Last month, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was awarded £13k from the West Midlands Police and given an apology for her wrongful arrests in November 2022 and February 2023 when she was detained by the police while silently praying on the street.
Put that way, the case sounds like a huge infringement on her right to practise her religion without persecution. Put that way, it sounds like egregious over-policing, bordering on thought crime, which should appal every right-thinking person who loves freedom. Put that way, she is a hero. And it has certainly been put that way a lot – by people like GB News regulars, Darren Grimes and Calvin Robinson. The former tweeted a video of her arrest, saying:
This is the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen the police do. She’s *silently* praying. Yet the police routinely choose not to investigate burglaries, muggings and fail to prosecute knife crime. How pathetically puerile our cops have become — a woman praying is now enemy #1!
And Calvin Robinson tweeted a video of her second arrest, saying:
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce has been given a fixed penalty notice by the Thought Police.
Clearly not protesting.
Clearly not harassing anyone.
Clearly causing no harm.
Arrested for silently praying in her head, again!
However, as is often the case when the likes of GB News pick up on a culture war cause célèbre, there is some vital context missing from their reporting. Vaughan-Spruce was not arrested on the street at random – she was standing outside an abortion clinic, and had been for several days.
When the police asked if she was protesting, she said that, while she is part of an anti-abortion protest group, she was not acting in that capacity and was merely praying “in her head”. When asked if she could do that somewhere other than outside an abortion clinic, she said she wanted to pray in that spot, because it is an abortion clinic.
Whether she admits it or not, choosing to spend several days standing outside an abortion clinic in silent prayer, in full view of the people working at and visiting it, is undeniably a protest – and I say that as someone who has travelled around the country to hand out advice leaflets about cold reading, outside psychic shows. What I was doing was a protest, and what Vaughan-Spruce was doing was also protest; she travelled to a location for the specific purpose of engaging in a public action against something she disagrees with.
Her actions were chosen in such a way as to send a message to the people using the clinic – after all, if this were really about prayer, her omniscient god would have received the message regardless of where she was when she sent it. It is the definition of a protest, whether her actions were vocal or silent; to deny that is an act of cowardice, rather than a principled stand against over-policing.
The denial of the protest, however, was deliberate and tactical; Vaughan-Spruce’s colleague filmed her on both occasions, as the police ask if she is aware of the Public Space Protection Order in place outside the abortion clinic, and she confirms she was aware. They ask her to move along and to answer some questions and she refuses, which ultimately leads to her arrest.
Her protest on those days, and the several others, was designed to test those Public Space Protection Orders, which is why she made a point of filming throughout. That might be a reasonable and principled stance, to protest against anti-protesting legislation – but not if she denies that what she’s doing is a protest.
In my opinion, the purpose was not to protest against the unjust nature of anti-protesting laws. It was a stunt designed to create exactly the kind of headlines GB News and dozens of other outlets delivered, where it appears that an over-zealous police force is clamping down on thought crimes, to the point where even existing in public as a Christian makes you a target.
Isabel Vaughan-Sprice and March for Life
I first heard of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce in 2016 when I reached out to the organisation she runs, March for Life, to invite them onto an episode of my podcast, Be Reasonable. March For Life organises anti-abortion marches and protests around the country. At the time, they were preparing for their big 2016 event, and were too busy to be interviewed, as they were all volunteers working on their anti-abortion protests in their spare time.
For the last eight years, I’ve been on their mailing list, receiving regular updates on their marches, their protests, and their organising. I’ve had emails from them about “pro-choice training days”, where they train you to make your anti-abortion protests more effective – what rhetoric to use, which buttons to push, which beliefs to hold back, and how to frame an anti-abortion position in as palatable a way as possible.
On June 24 2022, I received an email update headlined: “ROE V WADE IS OVERTURNED – WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE UK?” In it, they celebrated the ruling in America, and highlighted that they wanted to go even further in the UK:
What Roe v Wade has done is provide a strong talking point for us in the UK let’s use this to our advantage and not shy away from discussing this issue. We don’t want abortion to become illegal as much as we want it to be unthinkable.
To achieve that goal, Isabel and her team explained what they need their supporters to do:
At March for Life UK we often talk about the importance of being publicly pro-life. This doesn’t necessarily mean standing in the town centre with a poster, although it most certainly can do… we should be happy to talk about the science of the child in the womb, whose heart is beating from week 3, a fact which can, and should, make abortion supporters squirm… we should readily speak up about post abortion trauma and the symptoms of grief that can follow this decision as well as how to find healing and peace no matter how many abortions someone may have had.
And the newsletter, which is signed off by “Ben, Sarah and Isabel”, includes the following:
I sometimes suggest this litmus test – ask yourself the question: ‘If it became illegal tomorrow to be pro-life would there be enough evidence to convict you?’ If the answer is ‘no’, don’t berate yourself but rather think how can you change that?
