What we got from her conversation was an exercise in right wing grievance politics. As a mother, and one who lost a child to apparent NHS negligence 12 years previously, her concern is that unchecked immigration is a threat to her daughter and other children. Surely anyone with an ounce of compassion can see the sudden trauma of the Southport murders might cause an otherwise powerless woman to lash out? That in fact her call to set fire to hotels full of refugees came from a place of love and care? Connolly then argued that the courts were handing down much tougher sentences following Keir Starmer's remarks about far right thuggery. An example was to be made of her and, therefore, she was a political prisoner. We learned that while she was inside, her entitlements to leave were abrogated, and that even photographs of her daughter wrapped in the Union jack - following her victories in junior Golf - were denied. Her treatment only improved after Richard Tice went and visited her, with the Reform audience guffawing at the imagined bowing and scraping these now frightened prison official emoted before their future master.
This blog has previously visited right wing victimhood and its propensity to moan and whinge about how unfair everything is. Understanding this begins with acknowledging how their politics are fundamentally dishonest, because Faragism, just like the conservatism he came out of, has to present the minority interest - that of the oligarchy of the City, finance, propert, etc. - as the universal interest. Farage is a cannier peddler of this moonshine than the best the Tories can currently offer, and he uses the old populist tricks to creat a "them" of establishment elites and do-gooders, versus an "us" oppressed by political correctness, race hate laws, and people that might answer back. To get a bit abstract about it, the received idea of citizenship grew out of the exclusion of gendered, racialised, and classed others, and what the extreme right here and everywhere want to retain is this power to (arbitrarily) exclude. The imaginary of losing the privilege to define is a powerful attractor for some who feel excluded from politics and society, and the promise of its restoration is a harbinger for the return of certainty, of feeling in control again. This abstraction reflects the concrete realities of class politics - of a ruling class worried about its reproduction, the decline of the West, the right's dependence on the old, and the, for want of a better phrase, petit-bourgeoisification of retired people. The politics of Leave, of Boris Johnson, and now of Nigel Farage is a politics of being under siege. And to lift any siege, sharp initiatives and decisive actions are necessities. But those "solutions" consume much less energy than the performance the right affects of being victimised. It is a contrivance.
Yet Connolly, despite her gushing thanks to Reform and Allison Pearson might prove something of an unreliable partisan. Toward the end of her interview, she talked about the unfairness of the criminal justice system, of how (she felt) she wasn't able to access proper legal advice shortly after her arrest because it was at the weekend, the injustice of waiting long periods on remand, how her experience of prison has made her passionate about reforming the system, and - echoing common feminist arguments, that most women inside shouldn't be. Remarks that earned a smattering of applause. Which indicates straight away the direction Reform are using and want to carry on using Connolly's "plight". She is a martyr, an emblem of a two-tier Britain where we've become, to use Starmer's phrase, an "island of strangers". But where she has actually drawn compassionate lessons from her own experience, they're not interested. We'll see in due course if the rewards of being a useful puppet for Reform will override her desire to do something about the shortcomings of the criminal justice system.
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