The disgraceful case of Lucy Connolly reads like satire. She is the Tory councillor's wife jailed for 31 months for a social media post. That's right. In the same Britain that's one drug bust away from overflowing prisons, this is who we're locking up.

No one is defending what the mother-of-one posted in the wake of the killing of three children in Southport, it was a despicable comment: "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 and politicians with them." For this vile, inflammatory comment, which she later deleted and which preceded any rioting, she pleaded guilty to inciting racial violence.

But her punishment raises much bigger questions about British justice. This isn't a one-off. The UK has a history of imposing harsh sentences in the wake of riots. After the 2011 disorder, courts were told to ignore standard sentencing guidelines, resulting in two men receiving four-year prison terms for inciting riots via Facebook. Go back further to the 2005 Lozells riots in Birmingham, and the pattern continues. Four people were jailed months later as part of a strategy to demonstrate the consequences of stirring unrest.

While this approach isn't subtle, the logic is clear: make examples out of a few and hope the rest of us fall in line. But whether it actually works is another matter entirely. It's also hard to shake the sense that the punishment isn't about justice at all, but about performance.

Take Lucy Connolly's case. What makes it so egregious isn't just the sentence - it's the timing, the context, and the glaring hypocrisy.

We live in a country where grooming gang members, illegal immigrants and even high-profile media figures walk free or face minimal repercussions for serious crimes. Meanwhile, a childminder with no prior convictions is jailed for a tweet.

Lucy Connolly was denied bail outright. A first-time offender. Not a flight risk. No danger to society. No threat of reoffending. Yet she was held on remand for months, with limited access to legal counsel, and under pressure to plead guilty to end the nightmare. Her barristers believe a jury would likely never have convicted her. But with a backlogged court system and a child and sick husband at home, she caved.

This isn't justice. It's theatre. And Connolly was the scapegoat.

Even now, she's been denied release on temporary licence - a standard privilege for offenders of far more serious crimes. She reportedly overheard that she wouldn't be released with a tag "because of press and public perception". So much for rehabilitation.

None of this is to excuse her words. They were grotesque. But this isn't just about what she said. It's about proportionality.

If prison spaces were endless, perhaps this would be less galling. But they aren't. The system has been under pressure for 18 years since Gordon Brown introduced early release schemes in 2007. And yet we prioritise locking up a woman over a tweet instead of tackling the backlog of foreign criminals, rapists and violent offenders walking freely among us.

What makes this even more chilling is the clear political influence. During the Southport unrest, Keir Starmer stood in front of the cameras and warned: "The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand. Charges will follow. And convictions will follow." And they did. Like clockwork. Judges were reportedly instructed to reject nearly all bail applications tied to Southport - even from someone like Connolly, who clearly posed no danger to society. The judge in her case was blunt: "It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive," he said, framing her sentencing as a defence of pluralism rather than a response to a specific offence.

We don't want to become a country that tolerates hate speech. But if we're going down the prison route, there are a few thousand Islamist clerics, raging antisemites, child sex offenders, illegal immigrants, and gang rapists who should be at the front of the queue; not a panicked woman with a deleted Twitter account and a guilty plea taken out of desperation.

This case shows that the entire concept of equal justice under the law has utterly failed.