essentially doesn't matter how hateful Rick Shream a tweet or what someone says is,

the criminal law is not the right way to tackle that.

If they turn out to be connected with crime or terrorism,

they should be swiftly removed from the country and that's what we're not doing at the moment.

I think what this campaign has done is that it's noted and highlighted

just that kind of glaring double standard within multiculturalism, which is that all identities

are to be celebrated apart from the national one. Hello and welcome to the Spike podcast. I'm Fraser Myers.

Delight to be joined as ever in the studio by Spike's editor, Tom Slater. Hello. And we're absolutely thrilled to be joined for the first time by Ross Clark, the author of the brilliant Not Zero and Far from Eutopia. Welcome, Ross. Hello, hi. So, loads to discuss today. We'll be talking about the release from prison of Lucy Connolly, the closure of the Epping Asylum Hotel, England's flag wars,

and the folly of net zero.

So Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder who was jailed for a tweet, jailed for 31 months,

or sentenced to 31 months,

has been freed after nine months.

Tom, this is a bit of a core celebrity for the right, quite understandably.

It's probably the longest that anyone has been given for a single tweet.

I should probably read the tweet out just so that everyone is clear what she said and what she was sentenced for.

So she said, mass deportation now set fire to all the fucking hotels, full of the for all I care.

While you're at it, take the treacherous government and the politicians with them.

I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure.

If that makes me racist, so be it. And she's referring there to the Southport murders that

had happened on that very day. Tom, it is an undeniably despicable thing, what she said.

But how could she have seen the inside of a prison cell for that? No, absolutely. And I think we have to, on this issue, sort of walk and chew gum at the same time, and a lot of people seem to struggle with that, is what she said, bioinflammatory. Absolutely. Should she have been put in prison for it, in my view, absolutely not. That's the kind of distinction we continue to stub our toe on in this country. Understandable,

because we've had very censorious hate speech laws for a very long time. But I think cases like this,

...