Suella Braverman, Liz Truss and now Kemi Badenoch have gone sisterly and seemingly soft on crime. They’re speaking up for Lucy Connolly, 42, a childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, who was jailed in 2024 for 31 months. She incited racial hatred when riots broke out in several cities after three children were murdered at a dance class in Southport.
The killer was Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, born in 2006 in Cardiff, Wales, to Christian parents originally from Rwanda.
Before any facts were known, social media went wild with rumours, fuelled by anti-migrant and anti-Muslim haters. Connolly tweeted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care… If that makes me racist, so be it.”
She is reported to have been denied temporary release and that has triggered the three high Tory women. They say Connolly’s sentence is excessive, that the mum should be with her kids, and blame the “two-tier justice system which now prevails in Britain”, meaning the legal system is dominated by left-wing ideologies.
The truth is that too many law enforcers, from the police to judges, have long been biased against women.
Last week, I interviewed the lawyer Harriet Wistrich, about her new book, Sister in Law, Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men. She has dedicated her professional and personal life to that cause.
Women imprisoned for murdering their male partners were released after she and other lawyers established the concepts of cumulative control and of coercive and controlling behaviour. Sally Challen, who killed her husband after years of such cruelty, is among the best known of those cases. The feminist legal eagle has also exposed misogyny and a lack of accountability in our police forces.
Her relentless pursuit of that ended the crimes of John Worboys, the black-cab driving multiple rapist who is now behind bars. The book contains several cases of women who should never have been jailed. I would be happy to introduce Braverman, Truss and Badenoch to Ms Wistrich. But I doubt they would be interested, because their interventions are nothing to do with fairness.
They are part of right-wing drives, here, in the US and Europe, to politicise and interfere with the criminal justice systems. Trump, a convicted felon, expects judges to back all his policies and orders. Demonstrators came out for Marine Le Pen, the far-right French leader convicted of embezzlement, this weekend. Truss et al are whipping up public opinion against the judiciary. I believe they have never given a damn about the unjust, sexist legal system or the thousands of women currently held in our prisons.
The Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood believes “prison isn’t working for women”.
Last week, on a programme dedicated to the subject by Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, I learned 3,500 females are currently being held in prson; some are pregnant; half of them have kids under 18.
Many serve short sentences or are on remand, but that often causes them to lose jobs and homes. Three quarters have or develop mental health problems. Self-harm figures are eight times higher for women than for men in our jails. Some of the self-inflicted wounds are severe. The vast number of female inmates are not violent, and not a danger to society. In prison, they fall apart or close off. One woman was sent down for six weeks for stealing a British Rail sandwich. Her life never recovered. It’s a massive tragedy.
The retired prison governor, Vanessa Frake, who authored The Governor, agreed that prison is a poor place for women and says she fails to see how it benefits society to rip a child away from its mother. At present 17,000 kids have this happen to them. Many of the inmates are victims of male abuse and control. Some ex-prisoners spoke of sensory deprivation, missing hugs, feelings of disassociation and numbness. Remarkably, some do reclaim their lives.
The Tory trio who demand justice for Connolly need to widen their campaign and include all women in prison who should not be there.
They will not heed this leftie. So I give them Lady Edwina Grosvenor, daughter of the late, very wealthy Duke of Westminster, a tireless reformer calling for better alternatives to imprisonment for females. The heiress, a trained criminologist, funds progressive criminal justice initiatives and she has set up Hope Street in Southampton, a community centre to rehabilitate female offenders. Over to you Truss, Badenoch and Braverman. This is your chance to do more than just light populist bonfires.
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