On the day I speak to her, Mandy Clare should have been in court, standing trial for assault by beating and criminal damage. Instead she is reflecting on a horrendous few months which saw her arrested, charged and suspended from her job simply for – in her view – doing her job as a local councillor.
Mandy is the Cheshire West and Chester (CW&C) Borough councillor for Winsford Dene. Her legal troubles began on 28 June this year when she attended Winsford Pride, a supposedly family-friendly free day out in Winsford, Cheshire. Winsford Pride is council-funded and takes place on council land, in a park known as Marina Island. Marina Island is in Mandy’s ward.
It’s fair to say Mandy has a few problems with Pride from a safeguarding perspective. She believes exposing children of any age to sex toys, information about mastectomies, poppers, sexualised imagery and performance – specifically drag – is either highly inappropriate, needs strict controls or is, in certain cases, a form of grooming.
The latter point is controversial, but it is gaining ground. Dr Anne Woodhouse, a former clinical psychologist working with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) was accused of (and has not denied) writing:
“Normalising sexualised behaviour around children is grooming. Perhaps not groomed for the drag queen but that drag queen has just primed children for the predator who also says this sex malarkey is fun, come join me.”
As Woodhouse’s lawyer Naomi Cunningham said: “No doubt that is a statement that some people might find offensive. It is also a statement that many people consider to be true.”
Mandy has been in a running battle with other CW&C councillors who have a different perspective. Councillor Stewart Bingham called Mandy’s take on drag in particular “vile, hate-mongering nonsense” being both, as he saw it, “homophobic and transphobic”. Councillor Ben Walker (who also has “Senior Data Journalist for the New Statesman” in his X bio) accused Mandy of having the temerity to be “without shame” when she called for less council money to be spent on “grooming” pride flags.
On 17th September 2023, Mandy attended Chester Pride where she says she saw “two separate burlesque-style strip tease performances and the sale of sex toys within a child-accessible area”. She also noted “many examples of fetish-wear and political sloganeering, including signs displaying profanities”. According to Mandy’s calculations, Chester Pride has received more than £70,000 over the last three years. In late 2023 and early 2024, Mandy raised her concerns over both Chester Pride and Winsford Pride.
Mandy has attempted to explain her concerns on various occasions to Cheshire Police and the Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC) for Cheshire. In 2023, the former Cheshire PCC, John Dwyer, posed with a man holding a multi-coloured sign (pictured above) stating “If you can’t come out to your parents, you can come out to me xxx”.
🚩🚩🚩🚩, much?
At council meetings and via email Mandy asked questions “child safeguarding, whether there would be a dress code for performers, whether the Progress Pride flag, which is more politically divisive than the rainbow flag, would be used in promotions and whether stall content would be appropriate for children and non-political”. Mandy’s concerns were met with resistance by a core group of councillors who began naming her in their online communications. Their supporters were activated.
During the summer of 2024, Mandy attended the Winsford Pride event. Mandy was harassed by a man who followed her around and held a sign over her head which said “Mandy Clare hates trans folk”. Event security declined to intervene. Mandy reported this behaviour to the police who said if she had a problem, she should call 101.
A police sergeant who Mandy spoke to refused to view some of the stalls which Mandy thought were displaying “sexualised and political content”. The same police sergeant allegedly threatened Mandy with arrest on the basis of a stallholder’s complaint. Mandy approached the current Cheshire PCC, Dan Price, who was visiting the event. She offered to bring the stallholders’ content to his attention. Mr Price declined to view the display.
Mandy was also unhappy about a drag artist performing a burlesque dance in front of young children, wearing a pair of white knickers bearing a clown-face.
Determined to bring about some changes, Mandy pushed the council to adopt a family-friendly code of dress and conduct for the drag acts. She wanted sex toys and other inappropriate imaging/political items removed stalls. By the time the 2025 Winsford Pride event came round on 28 June, the council had in place a written Event Code of Conduct, a Child Safeguarding Policy, a Dignity & Respect pledge, plus a performer waiver restricting sexualised/political content.
