The Daily Telegraph - Features
Bernie Spofforth is the victim of a creeping British McCarthyism
During a notorious period in American history, insecure governments obsessed about the threat from Communist “Reds”. Amid a post-war panic over Russian influence, Americans were encouraged to do their bit to hunt down suspected Marxists. Politicians were particularly worried about secret Communist sympathisers on the airwaves, urging all right-thinking citizens to help “drive the Reds out of television, radio and Hollywood”. According to one propaganda poster, journalists and other creatives were “Moscow’s most effective Fifth Column”, and were surreptitiously “piping” their malign views into the nation’s living rooms via their TV sets.
This was McCarthyism, and it was supposed to have died out in the 1950s. Such was the fear of alternative political views at the time, that freedom of speech was brutally repressed. Those who fell foul of the “thought police” were ostracised and scapegoated; many lost their jobs or went to prison.
All this would come to be mocked as foolish hysteria about “Reds Under the Bed”. Crazed witch hunts were no way for the leaders of the free world to deal with diverging political views 70 years ago; and they are certainly no way for democracies to deal with them now. As Sir Keir Starmer reels from this summer’s riots, however, he shows alarming signs of heading down a similar route. Shellshocked by the displays of public anger over immigration, and desperate to shut down uncomfortable debate, the former Director of Public Prosecutions appears to be embarking on his own McCarthy-style crusade.
This is not about the remarkable acceleration of the normally glacial judicial process for carefully selected “far-Right thugs”. Though there is something quite sinister about the gleeful public parading of a particular cohort of (white) criminal, most voters will be pleased to discover that justice can be so swift when ministers want to make a political point. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if all straightforward cases were routinely handled with such brutal efficiency, and jail time were a dead cert for all of those convicted of violent crime – no matter their skin colour?
Far more concerning than the treatment of these louts is the harnessing of the machinery of state to silence Right-leaning writers, commentators and other free thinkers. We saw it during
Covid, when lockdown critics were disgracefully smeared and vilified by government agencies, and we are now seeing it again, in relation to immigration. Desperate to silence those who draw attention to the dreadful consequences of losing control of our borders, the state has begun aggressively shooting the messenger.
Witness the plight of Bernadette Spofforth, a successful businesswoman and mother of three from Chester who recently spent some 36 hours in a police cell. Her day job is selling swimwear. Like thousands of others these days, she is also a self-styled “social commentator”, opining on a range of issues on social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter). On subjects such as net zero, lockdowns and mandatory vaccination, she certainly has forthright views – but she is neither party political nor anyone’s definition of a “far-Right thug”. With only a modest number of followers on X, she isn’t even that influential.
Nonetheless, last Thursday afternoon, she was the target of an extraordinary and seemingly heavy-handed police operation – all triggered by a single ill-advised tweet. Her crime? To have speculated on the identity and religion of the suspect in the Southport killings. Very briefly, her comment on X, which featured the caveat “if this is true”, added momentum to false rumours that the culprit in the killing of three little girls was a Muslim asylum seeker. The tweet in question was deleted in less than two hours, the minute she realised her mistake. Nonetheless, Chester Police saw fit to dispatch not one, but several police cars to her home and cart her off to the local cop shop, where she was arrested “on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred” and “false communication”. Friends say she was subjected to the kind of interrogation that might be expected of a terror suspect.
What a grotesquely disproportionate reaction to an intervention that patently contained a note of caution and was never intended as a call to arms. Aren’t the police always complaining about being short of resources – the standard excuse for rock-bottom crime detection rates?
In a finger-wagging statement, Cheshire Police described Spofforth’s arrest as a “warning that we are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in person”. Indeed so! Spofforth herself agrees, which is why she has issued a grovelling public apology for her mistake – though she certainly doesn’t admit to being either a racist or a deliberate rabble-rouser.
Were we living in normal times, that ought to be that. Her shocking experience has already had the desired effect, putting the fear of God into others tempted to highlight concerns about violent crime in this country and a perceived link to mass uncontrolled immigration. This is terrifyingly real – but very inconvenient for a government which does not have any answers to the crisis.
Thus the former Director of Public Prosecutions who now occupies No10 appears to be resorting to modern-day McCarthyism. Sir Keir Starmer would do well to note what happened to Senator McCarthy. Eventually, he took his shrieking denunciations too far. His demented crusade to impose a single political ideology on the population failed, and his career ended in tatters.