Engineer jailed for 15 months for 'vile' social media post encouraging people to 'burn hotels' during summer riots
2 July 2025, 16:24
An engineer has been jailed for 15 months after posting "burn any hotels with those scruffy bastards in it” to social media during last summer's riots.
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Joseph Haythorne, 26, who is from Ashford in Surrey, posted the comment on X, at lunchtime on August 4 2024, at the time violence kicked off outside a hotel housing asylum seekers near Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
Sheffield Crown Court heard that Haythorne’s post, from an anonymised account, was viewed by 1,100 people in 17 minutes before he deleted it.
The defendant’s full post read: “Go on Rotherham. Burn any hotels with them scruffy bastards in it.”
It included a link to a now-deleted post by activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, more commonly known as Tommy Robinson.
Bianca Brasoveanu, defending Haythorne, said he “made a wrongful connection between the Southport events and immigration in general” after reading a “poisonous” post online.
She added Haythorne “displayed a very different way of behaviour” by deleting the post after 17 minutes and handing himself in at a police station.
Judge Jeremy Richardson KC called the defendant’s post "vile", but reduced the sentence after considering Haythorne's clinical depression, his early guilty plea and personal mitigation.
"It gives me no pleasure whatsoever in sending someone like you to prison because you have many positive attributes in life," Judge Richardson 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."
Before adjourning to consider his sentence, the judge said Haythorne "took leave of his senses" after being "inflamed by malignant comments on social media".
