2 days ago
UK free speech crackdown sees up to 30 people a day arrested for petty offences such as retweets and cartoons
Bernadette Spofforth lay in jail on a blue gym mattress in a daze, finding it difficult to move, even breathe.
'I just closed down. But the other half of my brain went into Jack Reacher mode,' she said, referring to the fictional action hero. 'Every single detail was in this very vivid, bright, sharp focus.'
She remembers noticing that you can't drown yourself in the toilet, because there's no standing water in it and the flush button is too far to reach if your head were in the bowl.
14 Chester businesswoman Bernadette Spofforth says 'I don't think I'll ever recover' after she spent 36 hours in a British jail over a social media post that contained a mild inaccuracy, a post she had deleted within hours.
Bernie Spofforth/ X
14 Spofforth was inspired to keep speaking out, and even started a podcast, after being arrested for asking 'If this is true' of another user's content on X.
Bernie Spofforth/ YouTube
She'd end up being detained for 36 hours in July 2024. Three girls had just been murdered in Southport, England, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. But Spofforth was not under suspicion for the crime.
Instead, horrified, and in the fog of a developing tragedy, she'd reposted on X another user's content blaming newly arrived migrants for the ghastly crime — clarifying in her retweet, 'If this is true.'
Hours later she realized she may have received bad information and deleted the post — but it had already been seen thousands of times.
The murders resulted in widespread civil unrest in the UK, where mass migration is a central issue for citizens. Four police vehicles arrived at her home days later. Spofforth, 56, a successful businesswoman from Chester, was placed under arrest.
'We're a year on now and I can honestly tell you that I don't think I will ever recover,' she told The Post. 'I don't mean that as a victim. Those poor children were victims. But I will never trust anything the authorities say to me ever again.'
Her story is one repeated almost hourly in the UK, where data suggests over 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending 'grossly offensive' messages or sharing content of an 'indecent, obscene or menacing character.'
Social media continues to be flooded with videos of British cops banging on doors in the middle of the night and hauling parents off to jail—all over mean Facebook posts and agitated words on X.
14 A man in the UK receives a police advisory notice in August 2025 after authorities learn the man is planning to attend a protest.
@TwinsArch/ X
14 Users have flooded social media with videos of UK police barging into their homes in the middle of the night to arrest them over 'offensive' online posts.
@EYakoby/ X
Maxie Allen, a radio producer in Hertfordshire, was on a Zoom call at home when he saw police standing over his shoulder from the camera view on his screen. Six officers came knocking — his partner Rosalind Levine, who answered the door, thought their disabled daughter had died — to haul the couple off over comments they posted in a private WhatsApp group for parents are their children's school.
In the chat, the couple had been repeatedly critical of the public school's slow pace to bring on a new governor.
'It's shaken the faith of the country I thought I lived in. I never imagined that just by airing your views about how an organization was run, trying to hold people to account in public office, that you get arrested for that,' Allen, 50, told the Post.
'If you have a vague law and then it's enforced to an officious and stupid degree, then it's always going to end in tears.'
14 Six police officers turned up at Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine's house in January to arrest the couple over messages they posted in a private WhatsApp group for parents at the local school.
14 Allen and Levine's story has shocked the nation yet the UK government has doubled down on arresting citizens for angry or critical speech, with Starmer's government announcing it's building an elite squad of speech police.
Good Morning Brtiain
Similar stories abound. In 2018 a man identifying himself as 'Adam' phoned into the British talk radio station LBC to describe his encounter with police earlier that year.
'I'm Asian myself and I did this drawing of a mate of mine, who's also Asian, and I said, 'you look like a terrorist.' And he took it really well. He thought it was funny,' he told the host.
But someone else saw the humorous doodle, took issue, and called police. Months later, Adam and his friend were interviewed by authorities — the friend told cops he laughed at the drawing and wasn't offended — but police still made an official report for a 'non-crime hate incident' and forced Adam to write a letter of apology to his friend, which he had to email to him.
Last year, 21-year-old student Jamila Abdi of East London, who is black, was charged under the Communications Act of 2003 for 'indecent or grossly offensive [speech] for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety' after she used a version of the n-word in post on X out of frustration while watching a soccer match.
'I'm so p—-d off let me get my hands on that f—–g n—a,' she wrote about black footballer Alexander Isak.
14 Britons are increasing fed up with mass migration, taking to the streets to protest at their own peril as the government monitors speech activity online and in the streets of the UK.
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14 Data shows that actual criminals rarely face charges in the UK's biggest cities, while the nation arrests 12,000 people a year for mean words and sharing 'misinformation.'
