LUCY Connolly, who was jailed for a tweet in the wake of the Southport knife attack, has said she has been stopped by the government from travelling to the USA.

She told The Late Show Live on GB News that she was due to travel with Nigel Farage to give evidence on free speech in the UK but she was was told she could not leave the country.

Connolly said: “Obviously, Nigel was really keen for me to go with him to America to give evidence on this. And as far as I’m aware, it was vetoed straight from the top. I mean, the original plan at the time was to go straight to David Lammy.

“I don’t know the ins and outs of what was said and what happened. I just know that I got an answer back of, ‘it’s a hard no’.”

Asked if it was Lammy who stopped her, she said: “Possibly. But that, again, I don’t know. I do know that they did go straight to the top. They bypassed probation and went to the government. And, yeah, it came back, ‘absolutely not’.”

She added: “It was quite amusing, really, because obviously, I’d come out of prison, I didn’t have a passport. It was expired, so I had to go back to Peterborough to get an emergency passport within like 24 hours. And I was saying to everybody that we’re trying to get me to America, this is never going to let me.

“They’re never going to let me, of all people, go to the US to tell them my story, and other people and the likes, don’t forget it wasn’t just me and tell America how far we’ve fallen here with regards to free speech, it was always going to be a big ask to for them to sign that off. And I never really expected them to, and they’ve just proven my point, haven’t they?”

Asked if she felt like she was being controlled by the State, she said: “Oh, massively. I have to go to probation every week. I’m a MAPPA Level 3. I don’t know if you know what that means, but sex offenders and terrorists get put on MAPPA Level 3…

“I’m not just answerable to probation. I’m what they call a MAPPA, which is insane, but they use the excuse of, well, it’s because of the press interest. You’re high profile with the press, so therefore I have to ask them permission to do everything.

“So if I want to go anywhere where there’s more than 50 people, I have to seek probation’s permission and get that signed off, if I want to attend like a conference or, for example, I’m going tomorrow to Parliament to watch the debate that Rupert Lowe set up about not using prison as a punishment for people that post on social media, and I’ve had to seek permission to go to that and get it signed off by them.

“Like everything I do, it’s controlled by them. Basically, no. So it’s not a case of, ‘oh, she only served 40% of her sentence’. Don’t be fooled into thinking that they make my life really easy now, because they don’t.”

Asked if she felt that she was being made an example of, Connolly said: “100%. There was, I’m not going to go into it, but there was an incident, and probation pulled me up about it this week…and they were saying things like, well, how much had you had to drink, and all of this stuff. And then I was like, listen, this incident was nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me. I wasn’t the one in the wrong.

“Somebody had gone to the Press, which had gone through MAPPA, got back to probation. It was something and nothing, that was again made a big deal out of, because it’s me, ‘oh gosh, you know, Lucy Connolly’.

“It’s getting a bit wearing now. I’m not going to lie, but I just smile and nod and go along with it. Because what choice do I have?”