Businesswoman Accused of Sparking Southport Riots Speaks Out as Police Drop Case
Bernadette Spofforth, the 55 year-old woman from Cheshire arrested and held for 36 hours because she’d misidentified the Southport attacker, has been informed by Cheshire Police that no further action will be taken against her. She released a video statement on X earlier today, making a point of thanking the Free Speech Union. Bernie is a member of the FSU and had she been prosecuted, the FSU would have paid for her legal defence in full.
The Times and theTelegraph has covered the story, as has the Mail.
A businesswoman “dragged from her home” and “locked up for 36 hours” for allegedly spreading a false name for the Southport dance class knifeman spoke of her “nightmare” today after being told she faced no further police action.
Bernadette Spofforth, 55, was held on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred as part of a crackdown on those accused of whipping up tensions online following the shocking killing of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed event in July.
False information that the suspect was “an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list” spread rapidly around social media, with anti-immigration riots breaking out across the country.
After being confronted last month at her £1.5million farmhouse in Cheshire by MailOnline as to why she was apparently the first person to publish the false name on X – formerly Twitter – the middle-aged woman said she had done a ‘really stupid thing’ which had ‘literally destroyed me’.
Today she returned to social media to say that four weeks after police ‘dragged me from my home and held me for 36 hours in a cell’ she had been told she would face no further action.
Insisting that her supposed ‘crime’ had been ‘sharing a tweet’ which she deleted after being told it was inaccurate, she said: “What I’ve experienced over the past few weeks is nothing in comparison to the suffering of the tragic victims in Southport.
“And I’m not trying to compare the two.
“But I am just an ordinary person with ordinary opinions and I think it’s important that the public should know how ordinary people can be treated.
“The nightmare my family and I have lived through over the past month could happen to anyone. And in Britain in 2024 that’s unacceptable.“
I gave a statement to the Mail in my capacity as Director of the FSU that it has reproduced in full:
We’re delighted the police have decided to take no further action against Bernie, who’s a member of the Free Speech Union.
Had she been prosecuted, we would have arranged for a crack team of lawyers to defend her and paid all their costs.
She never should have been arrested in the first place, let alone held in custody for 36 hours.
Yes, she misidentified the Southport attacker on social media, but it was an innocent mistake. She added the caveat “if this is true” and deleted the post when she discovered it wasn’t.
As Keir Starmer said when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, in cases such as these “a swift apology and removal of the offending tweet” should be enough.
The police should not be wasting their time investigating law-abiding citizens because they’ve said something politically incorrect on social media.
It’s little wonder that not a single burglary was solved in nearly half the regions in England last year – the police are too busy policing our tweets to police our streets.
They need to rethink their priorities.
The Mail piece is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The solicitor Stephen Jackson has posted an informative thread on the case here.
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Well done Toby and the FSU.
Best wishes to Ms Spofforth.
This is excellent news! Congratulations to all you Free Speech Warriors who leapt to her defence, especially our fearless leader Toby Young, and to Bernadette Spofforth for producing such a powerful, dignified message of truth. I hope it goes viral internationally.
Notice that yet again, the media such as the Mail attempt to diminish the cause of the riots, by referring only to 3 fatalities and “misinformation”, while neglecting to mention the full truth, that an Ethnic African stabbed and slashed 13 helpless, unarmed White People, 11 of whom were children, causing horrific, life-changing injuries and three deaths. They also neglected to mention that the riots were caused by public anger at the Mass Third World Immigration forced upon them by successive governments without their consent.
Notice also that the media keep featuring that same flattering juvenile photo of the Ethnic African Stabber in his British school uniform, instead of a photo of him as an adult. Photographic propaganda.
Notice also that the Daily Mail banned the public from commenting on that article.
The Daily Mail is a wretched organisation now. It colluded with the Government throughout Covid and is doing the same by holding back full details. They certainly don’t represent the public, only themselves.
They were always like this – they are a business after all
Great Work Toby 👏 this shows that this was over reach by all involved . Hopefully the other so called social media convicts who were coerced to plead guilty will be cleared & released asap !! 🤞
A highly suspicious looking person. Look at all those books! Most of them are probably full of white privilege. Should be banned. /s
Sad to say they’re wallpaper – unless she mounts her light switches on the backs of books.
Had zoom-in view and couldn’t see any light switches – but yeah, definitely wallpaper. Shame.
if you are referring the lady being wrongly arrested, then I object to your comment calling her suspicious. And what’s wrong with her wallpaper / bookshelf? Does that make her suspicious? Of what? I am shocked you have 14 likes.
For M.Tintin [we’ll forgive you for not being a native.. 🙂 ]:
Satire
/ˈsatʌɪə/
noun
Sarcasm 😉
At the time, Chief Superintendent Alison Ross added: ‘We have all seen the violent disorder that has taken place across the UK over the past week, much of which has been fuelled by malicious and inaccurate communications online. ‘It’s a stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy. ‘It also acts as a warning that we are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in person.’ What a load of bull. The action of people posting stuff on X is posting stuff on X and not rioting in the street. These were entirely different actions by different people and – that’s important – criminal actions while posting something that’s wrong on the internet certainly isn’t. That the riots were fuelled by malicious and inaccurate communications online is an unprovable assertion and doesn’t matter in the slightest. To use a historic example which just came to my mind: The Manson murders were reportedly inspired by the White Album from The Beatles and particularly, the song Helter Skelter. Does this mean Paul McCartney should have been jailed for them? Obvious answer: No. He didn’t order Manson to do anything, hence, he… Read more »
They obviously don’t believe in free will, unless it suits their narrative.
