Woman arrested over Southport attacker posts defended at Reform conference
Bernadette Spofforth apologised once she realised the information was incorrect and did not face any charges.

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Your support makes all the difference.Panellists at the Reform conference have defended a woman who was arrested after sharing a fake name for the Southport attacker online, and criticised the āweaponisationā of free speech.
During a fringe panel event at the partyās conference in the NEC in Birmingham titled ā Polarised Britain: How can we defend free speech? ā one panellist also said that āspeech is not actionā when questioned about consequences of online incitement.
Bernadette Spofforth was arrested after sharing a fake name, commenting that if it were true there would be āhell to payā.
The false claim that the perpetrator of the Southport knife attack was a Muslim refugee who had arrived by boat in the country in the past year, was spread online by a number of far-right commentators, stoking anti-immigration hostility.
The information appeared to originate from a news website called Channel3 Now, and a Pakistani web developer has since been charged with cyberterrorism.
Ms Spofforth apologised once she realised the information was incorrect and did not face any charges.
Alan Miller, chair of the Together Association, told the Reform conference that questioning the UKās sovereignty or migration numbers leads to being āpresented as someone whoās encouraging a riotā.
He said: āBernie Spofforth many of you would have seen, she had several police come and arrest her. She did a post. Some might say it was a stupid post. You might have even said it was irresponsible, right? But did it deserve to have the police turn up?ā
He added: āIn English law, you are responsible individually for your actions. Speech is not action.
āNow this is where the issue is really important. They think ā the great and the good, the smart ones ā that theyāre able to discern and work out comedy, irony, whether we say something that we mean or criticism, but the stupid plebs ā they mean us ā we canāt work all that out, right?
āSo if you say, Iāve got a question about the borders or sovereignty or the amount of migrants and what that means for resources, and I might have a very different view to all of you about migration, right? But when you say that now, youāre presented as someone whoās encouraging a riot.
āAnd you think that everyone, all the working class, is stupid and theyāre a Nazi, by the way, weāre the ones that fought them, our ancestors and our grandparents fought the Nazis and beat them, but now suddenly weāre all Nazis, and we want to go and do these terrible things.ā
Mr Miller further stated: āObviously, if you put a post up saying, āIām going to give you a load of money if you go and do this on this dayā, thereās very clear rules and laws that already exist about what actual incitement to something is.
āWhat weāre seeing now is a situation thatās really dangerous, where theyāre attempting to weaponise and criminalise speech by everyone actually asking questions and daring to know. We need to rigorously challenge that together.ā
Also on the panel was academic Lisa McKenzie, who referred to a tweet by a boss of an anti-racism charity to allege that policing of misinformation was ānot a fair systemā.
Nick Lowles, chief executive of Hope Not Hate, apologised after he claimed there had been reports of an acid attack on a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough ā which was denied by local police.
Ms McKenzie said: āIf you donāt believe there is a fair system, if you think that there are people that are being treated better than you, or getting a better deal than you, or are a favoured group of people, then what happens is ideas around free speech and democracy start to break down because you donāt believe in it.
āAnd I think over the riots or the disorder, we saw that quite clearly, because we saw Nick Lowles, from Hope not Hate, post that in Middlesbrough white racists were throwing acid in Muslim womenās faces.
āHe said that on Twitter, I saw it, there was no nothing came out of that. He wasnāt even visited by the police.
āSo that doesnāt say to me that there is any sort of fair system. It might be the police just not doing the job properly. I donāt know what it was.
āBut what it said loudly to everybody else was, if you hold this view, thatās okay, but if you hold this view, youāre going to go to prison. Now thatās not a fair system. And nobody then believes in justice, and thatās a very dangerous thing for society.ā