One of the most urgent and wounding criticisms of the British regime to emerge in recent years is that the justice system we live under is “two-tier.” Today, it seems increasingly obvious to much of the public that minorities and those on the left are treated far more favorably by the law than those who are white or on the right. Readers may be familiar with the case of Northamptonshire childminder Lucy Connolly, which has emerged as the paradigmatic example of this unfair treatment.
Distraught on the night of the Southport murders in July 2024, when a second-generation Rwandan teenager attacked a children’s dance class near Liverpool, stabbing three of them to death, Connolly responded by sending a tweet. With the authorities keeping quiet about the attacker’s identity, many initially believed the appalling crime must have been the work of an illegal migrant. In anger, Connolly tweeted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f**king [migrant] hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” She added, having once lost a young child herself: “I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”
A few hours later, she deleted the tweet, but not before a screenshot of it was taken. Soon she had been charged with a hate speech offense and remanded in custody, and knowing that she would remain behind bars for months even if she protested her innocence, she pleaded guilty. She ended up with a 31-month prison sentence, during which time she was denied various privileges routinely afforded to far more serious offenders, including to those in her own prison, such as temporary leave to care for her young daughter. The case particularly stings because in our increasingly soft-touch legal system, the perpetrators of violent, sexual, and acquisitive crimes will frequently get off with a more lenient sentence—if they are caught at all.
There are still some who would deny there’s any unfairness in Lucy being sentenced to a longer prison term for a tweet than, in one case, the members of a child-rape gang. Last year, when her appeal against the severity of the sentence was rejected, I found myself debating a prominent legal commentator who insisted that Connolly couldn’t have been the victim of two-tier justice, since “this is an offence for which the maximum sentence is seven years in prison” as laid down by Parliament, and her 31-month stretch was thus within the sentencing guidelines. He was wholly missing the point—though it’s hardly unusual in the British elite to be more comfortable in the realm of bloodless legalism than having to consider any genuine moral and political controversy.
Still, in one sense he wasn’t wrong. Parliament did create the Race Relations Act 60 years ago, which intentionally criminalized the ill-defined idea of speech that might (as the act states) “stir up” racial hatred, and later raised the maximum penalty attached to that crime to 14 times that of common assault. The act formed the bedrock of the antiracist state. Critics warned from the beginning that this dragnet of a law was both vague and targeted people’s intentions, rather than their actions, and thus would have the effect of outlawing disfavored opinions on race and immigration.
So it has proved. Further speech restrictions have since been added, and as our political culture has also become decidedly more woke and more censorious in recent years, ordinary Brits’ everyday speech is increasingly being policed and punished. This is especially the case with their online speech, which now accounts for an average of more than thirty arrests per day.
This is deeply illiberal, of course, but it is justified by pathologizing a dislike of demographic change and its deleterious effects—always a majority view —as pseudo-fascist, therefore meriting speech restrictions and punishment for its holders. Most would view with some sympathy Lucy Connolly, a bereaved mother who had sent a rather ugly tweet in a moment of anguish and then thought better of it. But in the eyes of officialdom—and amid the prime minister’s panicked crackdown on unrest after the awful murders—ordinary women like her became public enemy number one.
Indeed, it recently emerged that when the state prosecutor issued an emergency application to Attorney General Richard Hermer to rapidly approve the charge against her (a move that may well have been illegal), it explained that her post was “not a one-off regrettable tweet but part of her dislike for immigrants.” Connolly’s supposed political beliefs ought to have meant nothing at all, legally speaking. But this was an argument the prosecutor knew Hermer, a human-rights lawyer whose activist friends describe as a “dedicated antifascist,” would eagerly accept: she had to be made an example of because of her supposed right-wing views. Meanwhile, not charged with stirring up racial hatred and, crucially, not denied bail over his lesser speech charge, was the Labour councilor Ricky Jones, who, addressing a far-left rally during the same period, said of white right-wing protestors: “They are disgusting Nazi fascists. We need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all.”
Just as Britain’s laws around so-called hate speech are applied selectively and punitively—according to the priorities of state “anti-racism” ideology—so are our laws around hate crimes. Tellingly, in the parliamentary debate that introduced this special category of crime under New Labour, no mention was made at any point that aggravated penalties should apply just as much to racist incidents against whites. To diversity-obsessed British officialdom, anti-white racism simply cannot be acknowledged to exist, still less acted upon. Government bodies and antiracist activist charities implicitly understand this and act accordingly. Fusing the two are Hate Crime Scrutiny Panels, in which minority activist groups are invited to meet with police and prosecutors every few months and lobby them to be more attentive to alleged offenses against their group. Needless to say, no one is expected to speak for whites on these panels. Thus is two-tier justice institutionalized.
Among the grim results is that the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs—far and away the foulest race-hate crimes Britain has ever seen—have outrageously never been treated as hate crimes by our see-no-evil authorities. Not only were they ignored, downplayed, and at times actively covered up for decades for fear of upsetting “community relations,” but even when some of the men who abused these girls were at last prosecuted, authorities continued to fail the victims. Government data I have obtained show that none of the crimes of 38 defendants across five separate rape gangs, convicted between 2012 and 2025, were ever even flagged as potentially racially or religiously aggravated by officials, let alone prosecuted as such.
In reality, anyone with eyes to see knows these crimes stemmed from deep racial contempt. Fiona Goddard, a survivor who has waived her anonymity in order to speak about her experiences, told me that her abusers
spoke about ‘white girls’ as people they could use, saying they needed to keep Pakistani girls ‘pure’… They also spoke in their own language, using racial slurs to refer to us, like ‘gori’, which means ‘white’ in Urdu. They would pull faces while saying this or spit at you afterwards, so you knew it was meant in a derogatory way. There were even attempts to pressure us into converting to Islam, including being forced to fast or wear Islamic clothing.
What Goddard and a second victim experienced over years she now describes as “radicalised racially motivated sexual torture”—and this has happened at a vast scale, with tens if not hundreds of thousands of similar crimes across the United Kingdom, dating back as far as the 1950s. Yet never has a single one of these crimes been treated with the extra seriousness the British state is supposed to reserve for acts of racial hatred.
Equality before the law was once a bedrock of British society. “Judge very evenly,” warned Alfred the Great in the ninth century in the prologue to his Doom Book, setting out laws and legal principles for the nascent polity of England. “Do not give one judgment for the rich and another for the poor, nor for one you love and one you loathe.” But postwar immigration, and the multicultural settlement our elites built around it, have called time on that age-old ideal. Now, in England, how a criminal and a victim are treated depends, to a vast degree, on who they are and what political point the state wants to make about them. And white Brits know they are at the bottom of the pile.
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