Mick Hartley

Yes, this outrageous case needs as much publicity as possible. Jawad Iqbal in the Times:

The firing of a teacher for suggesting someone’s prison sentence was harsh should raise alarm bells about free speech, in particular the creeping censorship of lawful political viewpoints.

Simon Pearson, a teacher at Preston College, had commented on the case of Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Tory councillor, who is serving a 31-month prison sentence. She pleaded guilty to a charge of inciting racial hatred in a social media post following last summer’s Southport riots. The post, which she later deleted, said: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care … If that makes me racist so be it.”

Pearson, in a social media post, described Connolly’s comments as “obviously wrong” but added that she “should not have been jailed”. An internal investigation found his comments had the potential to bring the further education college into disrepute and he was sacked.

It's scarcely credible that this actually happened. The Lucy Connolly case has prompted a whole barrage of comment – mostly agreeing with what Simon Pearson said. Yes what she said was vile, but she quickly deleted it and apologised. Sacking Pearson, though, for expressing a perfectly straightforward and reasonable opinion…how on earth did we get here?

Pearson was dismissed after a complaint from a Muslim member of the National Education Union (NEU) at the college, who alleged that the post was “Islamophobic” and “racially discriminatory”.

Ah yes, that's how we got here. "Islamophobic". And a member of the NEU. A vision of the future?