That’s a bit of a philosophical tangent. I think the statement of this police superintendent is a pretty transparent attempt at scaring people away from open online communication. That’s most evident in the It’s a stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy. Checking the accuracy of something is often a difficult and time-consuming task well beyond the ability of individual spare-time X users to accomplish if it’s possible at all. Much of human communication is sharing rumours or exchanging opinions. The accuracy of the former cannot be checked because the information isn’t available (otherwise, the statement wouldn’t be classified as rumour) and checking the accuracy of the latter is by definition impossible. The subtext is thus something like Beware, little people! Talk we don’t like can be dangerous to you! [We’ll see to that!] A gross threat like that would be more fitting for a Stasi official than for a police officer in a supposedly free society. The reason for this is presumably because it’s not possible to corrupt this kind of mass communication. Organizations like the BBC or news publishing corporations can be stuffed with ‘reliable’ cronies or bought but… Read more »
They we’re obviously supposed to be infinitely scared and not infinitively.
🙂 🙂
I have to admit that I like the idea of the latter, though.
Toby – you are a star.
Well done the FSU!
And to put things in perspective, while concerned citizens are being sent to jail for speaking out online, attending protests, shouting at police and their dogs etc, sick perverts that are creating demand from the evil child sex abuse industry get off Scott free. This is Clown World justice, it seems. And I wish to God people would stop saying ”child porn”. It is not porn. The porn industry is based on adults getting up to consensual adult sexual things. *Consent* being the operative word here. Children and babies cannot consent to these same things so call it what it is please: ‘child sex abuse’. The former being lawful, the latter very clearly illegal! People who refer to this as ”porn” are enabling ‘TPTB’ in their objective to sexualize children, have them viewed as sexual objects and legitimize this most heinous of crimes so that even viewing it appears to have become decriminalized. I mean, how does one get sentenced to a non-sentence? You don’t. You get let off with a slap on the wrist and told to stay out of trouble for a stated duration. These sick b’stards know all about that; ”Scores of online paedophiles have joined Huw Edwards… Read more »
Some much needed balance Mogs.👍
Crikey, when you scratch the surface the examples are everywhere! 🙁 I am now 100% convinced that judges and magistrates are letting paedos off without doing any jail time because they themselves are in that same club. It’s exactly the same in the police force and God knows where else. Politicians too, of course. It obviously won’t be everyone but all it takes is enough senior figures in positions of power that people would be too scared to blow the whistle and expose these sickos because that would be them, done for. There’s enough of it going on that there must be an awful lot of influential people who are involved and it’s a case of everybody has something on everybody else but woe betide anyone who speaks out. You know the old adage: ”you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat”? I think we can sub ‘rat’ for ‘paedo’ because I feel like it’s way more rife than any of us realise. Also, it’d be interesting to know if since the dawn of the internet this whole paedophilia thing has exploded, because how could it not, when you think about it? Way harder to source and circulate… Read more »
I think that is because just like Heterosexuals & Homosexuals, they infest all walks of life and always have, ask the Ancient Greeks, but they were more about pederasty.
Yes well, all those male judges sympathising with all those male sexual deviant child molesters and saving them from doing jail time…. You do not need to channel your inner Sherlock to see what’s going on here. 🕵 As with everything else that’s wrong with society, this has “feminisation of the nation” written all over it. I mean, what other explanation is there? 🤔 🤷♀️
🤡
Presumably if it was made even worse because he’d watched even more images for more years, he’d have been given a 100 year sentence suspended for 200 years. That would teach him.
An interesting experience – I watched a YouTube clip to see the outcome of the Huw Edwards case (something ordinary like Talk TV), and YouTube started offering me videos of pre-pubescents in swimsuits. I’m still trying to work out what that says about YouTube.
Well done to all involved.
I guess they felt they could not push things as far as they wanted, but as so often the process is in part the punishment, pour decourager les autres.
The riots and the murders in places like Manchester Arena, all of the things to come, have one cause and one only: successive Governments do not give a flying toss about white people, they are only interested in appeasing Muslims. Where is the protection for Christians or Jews? Under Labour if I were what my roots are, Jewish, I’d be out of here faster than you could say Brown Shirt. That is exactly what Starmer should be wearing. The Police no longer implement the Law; they subvert the Law and the truth. The Courts make up the Law. Truth is no longer true; it is which version you choose. Pick your truth and repeat it endlessly. To be honest we all saw this coming and yet we voted for the same old same old who have hated us ever since 1950 or so. They realised with Blair how much they could get away with and then oh boy did it take off in 2020. Now they don’t even try to hide it. We see Two-Tier in his designer glasses with his wife in dresses no peasant could ever dream of and we still vote for them as the morgues fill… Read more »
How many politicians speak that well, clear, concise and focused? There’s a role for Bernie in a suitable right of centre Party.
Yes, and her voice is very pleasant to listen to, unlike so many female newsreaders who have strident voices like breaking glass, trampling their male counterparts into quiet submission.
They’re just storing up the evil and using a pressure cooker method. Ideally you have to be clever and work out a counter-strategy but try doing that when your emotions are at boiling point without any hope of catharsis. Perhaps the coming collapse will precipitate a return to redemptive values in that materialism will be exposed at its ghastly endpoint. Or we might just turn into savages and start eating each other. I daresay that there will be a mixture and I would predict that the the age of cannibalism won’t last very long.
Three cheers for Bernie.
Long time fan of hers.
Excellent news, but how much public money wasted on this?, and what happened to the “Manchester Airport” lot?
Huge congratulations to all involved.I admire Bernie’s courage.
This is also why I am a member of the FSU and DS.
Thank heavens for the FSU and Toby Young. Great comfort during a time of extreme stress.