Getty Images
Meanwhile in Derby, a 35-year-old man named Dimitrie Stoica was arrested for 'sending a false communication with intent to cause harm' after he posted a video on TikTok to his 700 followers, which he called a spoof, where he pretended he was being chased by right-wing rioters.
Despite police admitting the video caused no problems, Stoica was jailed for three months and forced to pay a $200 fine.
Last October, Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old Army veteran, was convicted and forced to pay a $12,000 fine for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in Dorset. In April, anti-mass migration French philosopher Renaud Camus was banned from the UK, where he was set to give a speech.
And on, and on.
The face of Old Blighty's free speech struggle has become 42-year-old Lucy Connolly, currently sitting in prison on a 31-month sentence for 'publishing written material with the intent to stir up racial hatred,' an offense under a law from 1986.
Following the slaughter in Southport, Connolly posted on X her support for mass deportations. Authorities say she 'falsely claimed' the Al Qaeda-supporting killer was a migrant. (When, in fact, it was his parents who were migrants, from Rwanda).
Connolly, like Spofforth, realized her mistake and deleted the tweet three hours after posting but police still showed up a week later to arrest her.
14 Lucy Connolly was arrested in her pink hoodie for posting 'misinformation' online and is currently serving a 31-month prison sentence, where she's become the face of the free speech struggle in the UK.
Northamptonshire Police
14 Activists called it a 'two-tier' justice system when Labor councillor Ricky Jones was found not guilty after calling for the murder of anti-migration protestors, telling a crowd 'we need to cut all their throats.'
The stories are so shocking, it's caught the attention of the White House, which is taking an increasingly aggressive stance against censorship in the Eurozone. In a fiery address to the Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President JD Vance blasted 'a crisis of censorship' in Britain.
On Tuesday, the US State Department's annual Human Rights Report slammed British authorities' 'serious restrictions on freedom of expression,' writing that the 'human rights situation worsened' in Britian over the last year, and criticized laws like 2023's Online Safety Act.
'We consider freedom of expression to be a foundational component of a functioning democracy,' State Department press secretary Tammy Bruce told reporters, calling Britain's chilling government actions 'intolerable in a free society.'
14 President Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer met in Scotland weeks before the US decried increasing human rights violations in the UK and called the assault on speech 'intolerable in a free society.'
POOL/AFP via Getty Images
14 At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance put Europe and Britain on notice, slamming a 'crisis of censorship' in the region.
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But Britain's Labor government has brushed off America's criticisms and doubled down on its nebulous and Kafkaesque speech codes. In the ashes of riots that erupted after the Southport murders, Starmer bragged that over 400 people had been arrested and jailed, 'some for online activity.'
This July, the Home Office announced it was assembling an elite force of special agents drawn from across the country to monitor speech on social media.
Also this summer, the UK government updated its definition of terrorist ideologies to include 'cultural nationalism,' singling out Westerners who express concern over mass migration.
Then last Thursday a court acquitted Labor councillor Ricky Jones after he was caught on video calling for the murder of anti-mass migration protestors, telling a crowd: 'We need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all.'
Speech advocates immediately decried a 'two-tier' justice system, comparing Jones' case to Connolly's.
14 Anti-mass migration protests turned fiery in Sunderland, England in August 2024 following the murder of three British girls by an Al Qaeda-supporting terrorist who was the child of migrants.
Drik/Getty Images
14 UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer bragged that the protests had resulted in a dragnet of arrests for 'online activity.'
Drik/Getty Images
All this police action devoted to mean words is occurring while actual criminals roam the streets of British cities. Of the 33,000 car thefts recorded in London alone last year, only 300 arrests were made; while just five percent of the over 40,000 shoplifting incidents reported in London in 2023 led to charges.
'In Britain there is increasingly a sense that whatever your problem is, someone else can sort it out for you,' Maxie Allen told the Post. 'It's like Amazon, you click a button, you get a product. And I think people are saying, right, I don't like the situation, I'll call the police, they can shut these people up.'
As the boot of the government, or the soft tyranny of busybodies, continues to stomp on the throats of everyday Brits, many aren't backing down. When Bernadette Spofforth got home from jail, she was forbidden under her bail conditions from engaging on social media, not that she wanted to at the time.
'I guess [my arrest] took the attention off the real reasons for the riots and it gave them a scalp because in the UK what's happening, particularly with the silencing of speech, is that if the government can shut people up, they don't have to deal with the underlying issue,' she told the Post.
She's since picked herself up and launched a podcast, hoping to give voice to others.
'My husband said to me, if you live the next 40 years in silence on our farm, when you die the news on Google will be no different than it is today. So, the only thing you can do is to speak out again.'