Mandy’s efforts have made her plenty of enemies locally. She is treated with open hostility by some councillors during council meetings and online. There is a website with the URL f***.mandyclare.co.uk and a facebook Mandy Clare Disappreciation page. She has been described as “obsessed” and “unhinged”.
Mandy’s friend Sally James sees it differently: “The first word to spring to mind about Mandy is passionate. She cares extremely deeply about the harms being visited upon society by gender ideology and is utterly tenacious in her defence of women and children. This tenacity and her spirited, articulate and – yes, stubborn – insistence on the primacy of sex and the dangers of adherence to the whims of gender activists make her a thorn in the side of ideologues, particularly in the captured institutions of Cheshire West. She’s also a fabulous friend and great company!”
Despite the toxic atmosphere and open hostility displayed towards her in some quarters, Mandy made it clear to the council she intended to be present at Winsford Pride 2025, aiming to “add pressure to [the] event organisers to ensure policy compliance”.
Winsford Pride 2025
Mandy was joined by some friends before the event including Sally James and Nic Thomson. Mandy’s partner, another CW&C councillor, Simon Boone, arrived later. Mandy says “she did not feel safe” to go on her own, given she felt she had “been threatened the year before and refused help by the security team”. As extra precautions, Mandy took a body-worn camera and an SOS button fob with a direct line to the police.
The women met beforehand in the Red Lion pub in Winsford for a short briefing. “We agreed to avoid alcohol until after the event, and ordered only soft drinks.” Mandy said. “We agreed what we were to look out for. We deliberately did not wear any women’s rights or similar campaign slogans or colours.” The objective was “to observe what was going on and gather photographic and video evidence if there were any policy breaches”.
Nic Thomson entered the event area separately from Sally and Mandy to “film from a distance”. Mandy was pleased to note the stallholders were complying with the new agreements. The women met at the back of the event space where they were joined by Simon Boone. The first drag act came on stage.
The act allegedly complained about having to comply with new restrictions and then allegedly made a joke about Rohypnol, a date rape drug. Mandy told Simon she was going to speak to the town clerk, Mark Bailey, who was standing at the side of the stage. The performer waiver included a clause allowing the event organisers to remove an act “immediately” if they started performing inappropriately around children. Mandy thought the reference to a date rape drug was inappropriate and wanted to alert the organisers to the situation. Simon went with her.
The partner of the drag act had (coincidentally?) been standing nearby listening what Mandy was saying. According to Sally James, this was “when things started to deteriorate”. The drag act’s partner “started arguing with Mandy… which was seen by the drag act. He stopped his act and pointed Mandy out, saying she was filming his partner for homophobic content to put online. This type of accusation made at a Pride event is obviously going to have an effect. As he continued in this vein, the crowd turned on us and we were quickly surrounded by revellers chanting and booing. They jostled us and thrust flags in our faces to prevent us filming.”
Mandy walked closer to the stage with “to ensure I wasn’t blocked from being able to see or film the drag act”. Nic continued to film from a distance. Simon sought out Mark Bailey. Mandy and Sally were surrounded by an aggressive crowd. A security guard saw this. Sally says:
“When Security came over I was hopeful that the situation could be defused and the day would continue without incident but it quickly became obvious that they would offer us no protection or make any attempt to ask the crowd to even stand back. This emboldened the crowd who became more agitated. All of our group implored the security guards to intervene but they entirely blanked us.”
Mandy hit her SOS button. The security guard seemed to think it was his job to stop Mandy moving further towards the stage, in the apparent belief she was about to storm it. He used his body to do so. Whilst dealing with this, Mandy was pushed and says she was hit from behind, possibly by someone wielding a dildo.
