‘Britain’s Favourite Political Prisoner’ Lucy Connolly Backs Farage’s Reform Party

Lucy Connolly, a British mother who was jailed for over a year for a Tweet, said that she plans to work with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK during an appearance at the populist party’s annual conference on Saturday.

Introduced as Britain’s “favourite political prisoner” to a standing ovation from a packed arena in Birmingham, Connolly recounted her harrowing experience after being sentenced to 31 months in prison and serving a year behind bars and said that she hopes to use the knowledge she gained about the broken judicial system to reform it for the better.

“I’d really love to use my experience to work with, hopefully, Reform in the future and overhaul the prison system, especially the women’s estate,” she said.

“It doesn’t work, it’s a waste of all of our money, and it just needs… We could let 80 per cent of the women population out of prison and none of us would be in any danger. They need housing, they need mental health, they need rehab, and they just need people to care. That’s it,” Connolly continued.

Britain’s prison system is chronically overcrowded, often operating at near 99 per cent occupancy, in large part as a result of foreign criminals taking up around twelve per cent of jail spaces rather than being deported, as Farage and Reform have vowed to do.

The 42-year-old mother, who was released from prison just weeks ago, recounted how she felt pressured into pleading guilty, under the belief that it was the quickest way to return to her husband and 12-year-old daughter, explaining that because of the judicial backlog, others wait for years in prison waiting for a trial.

Connolly also said that she believes she was given a lengthy sentence — rather than the lenient sentence she was led to think she would receive — came as a result of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s public comments, demanding that the book be thrown at those involved in last summer’s anti-mass migration riots which broke out after second-generation Rwandan Axel Rudakubana viciously murdered three young girls and injured ten more in a mass stabbing at a Southport dance party.

While Connolly was not involved in the riots, she posted on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it, take the treacherous government politicians with them… I feel physically sick knowing what these [Southport] families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

Although she deleted the post within hours, and had explained she was in a state of distress over the child murders, given the loss of her own son in 2011 — later proven to have been a result of “failings” by Britain’s socialised healthcare system — she was given a 31-month sentence, and served over a year in prison.

Commenting on her sentence, Connolly told the Reform members in Birmingham, “Never in a million years did I ever think I was going to end up in prison. And it’s not funny, but as I said earlier, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

“However, I learnt a lot in there and things that you’d never see in any other walk of life, and I really hope that I can change some things having come from there… Because it really is such a broken system, the whole system just needs complete reforming.”

Connolly’s case was highlighted in a U.S. congressional hearing on the state of free speech in Europe and Britain this week by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who said that he had hoped to bring Connolly to Washington, D.C. to tell her story, but was prevented due to her bail conditions.

Mr Farage has also suggested that if elected, Reform could pass “Lucy’s Law”, which would allow the public to petition the government to review sentences they felt were unjustly decided.