A few things are clear, here: firstly, Isabel is not a random Christian who happened to be silently praying on the street, she is one of the three leaders of a national campaign group who exists to protest against abortion. Secondly, the protest her group trains people to engage in explicitly includes anti-abortion posters and conversation designed to make people squirm. And thirdly, Isabel believes you should engage in that protest regardless of what the law says about it.
Anti-abortion protests and the law
So, what does the law say about protesting against abortion? In 2017, Ealing council proposed to use Antisocial Behaviour Orders to tackle groups organising daily protests outside the local abortion clinic to allow women to access “legal healthcare without intimidation”. Those protests were led by The Good Counsel Network, part of a network of anti-abortion groups, including March for Life, and 40 Days For Life. These two groups began in America, but now have UK-based arms run by Vaughan-Spruce (as well as being Co-Director of March for Life, she is listed as leader of Birmingham 40 Days For Life).
In 2013, I interviewed one of the other leaders of 40 Days For Life, Andrew Burton, after learning that the group hands out baby clothes, while shouting “mummy”, to women going into abortion clinics. Other clinics around the country have reported having baby socks left in hedges outside, with protesters holding up plastic foetuses, filming patients who enter, and calling the staff “murderers” and “baby killers”. It is easy to see why these protests, even back then, were causing people at abortion clinics to feel intimidated.
By 2021, according to an article in Elle, those UK protests had become more extreme and “Americanised” in their approach, with protesters emboldened by the extremists’ success in the US. And so MPs put forward plans for a Safe Access Zone around abortion clinics, meaning no anti-abortion protests would be allowed within 150 metres, enforced through Public Space Protection Orders. March for Life was incensed, and their March 2023 newsletter called these protest buffer zones a “national disgrace” that must be fought, arguing:
It is appalling that this proposal was ever put forward when there has never been any evidence demonstrating that intimidation or harassment has taken place outside any abortion centre in the country.
Given the actions of many anti-abortion protest groups, that March for Life believes there is no evidence of any intimidation is clearly more of a comment on their perception than their actions.
It is in this context that Isabel Vaughan-Spruce headed to the abortion clinic in Birmingham in December 2022, to engage in a protest while denying she was protesting. To my eyes, this looks an awful lot like someone hanging around outside a medical facility, knowing that doing so will provoke a reaction, to put these new laws to the test and find weaknesses in them.
The Alliance Defending Freedom UK
Videos of both of her arrests were uploaded to social media by the Alliance Defending Freedom UK, the UK-based offshoot of a well-financed American conservative group dedicated to ending abortion rights and LGBTQ rights. The video of her second arrest was branded with the ADF UK logo, and the group organised her case against the police , providing her with a legal team. Vaughan-Spruce’s stunt and subsequent PR victory would not have been possible without the funding and organisational support of the ADF UK.
March for Life cannot deny that their UK operation is entwined with the ADF – the host at their upcoming anti-abortion summit will be Lois McLatchie-Miller, Senior Legal Communications Officer for ADF UK. McLatchie-Miller posted an analysis of Vaughan-Spruce’s arrest to the website Conservative Home, where commenters wryly highlighted that, while her bio lists her as working for “ADF UK, a legal advocacy organization which promotes freedom of speech”, the UK outfit spells ‘organisation’ with an American Z.
Organising and supporting anti-abortion protest groups is not the extent of the ADF’s recent attempts to export their brand of American Christian lawfare into the UK. A Guardian article from April highlights how the ADF UK had more than doubled its spending on lobbying the UK government since 2020, and successfully partnered with senior Tory figures, including former Tory MP Fiona Bruce. In March, Bruce spoke alongside two members of the ADF at a conference on how to fight social hostility to religious beliefs. And if you’re wondering which religious beliefs need protecting, Bruce has voted against legalising abortion in the UK, and voted against same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.
The ADF also joined forces with Christian Concern to launch the Wilberforce Academy to train young Christian professionals in matters of faith. It’s hard to say how long this has been going on, because there is very little information online about the Wilberforce Academy beyond a very sparse website, a brief mention in the Guardian in 2011, and a form you can fill in to apply to be part of the 2024 intake (as long as you can tell them how you found out about them).
Christan Concern operates the Christian Legal Centre and seems to have picked up a few tips from the ADF’s playbook on finding and pursuing legal cases that push a Christian agenda, as the Guardian noted in 2011.
Close observers of the centre believe it is adopting the tactics of wealthy US evangelical groups, notably the powerful Alliance Defence Fund, which, through its Blackstone Legal Fellowship, trains an army of Christian lawyers to defend religious freedom “through strategy, training, funding and direct litigation”.
The CLC denies being funded by the ADF or ADF UK, and argues that “all of the centre’s work was done on a pro bono basis by committed Christian lawyers” and that what money it had came in “small donations from more than 30,000 people” who received its regular email updates. It is worth noting that at least some of those committed Christian lawyers passed through the ADF-funded Wilberforce Academy.
It is also worth noting that Isabel Vaughan-Spruce’s lawyer was Jeremiah Igunnubole, Legal Counsel for ADF UK, in a case that was “supported by the Christian Legal Centre”. So, in this case at least, the lawyer working towards the goals of the CLC was paid by the ADF UK, without it needing to be true that the ADF UK gave money to the CLC.