Off balance, Mandy pitched forward and grabbed the security guard’s shirt. He prised her fingers from his shirt and used a restraint technique on her arm. Then he and a colleague began to escort Mandy towards the exit.
Mandy was marched across the area in front of the stage. Some of the crowd followed (including the dildo-waving lady) and jeered. In the video of the incident you can see toddlers and small children milling about – one is nearly sent flying. After clearing the stage area, Mandy decided she didn’t want to be escorted off the premises and went limp. The police arrived, and the security guard who had Mandy’s right arm alleged she assaulted him.
The police arrested and cuffed Mandy for breach of the peace. Before she was cuffed she was able to give Nic her phone but one of the town councillors, Stella Mellor (who had been jeering and following Mandy) spotted this and allegedly told the police, who demanded Nic hand over Mandy’s phone. Before she was put in the police van, Simon Boone managed to retrieve Mandy’s bodycam.
Sally says the whole experience was terrifying: “I would never have dreamt that one of our group would end up in a police cell. The situation was allowed to escalate into a complete nightmare when it could and should have been an uneventful observation of a public event. The humiliation and horror of the arrest added to the very real fright we all felt. It was only later that the sheer injustice of what had happened really sank in.”
After 22 hours alone in a police cell Mandy was charged with assault by beating and criminal damage, despite the security guard dropping his complaint.
Mandy’s Motivations
Before we go any further, it’s perhaps worth knowing a little bit about Mandy’s background, as well as her political and personal motivations. Mandy grew up in a working class household in the town of Heswall on the Wirral. Her parents divorced when she was around seven, which she says was “difficult”, but she was bright and studious and got on with things. She won a place at West Kirby Grammar School For Girls.
Mandy’s dad died when she was 14, which sent her a little bit off the rails. She became pregnant aged 16 via her steady boyfriend, but the pregnancy “mortified” the family, and Mandy was banned from seeing the baby’s father. Their relationship withered, but getting pregnant focused Mandy’s mind – she realised she now had serious responsibility on her plate and knuckled down to her studies. She did her O-levels whilst heavily pregnant and continued to work hard through her A-levels whilst living in a bedsit dealing with her baby daughter – her first of four children. Mandy was in what she described as a “single mum’s place” around “girls who were in the same place with their own babies.” Some “were on the game… they used to service the taxi drivers and things like that”.
Mandy studied sociology as one of her A-levels, which helped her realise she was “basically left wing before she knew what left wing was”. Sociology “made the world make sense” especially after being “a working class kid in a privileged school”.
Mandy says many of the women in the single mothers’ unit around her “were just so smart. They were so smart, and clever and funny. And the only difference between them and me, as far as I could see, was that I’d had the benefit of going to a grammar school, which gave me a little bit more confidence, made me able to present myself a little bit more professionally when I needed to. I didn’t see that I was any more inherently intelligent than some of these girls. But their life was always going to be on a different trajectory to mine, even though I was in quite a disadvantaged position at that point. I was able to pull myself out of it.”
Mandy got the grades she needed to go to Derby University, where she took a BSc in Third World Development Studies. After a year of volunteering at Oxfam she took a graduate job managing a family support project in Birkenhead. “I was supporting families that were in the same situation I’d been in four or five years earlier”, she said. “One of the moms that I supported had lived in the [single mum’s] house with me. This was her, five more babies on, referred to my service by social services. So I went out and did the referral. I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s you!’ It was really nice to see her, but that was quite stark, you know.”
Mandy married and moved to North Wales where she got a job working for the police managing a domestic abuse prevention and support project. In 2015 she became a Labour activist, inspired by Jeremy Corbyn. Mandy says she was “horrified” at the Lib Dems reneging on tuition fees and was “gutted” at Labour’s loss to David Cameron’s Conservatives. When it came to Corbyn, she felt someone was speaking her language. “I’d been watching him over a couple of months and just thought, ‘ah, it’s never going to happen. They won’t let him become leader. That won’t happen’. And then when he became leader, I thought, ‘well, I should get involved’. Because we didn’t have much money as a family and I’ve always believed in the NHS. I believe people need to be treated well at work and workplaces need to be safe. I believe in women’s rights within the workplace and I don’t like racism. And these are all things that I kind of associated with being on the left, with people being able to make a fair wage for a fair day’s work. And for our kids to be able to get on the property ladder and build a life .”
