An engineer who posted “burn any hotels with those scruffy bastards in it” online as violence erupted outside a hotel housing asylum seekers has been jailed for 15 months.
Joseph Haythorne, 26, from Ashford in Surrey, posted the comment on X, formerly known as Twitter, at lunchtime on 4 August last year, just as violence was breaking out near Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
During the violence, rioters set fire to a bin against a door of the hotel, which housed 240 asylum seekers, and also had more than 20 staff inside. More than 60 police officers were injured that afternoon as hundreds of people threw missiles at the hotel and police outside it.
Sheffield crown court heard that Haythorne’s post from an anonymised account, which was viewed by 1,100 people in 17 minutes before he deleted it, included a link to a now-deleted post by activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. He later handed himself in at a police station, the court heard.
“Go on Rotherham. Burn any hotels with them scruffy bastards in it,” his full post read.
Prosecutors said the case had some similarities with the case of Northampton childminder Lucy Connolly, who was jailed last year for 31 months after she posted on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care... if that makes me racist so be it.”
Bianca Brasoveanu, defending Haythorne, said he “made a wrongful connection between the Southport events and immigration in general” after reading a “poisonous” post online, and said his case was different from that of Connolly, whose post was live for hours and an investigation into her social media “revealed other posts including further racist remarks”.
“None of this was present within Mr Haythorne’s social media. The defendant is more interested in football than anything else,” Brasoveanu said.
Jailing Haythorne for 15 months, Judge Richardson KC said the post was “vile”.
The judge said Haythorne had been distressed by comments online about the “dreadful events in Southport”, adding that there had been “an awful lot of malicious and malignant nonsense on the internet”.
He reduced the sentence after considering the defendant’s clinical depression, his guilty plea at the earliest opportunity and personal mitigation, but said immediate custody was necessary due to the seriousness of the offence.
“It gives me no pleasure whatsoever in sending someone like you to prison because you have many positive attributes in life,” he said.
“But unfortunately, in that whole episode in August of last year, whilst there were some very bad people conducting themselves very badly, there were also a number of otherwise perfectly good people who did something very bad, and you are in that category.”
Haythorne had been due to be sentenced last week but his original conviction was quashed when it emerged that the offence he was charged with – publishing material intended to stir up racial hatred – requires permission from the attorney general before charges can be brought, and the Crown Prosecution Service had not sought permission due to an “oversight”.
He pleaded guilty to the charge for a second time after his case was sent back to the magistrates court.