after were being dropped off for the day by their parents. (Mrs Connolly’s precious charges have included Nigerian, Somalian, Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Lithuanian and Polish, as well as white British, kids. “It’s like the blimmin’ United Nations in here,” the childminder used to joke.) Lucy went with the police “quiet as a lamb, she thought if she did as she was told everything would be fine,” recalls Ray.

I ask him if he ever thought the family’s tragic history and his wife’s mental distress would help Lucy with her case. He shakes his head. “I knew things were bad when Starmer and the Home Office started going on about the ‘far-Right’, they obviously had an agenda.” Over the next few days, Lucy Connolly ceased to be a person and became a demonised figure stripped of nuance and humanity. “Conservative councillor’s racist wife.” That was her name from now on.

Looking back, we can see how it was expedient for panicking politicians to blame social media for civil unrest rather than acknowledge the growing anxiety about uncontrolled immigration that fuelled the rioting. (That would have meant officialdom shouldering some of the blame.) While social media can amplify content that inflames tensions there is little or no evidence that a single post persuades law-abiding people to engage in violent protest.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...-taylor-swift/

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