The conservative Christian agenda
It is not just through anti-abortion protest cases that the Christian Legal Centre’s agenda seems to align with that of the ADF – the CLC takes a keen interest in end-of-life and dying-with-dignity cases. Earlier this year, it was even reported that medics were leaving their jobs due to the “considerable moral distress” caused by right-wing Christian groups, including due to legal cases brought by the CLC.
The issues page of Christian Concern’s website shows their priorities – which is to push a Christian view on the beginning of life, end of life, marriage, gender, and sexuality. They stress the importance of education, by which they mean faith-based education, because “the children of our society become more vulnerable to the secularising and sexualising trends of culture”.
They claim that there are Sharia law councils across the UK, creating a parallel legal system. They oppose secularism, which they claim “privileges atheism in public life, and squeezes out other religions and beliefs, including Christianity”. And, of course, they campaign against gay and trans people, and what they term ‘gender ideology’. Their lawyers at the Christian Legal Centre are behind a string of cases in which they defend people who were sacked for discriminating against gay and trans people.
In 2014, they represented Richard Page, a magistrate who tried to deny a same sex couple the right to adopt a child, because of his religious beliefs. In 2018, they represented Svetlana Powell, a teacher who was sacked after telling a lesbian pupil in her class that homosexuality was against God’s will, and that she “will be going to hell if she does not repent her sins”, comparing homosexuality to murder.
They represented Kristie Higgs, a teacher in Gloucestershire who said that lesson plans about relationships and gay rights as part of the Equality Act were “brainwashing” kids. And in 2021, they sued the government on behalf of Nigel and Sally Rowe, who argued they were forced to pull their child out of school and homeschool him after he saw a six year old boy wearing a dress at school.
In 2023, they represented Glawdys Leger, a languages teacher who refused to teach about LGBTQ rights as part of the year seven syllable. According to evidence presented at her hearing, she told the school: “This was going too far now and that I am going to tell my pupils the truth”. That “truth”, according to Leger, was being LGBTQ+ is “a sin” and “not fine”. Instead, she used the lesson to tell pupils a story about a gay man, who had “given up being gay to become a Christian because it was not right” and that “People who are transgender are just confused about themselves”. The Telegraph reported that she had been sacked for refusing to teach “extreme LGBT ideology”. The Spectator raged about how she was hounded out of her profession for her views. Laurence Fox whined about her being sacked for sharing Christian beliefs in Church of England schools – which she wasn’t, but it was arguably the goal of these organisations to portray it that way.
The CLC also represented Joshua Sutcliffe, a teacher who, according to last month’s ruling in the case, lost his job after repeatedly used female pronouns to refer to a trans male pupil, first in the classroom, and then on national television when interviewed about the case – outing the kid in the process. Supporters of Sutcliffe’s views on trans people might not have bothered reading that he also told his class that homosexuality was a sin that can be cured by god, and that he played a video in class about men who are “not masculine enough”. He blamed the loss of his jobs on the “LGBT+ mafia” and the “Islamic mafia”.
Reasons for concern
There is evidently a well-financed, well-organised push from American ultra-conservative organisations to export their agenda to the UK on several fronts. What is most concerning is that they’re actually finding supporters here in places that ought to be unexpected.
The agenda of an organisation that seeks to discriminate against gay people is celebrated and championed at GB News by Darren Grimes and Andrew Doyle – conservative commentators who are both gay. But those attacks on gay rights are packaged as a free speech issue and the freedom to hold conservative beliefs, and so the GB News commentariat laps it up without examination.
Equally, ‘gender critical’ activists who would still call themselves feminists have cheered on legal cases about teachers being sacked for their views on trans people, despite the fact that those legal cases are pushed by groups that are currently lobbying the government to make abortion illegal, and to make it acceptable for people to intimidate women at abortion clinics.
This is strategic: couch your regressive agenda in language they can like and share, and they won’t care enough to notice that everything else you’re saying and doing is antithetical to the values and principles they purport to hold; hate the people they hate and they will help you, without ever noticing that you hate them too.
It’s hard to know how far this will go and how much of a threat it is. The UK is not America, and that American style of radical Christian ultra-conservatism isn’t part of our cultural fabric, regardless of what organisations like Christian Concern might say. But we also have to appreciate that when it comes to attacks on secularism, bodily autonomy, gay and trans rights, and women’s rights, it actually doesn’t take much to start rolling back hard-fought rights. And with the funding and organisational strength of groups like the ADF, and the strategic sophistication those groups can bring, it’s easy for them to find fault lines in society, and to mould their regressive views into the perfect shape to exploit any cracks.
If we care about freedom from religion as much as we care about freedom of religion, we should pay attention. And to the free-speech-absolutist crowd and the gender-critical crowd, next time you’re high-fiving a group for something you agree with, maybe check to see whether their other hand is holding a knife at your back.
