A Conservative councillor’s wife has reportedly been arrested after urging people to “set fire” to hotels containing asylum seekers.
Childminder Lucy Connolly, from Northampton posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care... If that makes me racist, so be it,” the BBC reported.
Ms Connolly has since deleted the post and said she was acting from misinformation spread on social media.
False claims had been shared on social media in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings about the suspect, who was wrongly identified as a person of Muslim heritage who had arrived in the UK on a small boat.
A judge has since lifted reporting restrictions in the case to allow the murder defendant to be identified as 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff.
Northamptonshire Police said a 41-year-old woman had been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred and remained in custody.
The broadcaster reported Ms Connolly is married to Raymond Connolly, a senior Conservative councillor at West Northamptonshire Council.
Defending his wife, he said she had made one “stupid, spur-of-the-moment tweet out of frustration and quickly deleted it”.
“She’s a good person and she’s not racist," he said.
“She’s got Somalian and Bangladeshi kids she looks after and she loves them like they’re her own.”
In her own post on X, Ms Connolly said: “I am someone who cares enormously about children and the similarity between those beautiful children who were so brutally attacked, and my own daughter, overwhelmed me with horror, but I should not have expressed that horror in the way that I did.
“This has been an invaluable lesson for me in realising how wrong and inaccurate things appearing on social media can be.”
Childcare listing site, Childcare.co.uk, said an Ofsted- registered childminder who had an advert on its platform had been suspended following an inappropriate social media post.
