Lucy Connolly is not in prison because of what she tweeted, but because she's working class

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The British Regime has made two major announcements this week, both of which have been wrongly interpreted by right-wing commentators as relating primarily to politics. Lucy Connolly – the Northampton mother who sent out, and promptly deleted, a supposedly inflammatory tweet about immigrants in the wake of the Southport child massacre – was denied her appeal against her 31-month sentence, passed after she pleaded guilty. Tommy Robinson, who has been in prison for contempt of court since October 2024, was due to be released this week but has suddenly been charged with harassing somebody in August 2024.

It’s easy to assume that a "Woke Regime" is making an example of these people due to their politics: Lucy Connolly published numerous “far-right” tweets beyond the misjudged one about not caring if hotels full of immigrants were burnt down and demanding “mass deportations.” Tommy Robinson has long engaged in provocative, anti-fundamentalist Islam, British nationalist demonstrations in which, it might be argued, he has stirred up division. You might assume these people are persecuted because they are right-wing – they are heretics who endanger and do not adhere to the "Woke Regime" – and their words and actions may contribute to public disorder. I suggest this omits a crucial reason why they must be stopped: they are working class.

The upper class seems to get along with the working class; there’s a kind of noblesse oblige arrangement. A university friend of mine, who went to a public school and lived in a castle, put it best when he jokingly remarked about his close relationship with his college cleaner, who had consoled him when his girlfriend dumped him: “Daddy says that the upper class and the working class can be friends because the working class like serving the upper class, and the upper class like being served by the working class, but neither of them can be friends with the middle class, because the middle class have ambition!” The upper class, in a sense, cannot survive on their own because they lack practical skills. The working class need the land, secure employment, and military prowess to repel invaders that the upper class provide.

The middle class, by nature, are insecure. They fear falling into the working class and deeply envy and resent the upper class, whom they wish to join, an ambition often frustrated. In many cases, they descend from those who have risen from the working class or fallen from the upper class. Psychologically, they deal with this by telling themselves that, though they may not be as physically tough as the working class or as rich and refined as the upper class, they are superior to both because they are “moral” and “educated.” They are Nietzsche’s resentful “priestly caste,” bubbling with hatred due to their perceived relative powerlessness.

This leads to competitive morality-signaling on the part of the middle class, a process behind many “moral panics” over the behavior of the higher and lower classes. For example, it was quite normal for both lower and upper-class people to have illegitimate children in the early nineteenth century. King William IV had many of them. A middle-class “moral panic,” combined with increasing middle-class influence over a decreasingly agricultural society, made this increasingly unacceptable, until love-children were routinely put up for adoption by the 1950s.

The middle class are high in traits that predict educational success: conscientiousness (rule-following, impulse control) and an optimal level of anxiety that incentivizes hard work and exam preparation. The aristocracy and the working class, according to various studies, are lower in both of these traits and in agreeableness (empathy and altruism) which also weakly predict educational success.

The working class are also significantly lower, on average, in intelligence. As I’ve discussed before, intelligence is associated with social conformity. Intelligent people better norm-map, understand the benefits of conforming, have the effortful control to adopt the norm, and competitively signal their conformity. They proclaim how wonderful the emperor’s new clothes look, whereas a working-class person might simply state that the emperor has no clothes. In this sense, the working-class person tends to be “based.” However, they may also perceive their own class as entirely separate and conform to its norms rather than those of the middle-class-dominated society.

For anxious people who are upset by the prospect of disorder and are physically weaker, this makes the working class extremely dangerous. Additionally, the non-noble upper class – those who reach the top, the innovators – tend to combine high intelligence with psychopathic traits, leading to questioning the system and rocking the boat but also to success in making money. In that sense, they are similar to dissident charismatic leaders and, of course, to the working class and warlords who once became the traditional aristocracy and began assortatively mating with each other. They are dangerous.

So, the working class must be kept in their place. They cannot be allowed to express disorder-inciting views because, to the middle class, they are not “one of us.” They cannot be trusted, their motives are feared, and the middle class worry they might be hanged from trees as traitors if the moment came – and they be correct to be, in the view of the priestly caste.