The White House has said it is monitoring the case of Lucy Connolly in an escalation of free speech tensions with Sir Keir Starmer.
State department officials are examining the treatment of Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, who was jailed for 31 months over a social media post about the Southport attacks.
Judges threw out an appeal brought by the 42-year-old last week, meaning she will not be released before August.
Campaigners raised her case with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, as part of a wider effort to challenge what they regard as draconian hate speech laws across Europe.
A spokesman for the state department said: “We can confirm that we are monitoring this matter. “The United States supports freedom of expression at home and abroad, and remains concerned about infringements on freedom of expression.”
It is the latest sign of Donald Trump’s willingness to intervene in domestic British affairs amid a growing transatlantic rift over the protection of freedom of speech.
Recall that Trump sent US officials to meet five British pro-life activists over censorship concerns. The diplomats from the US bureau of democracy, human rights and labor (DRL) travelled to London in March in an effort to “affirm the importance of freedom of expression in the UK and across Europe”. They met with officials from the Foreign Office and challenged Ofcom on the Online Safety Act, which is thought to be a point of contention in the White House.
Since then, Connolly’s case has raised eyebrows of Trump administration officials who question her conviction and the length of her sentence. British politicians who have criticised her sentence praised the White House for its intervention.
Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, said: “Lucy Connolly is effectively a political prisoner and should be freed immediately. She made an ill-judged tweet, soon deleted. “That the US is investigating this case is a sad indictment of the dire state of free speech under Two-Tier Keir. Free speech is in crisis under Labour.”
Connolly expressed her outrage on social media platform X hours after Axel Rudakubana murdered three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport. She posted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the b——s for all I care, while you’re at it, take the treacherous government politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these [Southport] families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.” Connolly deleted the post less than four hours later, but by then it had been viewed 310,000 times. She was arrested on Aug 6 following widespread riots across the country over the stabbing attack, and later jailed for 31 months.
Connolly, who has no previous convictions, also sent another tweet commenting on a sword attack, which read: “I bet my house it was one of these boat invaders.” Last week, the Court of Appeal judges said they did not accept that the original sentence for inciting racial hatred was manifestly excessive. The judges also said they did not accept that Connolly had entered her guilty plea without fully understanding what it entailed.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “In recent months, shoplifters with hundreds of prior convictions have avoided prison. A domestic abuser with 52 prior offenses got off with just a suspended sentence, as did a paedophile with 110,000 indecent images of children.
“And yet Lucy Connolly has received a 31-month prison sentence for an appalling – albeit hastily deleted – message on social media. How on earth can you spend longer in prison for a tweet than violent crime? This crazy disparity will only fuel the perception that we have a two-tier justice system where the law is enforced selectively.”
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader and an ally of Mr Trump, said: “Our American Republican friends seem to care more about free speech in the United Kingdom than our own government.”
