The right now has its sainted martyr. Lucy Connolly walks out of prison, blinks in the sunlight, and declares herself Keir Starmer’s political prisoner. Fuck me, I did laugh at that. Within hours, she is meeting Trump officials. You know exactly who they are, those tireless guardians of liberty whose party bans books, jails migrants, and treats abortion like witchcraft. Soon, no doubt, she will be elevated by Nigel Farage to the pantheon of “ordinary decent people” betrayed by the liberal elite.
The story writes itself because the Labour government, in its unerring instinct for self-destruction, has handed the far right the one thing it could never create alone: the glamour of persecution. Connolly’s vile words “set fire to the hotels”should have been exposed, debated, condemned. Instead, the state turned her into a free speech Joan of Arc, except this saint didn’t want to be burned, she wanted others to be. When liberals criminalise speech rather than confront it politically, they fertilise the very soil in which the far right grows
Starmerism and the Criminalisation of Politics
Starmerism has no politics beyond criminal law. Its answer to riots is “fast-track prosecutions”; to protest, “public order powers”; to migration, “detention centres.” It is Blairism drained of spin, liberalism minus liberty. A technocratic authoritarianism draped in the language of “safety” and “community cohesion.”
The dialectic is brutal: a Labour government, terrified of looking weak, mimics the Tory right’s law-and-order theatrics. The Tory right, in turn, discovers its inner Voltaire, suddenly aghast at the death of free speech. Starmer prosecutes; Farage cashes in. The centre criminalises dissent; the right turns every prosecution into proof of its own persecution.
The Far Right’s Gift Horse
Connolly now tours the talk shows, her hatred laundered through the language of rights and liberties. She will meet Trump’s people, who lock up migrants in desert camps but weep hot tears for the “free speech” of those who call for arson. Across the Atlantic, those on Truth Social will declare Britain a dictatorship between memes about George Orwell. The right understands the spectacle: there is no better recruitment tool than the image of a trembling mother jailed by the liberal establishment for “wrongthink.”
The tragedy is that the left once understood this too. Marx, Luxemburg, even the early Labour movement: all grasped that the answer to reactionary ideas is political struggle, not police raids at dawn. You defeat the far right by organising the class whose misery it feeds on, not by handing it martyrs on a plate.
The Real Authoritarianism
The authoritarian danger does not come from Lucy Connolly’s filthy tweet. It comes from a political class (Starmer, Sunak before him, the whole decaying circus) that treats dissent as a problem of public order rather than politics. It comes from a state that surveils, prosecutes, and censors because it has nothing left to offer except management and control.
Every time Starmer sends in the police rather than making an argument, he strengthens the very forces he claims to oppose. The far right will ride this wave all the way to the ballot box, pointing at every Lucy Connolly and saying: here is your Britain, criminalising speech while the country rots. And unless the left recovers its belief in politics over policing, it will have no answer at all.
