United Kingdom

A mother-of-three who works as a swimwear designer has been arrested on suspicion of stirring racial hatred by spreading a fake Muslim name for the suspect in the Southport attack. Bernadette Spofforth, 55, was taken in for questioning by police on Thursday.

Foreign agitators, including the Russian state news channel, had leapt upon false claims the Southport suspect was a small boats immigrant and there have been claims this played a role in provoking days of riots and unrest.

Police said Spofforth had been arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred, a public order offence under a 1986 law, and false communications, an offence created under the Online Safety Act 2023.

Last week The Times revealed that Spofforth, who owns a dog and enjoys walking, lives a well-to-do family life in a £1.5 million house in the rural north of England.

The businesswoman was a campaigner against Covid lockdowns and net zero policies, and until recently was the managing director of a children’s clothing company called Splash About International. She also has several US patents to her name.

She has been accused of writing on her account that Ali Al-Shakati was the Southport suspect, an “asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year”, and was on an “MI6 watch list”. “If this is true, then all hell is about the break loose”, the post, believed to be under consideration, said.

An hour after publishing the post at 4.49pm on Monday — she deleted it.

Spofforth denied she was the first to share the name, saying she copied it from a fellow lockdown sceptic’s account. She said it was a “really stupid mistake” that she regretted.

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The website Logically, which uses open source investigators and data science to report on misinformation, analysed the spread. It found the fake news spread around the internet at speed, suggesting it may have helped provoke the anti-immigration riot in Southport the following evening.

Archive

Staff at the DWP reportedly objected to the clothes of Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a trans woman who co-chairs the LGBT+ Civil Service Network

Plans for a network of radars tracking deep space activity to help protect the UK from “space warfare” are to go ahead in Pembrokeshire, despite the opposition of local campaigners.

The 27 radar dishes planned for the St Davids peninsula, which will be 20 metres high and can track objects as small as a football, are part of a network planned around the globe.

The Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (Darc) will be developed at Cawdor barracks in south-west Wales by the Ministry of Defence. Ministers have said the plans are crucial as long-term defence against the possibility of threats in deep space.

The plans to redevelop the barracks, which were previously set to close, are part of the Aukus defence partnership between the UK, US and Australia. They will involve a network of ground-based radars in all three countries designed to monitor, track and identify objects up to 22,000 miles (36,000km) away from Earth.

Senior police have described a “turning point” in the disorder seen across England in the past week, suggesting swift sentencing and a major public order operation acted as deterrents to far right-led agitators.

Thousands of anti-racist demonstrators gathered on Wednesday evening and created human shields to protect asylum centres, dwarfing a handful of anti-immigrant rallies.

But in a sign that unrest may continue, 5,000 public order officers will be on duty or on standby this weekend amid evidence of renewed plans by far-right activists to mobilise in cities across England and Wales.

“There are many potential events still being advertised and circulated online and those intent on violence and destruction have not gone away,” said Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).

Stephens cited a range of factors for his belief that a “turning point” had been reached after a week of violence following the killing of three girls in the seaside town of Southport on Monday last week.

These included a significant police presence and the deterrent impact of offenders being sentenced in days for their part in the riots, peer pressure from families, friends and work groups, and “the disruption” of some online messaging.

While admitting that he had been “nervous” about the prospect of thousands of counter-demonstrators taking to the streets because it added to “the scale” of what police would have to deal with, Stephens also praised what he described as the stand taken by communities.

Elon Musk shared a fake Telegraph article claiming Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands.

Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes but a screenshot captured by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was deleted.

In it, Musk shared the image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, Ashlea Simon, which she captioned with, “we’re all being deported to the Falklands”.

The fake piece, purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the Telegraph and mocked up in the newspaper’s style, said camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as the British prison system is already at capacity”.

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Musk has not apologised for sharing the fake report, but has continued to share material criticising the UK government and law enforcement authorities’ responses to the riots.

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On Thursday, Musk shared a Sky News interview in which Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales, said police officers were scouring social media for material inciting racial hatred. “This is actually happening,” Musk said. In a separate post referring to the same clip, Musk called Parkinson “The Woke Stasi”.

Musk has been embroiled in a row with Keir Starmer and British enforcement authorities since he claimed in response to the anti-immigration protests in England and Northern Ireland that “civil war is inevitable” and that the police response had been “one-sided”.

The sight of scurrying looters and widespread rioting across multiple English cities may be an unusual one. But the disorder has a 21st-century precedent in another overheated August.

The television images will take many back to the 2011 riots, which engulfed London before spreading to other cities and were considered the worst week of public disorder to hit Britain for 200 years.

Then, like now, Keir Starmer was involved in quelling the disturbances. In 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions who kept the courts open for 24 hours a day to process offenders and allowed magistrates to pass longer and tougher sentences.

This time, as prime minister, he has accused far-right agitators of mercilessly exploiting the deaths of three girls to fuel attacks on asylum seekers and people of colour.

Below, we examine the parallels and differences between the riots which happened 13 years apart.

Counter-protesters have turned out in UK cities amid warnings of at least 100 far-right marches being planned for Wednesday night.

People were on the streets of towns and cities including Bristol, London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Brighton.

More than 6,000 specialist police had been mobilised amid fears of a repeat of the violence seen around the country over the past week.

Some businesses closed early and others chose to board up windows ahead of an anticipated 8pm start time.

Solicitors and other agencies who work with asylum seekers had been warned they could be targeted.

But as the night progressed it appeared the mass far-right protests had failed to materialise, with counter-demonstrators instead taking the initiative.

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The Stand Up To Racism group tweeted photos of the counter-protests alongside the words "this is what a mass movement looks like".

archived 8 Aug 2024 01:21:23 UTC.
(For me to mess with archive.is and realise it bypasses cookie infested sites)

Malaysia has become the first country to issue a safety warning to its citizens about travel to the UK due to anti-immigration protests and riots.

The south-east Asian country's ministry of foreign affairs published an alert on Sunday advising Malaysians living in or visiting the UK to "stay away" from protest areas and "remain vigilant".

Thugs threw rocks at Filipino NHS nurses on their way to work in a hospital as emergency cover during riots.

The workers were reportedly 'terrified' by the attack on their taxis after the vehicles were the target of yobs in Sunderland. They then set light to a police station following a planned protest linked to the Southport knife attack.

A source told the Mirror: "They were in two different taxis and had been called in because of the trouble as emergency cover. They managed to get through but they were obviously fearful about what might happen to them."

"There has been disorder and rioting at a number of other towns and cities across the UK – with building and vehicles set on fire on a night of rioting in Sunderland last night, while there have also been disturbances in Manchester, Hartlepool, London and Aldershot with anti-Islam and anti-immigrations chants shouted, along with support for far right activist Steven Yaxley-Lennon, who uses the name Tommy Robinson.

The Doncaster “vigil” was planned for 2pm. But the protest failed to materialise, with one demonstrator filming an empty square, with a couple of police vans flanking the square..."