The wife of a Tory councillor has been arrested for inciting racial hatred after calling for hotels housing migrants to be burnt to the ground. ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care, and while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them,’ Lucie Connolly wrote in a now deleted post on X. ‘If that makes me racist, so be it,’ she added.
Ms Connolly, who works as a childminder in Northampton, later blamed ‘a moment of extreme outrage and emotion’ for her outburst, when she was acting on ‘false and malicious’ information. Northamptonshire Police confirmed a 41-year-old woman had been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred, and remains in custody. Ms Connolly’s husband Raymond, who is vice chair of the committee on adult social care at West Northamptonshire Council, responded by telling the BBC his wife cannot be racist because she ‘looks after Somalian and Bangladeshi kids’.
He told the broadcaster his wife made one ‘stupid, spur of the moment tweet out of frustration and quickly deleted it’. ‘She’s a good person and she’s not racist,’ he added. The offending post came just hours after the stabbing rampage in Southport on July 29 which saw three children aged six, seven and nine killed while attending a Taylor Swift themed dance class.
The attack sparked a slew of misinformation that spread like wildfire online,causing a further escalation in far-right vi.