At the time Mandy had not seen much evidence of trans activism or the mantra “Trans Women Are Women”. Being a diligent and committed sort, it wasn’t long before Mandy was an CW&C councillor. She also won a place on Labour’s National Women’s Committee. Then things began to turn sour.
In around 2019 Mandy began having conversations about the tension between trans and women’s rights issues on various “lefty WhatsApp groups”. People began to argue that trans-identifying men should have access to women’s refuges. Mandy, with her experience of dealing with male violence against women, disagreed. She also couldn’t understand how people could argue that male bodies had any place in women’s sports. She was called “bigoted” for her pains. “They were basically suggesting to me there’s no difference between men and women… they were nutcases.” Although she didn’t say so explicitly at the time, Mandy presents her view as follows: “There is an argument that ‘Woman-face’ is as offensive to women as Blackface is to people who are black. And I kind of think, ‘yeah, it is’.”
Mandy spoke up as she saw trans ideology envelop the Labour party and the institutions connected to CW&C council, as well as the council itself. She was rewarded with deselection and disciplinaries. In 2022 Mandy resigned from the Labour party. After a brief flirtation with the Socialist Labour Party and Kellie-Jay Keen’s Party of Women, she sat as an independent. For the next election she joined a residents’ block, but again fell out with them over trans issues. Mandy joined Reform UK in March this year. I asked why she chose Reform over the Tories. Mandy says the Conservatives’ national failure to get a grip of gender ideology and the threat it represented to women and children made her “resentful… they allowed this to happen.”
She is scathing about her experience of dealing with Labour and the SLP, saying “there’s nothing left wing about completely selling out women and children, or free speech. I stopped believing that any of those booked-learned Marxists were actually decent people with a viable plan. These male leaders claiming to be able to shift the national economy in a way that would have put it at odds with how the rest of the western world works may have struggled to achieve that, given how readily they acquiesced to the overtures of tantrumming blue-fringed adolescents and developed instant amnesia regarding the reasons why it’s not safe or reasonable for women to have men in our refuges, sports or prisons.
“The realisation of how misogynistic but also how immature those who claim to be the modern left wing are has been rude awakening. There was no ‘changing the party from the inside’ option available either. On the National Women’s Committee, any mention of the bullying women were reporting from branch level for raising women’s rights concerns were met with head-shaking, frowning, tutting, eye-rolling, open online abuse from other committee members and were duly scrubbed from the minutes. There was no point soldiering on within such an oppressive environment. I’d seen it close up and at national level and it was obvious it was not going to change, whatever the approach taken.”
Mandy has applied the political skills she developed working within other parties to Reform, who she describes as “on a mission to try and reset things in this country.” Mandy is Reform UK’s leader on CW&C council and, until she was charged with assault and criminal damage, worked with the Reform MP Sarah Pochin as a paid caseworker.
Pochin suspended Mandy as soon as she was charged, saying: “We operate a zero-tolerance policy towards any suggestion of disorderly or inappropriate conduct. While we fully respect the right to due process and a fair hearing, it would not be appropriate for the individual to continue in her role at this time.”
Shortly afterwards, Mandy resigned, saying she didn’t want her situation “reflecting negatively on Sarah”.
Back to the story
I asked what it was like being locked in a police custody suite.
