The hug matters. At Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, Nigel Farage wrapped his arms around Lucy Connolly, and in doing so wrapped his party around her cause. Connolly — the former childminder jailed for urging people to “set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b*******” after the Southport murders — was reborn in that instant as a heroine. Not a felon, not an inciter of racial violence, but a martyr of free speech, greeted by cheers as though she had returned from exile rather than prison.
This is how eliminationist politics is made respectable: not through jackboots and torches, but through hugs, embraces, and declarations of “ordinary mothers silenced by the liberal elite.” The hug was theatre, but it was also consecration. It told the crowd, and the country, that what she said was not only forgivable but foundational.
I. The Gendered Alibi
Connolly’s rhetoric was brutal, but at the conference it was re-engineered into maternal instinct. Her mantra (repeated twice for emphasis) was that “unchecked immigration is a danger to my child and everyone else’s child.” This is the oldest move in the book: the racialised Other as predator, the native mother as protector. The fascist logic is disguised beneath the nursery curtain.
By speaking as a mother rather than as a politician, Connolly relocates hatred from the realm of ideology to the realm of biology. It is no longer a position to be contested but an instinct to be honoured. What liberal commentator dares to argue against a woman’s fear for her daughter’s safety? Every retweet, every newspaper quote of that line, does the ideological laundering for her: racist incitement becomes parental concern.
The trick, of course, is that Connolly is not describing her daughter at all. She is describing a fantasy: an encounter in Liverpool where she and a friend were “accosted” by two men. “I’m big enough and ugly enough to back them off,” she boasted, “but what if it was my teenage daughter?” The anecdote relies on a conjured victim, the imaginary girl under threat. Hatred does not even need a real case to feed upon. It survives on spectres, on warnings of what might happen if migration is not “checked.”
II. The Embrace as Spectacle
Farage knows all this. He also knows how to choreograph it. His hug was not a gesture of empathy but a staging of legitimacy. Think of it as a rite: the criminalised outsider embraced by the would-be Prime Minister, the crowd erupting in applause. Every cheer was a challenge to the state: your convict is our candidate.
This is how Reform UK weaponises law itself. By elevating Connolly, they make her conviction proof of persecution. “Two-tier policing” becomes the watchword, as though the courts were instruments of woke bias rather than reluctant agents of public order. And so incitement to racial arson is recoded as political speech.
If Connolly can be welcomed back not only into the party but into its leadership orbit, then the boundary between political rhetoric and physical violence collapses. The stage becomes the street. Farage doesn’t need to call for fire himself. He can let others dream it, tweet it, shout it, and then hug them afterwards.
III. From Stage to Street
The alchemy of Connolly’s rehabilitation is not confined to the conference hall. On Thursday, Sky News interviewed a softly spoken young man outside the hotel in Epping, one of the many sites targeted by anti-migrant protests. Asked what it was like living nearby, he said the worst part was the noise of the demonstrations keeping him awake, and that he had experienced no problems since the hotel opened. Sky never broadcast the clip, but it was filmed by a concerned local.
The crowd’s reaction was instant. “I ain’t seen you here before,” one man snapped. Another thrust a poster into his hands. Within seconds, he was encircled: men in England shirts, others draped in St George’s crosses and Union Jacks. “Pedo!” someone screamed. He tried to leave but was followed, the mob with blood in their nostrils. Only the police line outside the hotel prevented it becoming something far worse.
And the children were there too. Parents had brought them along, some clutching flags, some wearing replica kits. These were the children supposedly being protected from the menace of “unchecked immigration.” Yet it was not migrants endangering them that night. It was their own fucking parents, dragging them into a mob that turned on a neighbour with the speed of a hunting pack. Is this what “keeping children safe” looks like?
This is the translation of rhetoric into reality. Connolly says “set fire to the hotels,” Farage hugs her, Tice praises her, Badenoch sympathises with her sentence, and in Epping, a young man who dissents even slightly is nearly lynched. The maternal alibi becomes masculine menace; the imagined daughter in danger becomes the real neighbour branded a paedophile. This is how eliminationist speech incubates eliminationist action.
IV. Tory Complicity
If this were only Reform, one might call it fringe. But Kemi Badenoch’s intervention shows how quickly the line blurs. Her statement that Connolly’s punishment was “harsher than the sentences handed down for bricks thrown at police or actual rioting” was not an idle comment. It was a signal: the Tory establishment shares the suspicion that anti-racist law enforcement is overreach.
That matters. Once the far right and the mainstream agree that racism is “speech” rather than “crime,” the ground shifts. Soon we are back in the old territory where migrants are blamed for their own vulnerability, where those who call for their expulsion or destruction are rehabilitated as truth-tellers. The net effect is to transform violence against migrants into a legitimate position within parliamentary politics.
The Promise
Connolly told the conference she would “love the opportunity” to work with Reform. Richard Tice agreed she had a “huge opportunity to help.” That is the promise: that the woman who once urged the burning of hotels will now become a campaigner for the party that aspires to power. Her words were not disavowed but adopted, transfigured into a maternal warning, a populist creed, and a political opportunity.
The hug is the symbol. It is not reconciliation but initiation. It says: this is who we are now, and this is who we welcome. The consequence is chillingly clear. The next time someone throws a petrol bomb at a hotel, the words that justified it will already have been spoken, applauded, and sanctified on the national stage.
