Ricky Jones, Lucy Connolly and Multi-Tiered Justice in the UK

'The Lady has turned her back on Justice' by Michael Naughton

In August 2025, Lucy Connolly was given a two year prison sentence following a social media post in the wake of the riots prompted by Axel Rudakabana’s murders of three young girls in Southport. She pleaded guilty in order to be home in time for Christmas. Connolly is the wife of a Conservative councillor. Nearly two years later, Labour councillor Ricky Jones was found not guilty by a jury following his own ‘incitement’ trial, when he was filmed miming a ‘slit their throats’ action in response to the riots.

The outraged online response to this apparently blatant example of ‘two- tier justice’ was called out by figures including Conservative politician and GB News presenter Jacob Rees-Mogg, saying it was nothing of the kind, as one was a guilty plea, and the other a jury trial due to a not guilty plea.

While all cases are different and all individual, the charges were similar, and many believe that Connolly’s emotionally-inspired words (’burn the hotels down for all I care’) were less extreme than Jones’ more pre-meditated action. The jury decided that Jones ‘hadn’t intended incitement’ - but had Connolly, after losing her own baby due to NHS neglect, and responding to a fake news report from Pakistan?

But this is the ‘race’ end of the culture wars: other fronts are available, and the courts seem increasingly more in thrall to social justice narratives rather than observing objective legal standards. As if to provide evidence of judicial impartiality, hundreds of Palestine Action members were arrested for holding signs supporting PA, just in case the system were blamed for bias after having outlawed National Action some years previously. The only real lesson here is not to suffix your pressure group with the word ‘Action’.

Hurt People Hurt People: The Labour Party’s victimhood complex runs deep, and supported by the Conservatives in power in the 21st-century so far, they have made the justice system a subjective stitch-up. Feelings count more than objectivity, cross-examination is seen as harassment or bullying, and all bad behaviour committed by non-white males is explained away by ‘social conditions’.

This goes along with the habit of Distress Signalling, or asking people if they ‘feel unsafe’; and if they do, to stop or delay proceedings until the person says they’re comfortable. This ‘victim’ or ‘trauma-informed’ approach to justice means that every difficult probe can be wriggled out of by tears, the mention of past (alleged) trauma or any other lack of feeling ‘safe’.

The 70s-style bad-cop corruption of classic British memory has been replaced by a identitarian, progress-based form of ideological corruption, in which elite judges (and no doubt jurors) decide based on political cliches and tropes. Jeremy Bamber finds himself maintaining innocence on a whole life order since the late 1980s (partly) due to his being an ‘arrogant young bisexual’ at the time; Lucy Letby is national news as the UK’s most unlikely serial baby killer while no actual evidence exists of her having harmed anyone; and John Lee Osbourne doing 18 years for rape when conflict resolution following multi-directional malicious communications might have been more appropriate.

Then there is the celebrity level, where Johnny Depp is exonerated for libel in the US but found guilty in the UK on essentially identical grounds - the #MeToo effect, a pernicious cultural piledriver that did lasting damage to objective justice. This effect led to the media monstering of Andrew Tate, Russell Brand and Laurence Fox, vocal rebels who refuse to obey the woke-progressive party line, and thus find themselves variously charged with rape, human trafficking, sexual assault, harassment and upskirting - the very definitions of New Culture Crimes.

So while the two-tier justice that appears to have been the background to the cases of Lucy Connolly and Ricky Jones feels counter-intuitive to the spirit of natural justice or even a sense of British fair play, the pattern has been metastasizing through the post-war decades through ‘classic’ corruption to an ‘elitist’ form of neo-corruption based on subjective ideology.

The punishment is also a Kafkaesque process, following an Orwellian social free speech situation, where a biased media is more powerful than politics. The justice system of the UK is now fully counter-intuitive, and while there will always be good people working within it, the dark is currently out-manoeuvring the light.

By Sean Bw Parker