Woman arrested over Southport attacker posts defended at Reform conference

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 “weaponisation” of free speech.

During a fringe panel event at the party’s conference in the NEC in Birmingham titled – Polarised Britain: How can we defend free speech? – one panellist also said that “speech is not action” 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 “hell to pay”.

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 UK’s sovereignty or migration numbers leads to being “presented as someone who’s encouraging a riot”.

He said: “Bernie 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?”

He added: “In English law, you are responsible individually for your actions. Speech is not action.

“Now this is where the issue is really important. They think – the great and the good, the smart ones – that they’re able to discern and work out comedy, irony, whether we say something that we mean or criticism, but the stupid plebs – they mean us – we can’t work all that out, right?

“So if you say, I’ve 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, you’re presented as someone who’s encouraging a riot.

“And you think that everyone, all the working class, is stupid and they’re a Nazi, by the way, we’re the ones that fought them, our ancestors and our grandparents fought the Nazis and beat them, but now suddenly we’re all Nazis, and we want to go and do these terrible things.”

Mr Miller further stated: “Obviously, if you put a post up saying, ‘I’m going to give you a load of money if you go and do this on this day’, there’s very clear rules and laws that already exist about what actual incitement to something is.

“What we’re seeing now is a situation that’s really dangerous, where they’re attempting to weaponise and criminalise speech by everyone actually asking questions and daring to know. We need to rigorously challenge that together.”

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 “not a fair system”.

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 – which was denied by local police.

Ms McKenzie said: “If you don’t 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 don’t believe in it.

“And 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 women’s faces.

“He said that on Twitter, I saw it, there was no nothing came out of that. He wasn’t even visited by the police.

“So that doesn’t say to me that there is any sort of fair system. It might be the police just not doing the job properly. I don’t know what it was.

“But what it said loudly to everybody else was, if you hold this view, that’s okay, but if you hold this view, you’re going to go to prison. Now that’s not a fair system. And nobody then believes in justice, and that’s a very dangerous thing for society.”