“There’s a camera in the cell.” she said “It says on the camera on the ceiling that the camera can’t see the loo. But you have to take their word for it. You know what I mean? So I found a way of going to the loo with a jumper in front of me strategically. I don’t think they could see anything. But there’s a very thin, cold mattress and a very thin, cold plastic pillow. And I was there for 22 hours, no phone, only one phone call, which was to try to get a lawyer. I was really worried about my family and my kids because I knew that they will have heard the news and I’ve got no way of saying to them I’m okay.”
Mandy said her brain was going at full speed. “I had been allowed paper and a pencil, so I’d written reams and reams on what had happened exactly as I could remember it because I didn’t want to lose that memory. I was aware that I was traumatised, but I also was aware it was very important for me to remember all the details and get it straight in my own head, because I knew I was going to be interviewed on it and I thought, ‘right… make sure I don’t forget anything’…. so I got it clear on paper. That was helpful.”
Simon Boone had been told by the police he would not be able to see Mandy until after she had been interviewed. He went home and “stayed up all night looking through her body-cam footage. The police came to my house the following day and threatened to gain entry to get the body-cam footage. I handed [the camera] over, as I’d copied the most important bits and she had nothing to hide. I then asked if could make a statement.”
Boone (who himself has what he sees as a politically motivated criminal conviction) went to Northwich police station to make a statement on the events of the previous day.
Mandy has not been able to find out why the police saw fit to detain her for 22 hours, nor why she was charged, despite the evidence being almost non-existent, and the security guard dropping his allegation (though it seems he was persuaded to write a witness statement on the evening of her arrest).
In the days after her release, Mandy had to deal with the public humiliation of being on a criminal charge, with her political opponents making as much hay as they could. Although she was not suspended by her party, Reform did not offer any public or financial support. Mandy was on her own.
“That was terrifying,” she said. “I had my plea hearing looming and I didn’t want to have to represent myself because I had no idea how to do that. There’s a lot of technicalities that have to get sorted out. It’s not a straightforward thing that’s easy for a lay person to do. I was just really, really traumatised, but I had to get on the case really quickly.”
Mandy found a firm of solicitors, Levins, who were prepared to do some work without requiring any cash on account, but she would still need to be able to settle their bills at the end of the day. After the plea hearing, Mandy was told two days were being set aside for her trial – 16/17 December. Mandy knew she had to spend as much time as possible trying to prepare for the case and raise the cash she needed to fund her legal representation. The Free Speech Union, perhaps understandably, did not see this as a free speech issue. JK Rowling’s fund refused to help. Mandy set up a crowdfunder and tried to get some media attention.
A junior barrister who was appalled at both the case against Mandy and the lack of police disclosure began to help out behind the scenes. TERF friends rallied round, other legal professionals gave advice and two local people – Cristiana Emsley and Dave Poole – made contact out of the blue. Both had had separate, but similar experiences with the police and criminal justice system in Cheshire and knew Mandy would need advice and emotional support.
The crowdfunder inched its way upwards, but it was thousands short of where Mandy needed it to be. Mandy continued to prepare for the case, asking via her solicitors for more disclosure, focusing on a directions hearing scheduled for 9 December.
In November, Mandy realised she was in trouble. “I had a meeting with my solicitor and he said, ‘Right, let’s have a look at what’s in the crowdfunder. What’s your current position in terms of your income?’ At which point I burst into tears. I’d got through this whole thing in a number of meetings and I had not cried. I obviously cried at home, but not in my meetings. We just dealt with the business. But when he asked me about my income, I just fucking fell apart in the office, which was really embarrassing and he said, ‘oh, this is going to be a very difficult meeting for you then, because we’ve got to talk about the business side of things’.”
Her solicitor spelled out the cost. Mandy said “I just felt suicidal after that meeting, to be fair, because I thought, ‘Fucking hell. I don’t know where I’m getting that money from. I have no idea. And it’s so late in the day now’.”
