Tony Horne in conversation with Lucy Connolly. Episode 1 of 4.
On July 29, 2024, a knife attack occurred at a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance workshop at the Hart Space studio in Southport, England. Three young girls – Alice da Silva Aguiar (9), Elsie Dot Stancombe (7), and Bebe King (6) were killed, and ten others were seriously injured.
Axel Rudakubana, aged 17 at the time of the attack, carried out the mass stabbing. In addition to the three fatalities, eight children and two adults (dance instructor Leanne Lucas and local businessman Jonathan Hayes) suffered severe knife wounds.
On the day of the attack, Lucy Connolly, from Northamptonshire, published an expletive-ridden post on X (formerly Twitter) calling for “mass deportation now” and urging her followers to “set fire to all the f**** hotels full of the bastards [asylum seekers] for all I care.” Her post concluded with the statement: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”
A childminder and wife of a local councillor, she posted the message after encountering false information online claiming the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived by boat.
She also commented on a sword attack on the same day, writing, “I bet my house it was one of these boat invaders.”
Her post was viewed 310,000 times and reposted nearly 940 times before she deleted it three-and-a-half hours later.
She pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred under the Public Order Act 1986. In October 2024, Birmingham Crown Court sentenced her to 31 months in prison. The judge noted she was well aware of how volatile the situation was and had actively encouraged actions that endangered lives.
In May 2025, she challenged her sentence at the Court of Appeal, claiming she was “really angry, really upset” and “distressed that those children had died,” insisting she never intended to incite actual violence. The court rejected her appeal, ruling that the sentence was not excessive.
She was released from HMP Peterborough in August 2025 under automatic release guidelines after serving 40% of her term. Following her release, she claimed she was treated as Sir Keir Starmer’s “political prisoner”.
The double standards in terms of her punishment sickened millions of people throughout Britain and beyond. In recent months, we’ve seen numerous people on the extreme left take to Twitter to rejoice at the murders of Charlie Kirk and Ann Widdecombe, and to encourage acts of violence against those who hold similar views. They have faced no comparable prosecutions or prison sentences.
To be clear, Lucy regrets what she tweeted. She is not the first and will not be the last person to post something foolish on social media in the heat of the moment. She has good reason not to like the British establishment, having battled the NHS to admit negligence following the death of her 19-month-old son Harry in 2011. She is all too aware of how the establishment closes ranks and looks after its own, and sensed that was happening again over Southport.
Lucy and Tony also discuss how the left-wing mob on Twitter/X seemed primarily motivated by the fact her husband, Raymond, was a Conservative councillor, rather than anything else, and they thought it acceptable to publish the couple’s personal details and attempt to ruin their careers as well as compromise their safety.
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