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 violence.
In a post on X last night, Mrs Connolly said: ‘I am someone who cares enormously about children and the similarity between those beautiful children who were so brutally attacked, and my own daughter, overwhelmed me with horror, but I should not have expressed that horror in the way that I did.
‘This has been an invaluable lesson for me in realising how wrong and inaccurate things appearing on social media can be.’
The childminder’s account has since gone private, but the Mail reported several posts of hers- including one where she says she has ‘seen noone trying to organise or spread any kind of hate or discrimination’- were still online as of last night.
She continues: ‘Imagine if two tier Keir told me I had to stay in my home due to riots. That threat is very real right now.’
In a post on X, childcare listing site Childcare.co.uk, said an Ofsted registered childminder who had an advert on its platform had been suspended following information received about a highly inappropriate tweet.
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