Mandy also had no idea who was going to represent her in court. She knew she needed a really good barrister but the ones on her solicitor’s list were either unaffordable or unavailable. Mandy had done her own research on “gender-critical high-profile accomplished barristers” working in the UK, and Sarah Vine KC’s name came top of her list, but even asking seemed ridiculous. “I’d had a thought about contacting her, but then I just forgot about it. I thought she’s never going to be interested in this case. But when my solicitor said these other barristers weren’t available. I said to him, ‘do you think you could contact her chambers and just see if she might be?’”
Mandy describes it as “the longest shot in the world. I didn’t think for a minute that she’d say yes. I knew that she’d defended Glinner, and I just thought, well, why is she going to want to be bothered with little old me? And it’s probably going to be like hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
Three things happened. Sarah Vine KC said she was available, Mandy launched a second crowdfunder to try to urgently raise the additional funds required and at the final hour, a local supporter came good and said if it fell short, they would make up the difference.
Mandy’s situation changed almost overnight – she was still facing a criminal trial, but now she had expert legal counsel with a national profile and the financial cliff-edge had been averted.
“I’m thinking, even if they do something really dirty and it’s a really ideologically-captured judge who decides to interpret things in a particular way and do something horrendous, the whole country’s going to know about this because Sarah Vine is now in my corner.”
The day before Mandy’s case directions hearing, she had her first conference with her new barrister. Mandy’s friend Cristiana was on the call and in the room with Mandy, detailing her own experience of dealing with Cheshire police and navigating the local criminal justice system. Mandy said Sarah “was so funny. She made a joke about one of the councillors who’d given me a lot of grief, a very funny joke, which I won’t repeat, which immediately lightened the mood. It was an accurate description, too. She just thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and I think that’s why she got involved.”
Mandy felt the whole energy around the case had changed. “I knew that the CPS prosecutor would probably be shitting themselves at this point because it doesn’t look the same anymore. You know what I mean? It’s not like David and Goliath. We just reversed that. I didn’t feel like David anymore.”
During the conference Mandy’s solicitor interjected to say he had just received a communication from the CPS and was going to find out more. Mandy and Sarah carried on talking. “She’d started asking me specific questions. She knew the case really well. She’d only been sent information within the last week about it and already she knew everybody’s name. She knew all the details. She even knew all of the little background comments that were being made by people in the videos as well. Taken it all on board.”
Mandy was delighted. “That made me feel really confident that she’d absorbed all of that information and that detail so fast because I knew it inside out, but it’s my case that I’ve been sat with for 6 months daily, so that was great.”
The solicitor returned to say the CPS had been in touch to tell him there was not sufficient evidence to secure a conviction and they were discontinuing the case.
“I think I laughed,” said Mandy. “I put my hands to my face and just laughed. It was just, like, a shock reaction. Everyone laughed with shock, you know – is this real?“
Cristiana came over to Mandy. “She put her arms around me and said, ‘what did I tell you?’” It was an emotional moment.
There were no tears, though, and there haven’t been since.
“I did feel shocked. I did feel delighted,” Mandy told me, “but I’ve been stuck in a six month rut of feeling like the state’s coming after me and anything can happen. My family are worried. I’m out of my mind every single day and I’m worried about them every single day. I feel guilty every single day for putting them through that. I feel like there’s no justice. I feel like I’m powerless. I’m terrified about money. This is this is every minute, every waking minute of every day for six months. So when that changes and you’re not in that position anymore, you don’t shift gear instantly. I’ve not decompressed from it by any means. I don’t think I’ve even started to process it yet.”
Mandy has already begun raising a criminal complaint against the people who she believes assaulted her, and she is pursuing various avenues to find out how and why the police arrested her, recommended charging her with little to no evidence, ignored her counter-complaint, and continued to push the case even after the complainant said he didn’t want to press charges. She has reflected on the last six months:
“I was emailing lots of people, lots of organisations and people who are high profile in the TERF world, asking for help and not hearing back. And every time you don’t hear back from someone, it demoralises you a little bit further. That sense of doom and isolation just multiplies. And I know for a fact that there are people who’ve actually said, ‘has she done it? Did she do it? Oh, it’s criminal, you know, do we really want to be associated with that?’ And I can get that, but then, you know, look a bit further, do a bit more work on it… it’s not until you’re actually in this situation that you realise quite how desperate and isolating it is. Especially if you don’t have resources, if you don’t have cash.”
Mandy is, of course, deeply grateful to those who were able to find the time to help.
“I’m really glad that I kept reaching out and didn’t give up. I’m really grateful to Levins for stepping in and being prepared to take this on when I didn’t have anything to put on account to pay them and helping me with the crowdfunder, because that’s a whole logistic world that is difficult to navigate, if you’re not used to doing it.”
Sally James says she is “extremely angry” on Mandy’s behalf. “I greatly admire the strength and determination she’s shown to fight this huge injustice. ‘The process is the punishment’ is a cliché precisely because it’s true. She’s suffered months of stress, uncertainty and financial hardship as a direct result of the case, always alongside the knowledge that she was completely innocent of all charges.”
Mandy is of course grateful to the friends “who’ve been in touch with me, who’ve cared about my welfare through this, and people who’ve actually helped me on a practical level and kept me afloat through it. I don’t really have words to thank those people. And I’m never going to feel okay about the impact of this on my family. I’m never going to square that, but I’m really grateful. I’ve made amazing new friends who’ve been through similar things, spotted what was happening with me, and they got right alongside me. They had a clue as to how to navigate it, which I didn’t. This has consumed my every waking moment. Every day.”
Mandy intends to continue to work inside Reform to ensure their instincts about the stupidity of gender ideology are shaped into proper policies which protect women and children.
“My friend Cristiana, who has been through a similar process at the hands of the police, advised me that I would come out of this ordeal a changed woman and I can already feel that is the case. The shaming, judging and backing away even of people on my own side… the injustice, the fear of losing everything – my freedom, my ability to work, my home, my ability to protect my children, my reputation and good standing, my belief that the police are there to protect women and children and can be trusted has been disrupted and this realisation has been a constant weight bearing down on me every waking minute of every day, along with the trauma and flash backs, the head-to-toe adrenalin reaction every time I have to re-watch the videos or go near my ward.
“We are good people on the side of children, doing the right thing within a more hostile environment than I could ever have imagined. I’m recalibrating, but can already feel my strength gaining ground daily. I have submitted crime reports to the police in respect of those that attacked, or incited those attacks, against myself and my friends at that event. My small team of warriors who came forward to share how they had fought back against similar police injustices are working with me to bring complaints against the institutions that failed us in a way they can’t readily squirm out of.
“I would love to be able to step up my political voice in fighting for women, children, free speech and the return of an accessible and politically impartial, fair justice system within the UK. I would love to be able to have a greater political voice in de-politicising local councils, the school curriculum and our health and other services and making sure women and children are not afterthoughts in those. We still had a lot of work to do on that front even before this destructive ideology took hold.
“I set up a skeleton organisation called Women’s Work and have so many outline project ideas for how I would like this to grow and develop, starting within my own local authority area, to provide funded models of good practice and networks of support for women to lobby for better polices, services and representation for ourselves and our children on the basis of sex and not gender identity. I plan to give that some renewed attention in the New Year, once the initial stages of my onward legal actions are underway and if there are any organisations, lawyers, barristers or benefactors with expertise or funding to offer that would like to help a penniless, still slightly shell-shocked local councillor with any of that, then I would be very happy to hear from them. There is still so much ground to cover and, sunlight being the best medicine, I would like as many opportunities as possible to talk publicly about that.”
I have contacted Cheshire Police asking why Mandy was charged. I have contacted the CPS asking why the delay before dropping charges and why they were dropped. They responded to tell me “the case was initially charged by the police, we then reviewed this and concluded that it didn’t meet our evidential test”.
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