A woman has been prosecuted for holding a sign saying “here to talk, if you want to” outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic. She was not seeking to interfere with the rights of any woman entering the clinic, although I think it is fair to say that she was hoping to influence her into changing her mind. It cannot be right that a woman should be criminally prosecuted in such a case.
Livia Tossici-Bolt was found guilty of two public order offences for breaching a protected zone outside a British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) clinic on two consecutive days in March 2023.
The zone was established outside the clinic in 2022 given its status as one of the most harassed abortion centres in the country.
The offence is in section 9 of the Public Order Act 2023.
Offence of interference with access to or provision of abortion services
(1) It is an offence for a person who is within a safe access zone to do an act with the intent of, or reckless as to whether it has the effect of —
- influencing any person’s decision to access, provide or facilitate the provision of abortion services at an abortion clinic,
- obstructing or impeding any person accessing, providing, or facilitating the provision of abortion services at an abortion clinic, or
- causing harassment, alarm or distress to any person in connection with a decision to access, provide, or facilitate the provision of abortion services at an abortion clinic.
I am only interested in the first offence: that it is an offence for someone to do an act inside a buffer zone with the intent (or reckless – a legal term of art) to influence any person’s decision to access, provide or facilitate the provision of abortion services at an abortion clinic. (The other acts in (b) and (c) I accept should be criminal.)
It should be noted that when the buffer zones around abortion clinics were introduced it was on the basis that women were being harassed and intimidated before they entered. I don’t support these acts. But the idea that you cannot do any act with the intent of influencing a woman who is entering an abortion clinic is different.
Livia Tossici-Bolt stood outside Bournemouth abortion clinic on March 2nd and 3rd holding a sign saying “here to talk, if you want to”. That’s all she did.
Officer Rukan Taki, who is employed by Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council to enforce the terms of the safe zone, spoke to her after a complaint was made by the clinic.
The Times sets out what was said at court here.
Tossici-Bolt said “I’ve been dragged through court merely for offering consensual conversation. Peaceful expression is a fundamental right — no one should be criminalised for harmless offers to converse.”
And “my case, involving only a mere invitation to speak, is but one example of the extreme and undeniable state of censorship in Great Britain today. It is important that the government actually does respect freedom of expression, as it claims to.”
Louise McCudden, head of external affairs at the pregnancy advice and abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choices [formerly named Marie Stopes International], said the charity was relieved “to see the law upheld”.
She said: “Before we had Safe Access Zones, women entering our clinics were harassed, spat at, called murderers and sinners, and given false medical information. We are grateful to local authorities like Bournemouth for listening to residents and introducing local protections.”
I don’t see how the prosecution of Tossici-Bolt’s action of holding a sign up could be proportionate to her Article 10 freedom of expression rights. I hope it is appealed. She has not committed any of the nasty acts such as harassing, spitting or calling women murderers or sinners.
In seeking to prevent harassment the state cannot over legislate – this is the idea it criminalises minor acts in order to prevent more serious ones. That is the very definition of a disproportionate interference in freedom of expression.
Holding up a sign saying “here to talk, if you want to” is clearly a form of expression. However I do not believe that Tossici-Bolt is being completely honest when she says it was only an invitation for consensual conversation. Clearly, if you hold up that sign and you are inviting conversation it is with the intent to influence the decision of a woman about to enter an abortion clinic. You want her to change her mind and keep the baby.
I don’t know why the pro-lifers are being so coy about this. There are two reasons you might stand outside an abortion clinic within the buffer zone of 150 metres. The first is the Christian idea of bearing witness – which deserves an article of its own. The second is surely to influence the woman to not undergo the planned abortion. At this stage, you are at last chance saloon.
Some women – maybe just one – who are entering an abortion clinic any one day might have some doubt about what they are about to do. Perhaps they are being coerced, perhaps they feel they have no alternative, they feel having an abortion is something they have to do, not what they want to do. And there is another woman who is holding a sign saying she is here to talk. That’s what she is doing with her day. She isn’t at work, or at the gym or at lunch or minding her children or parents.
This woman is outside the abortion clinic holding a sign hoping to influence another woman who is about to enter the clinic and end her pregnancy. Sign woman wants pregnant woman to change her mind by holding a sign up saying she is here to talk. We should be honest about that. In a civilised society this would not be criminalised. It is obviously a disproportionate interference with free speech.
Perhaps the pregnant woman who is about to enter the clinic decides not to. She goes over to the woman holding up the sign saying she is here to talk, if you want to. So the pregnant woman goes over and talks, because she wants to. Maybe the woman ends her pregnancy anyway but she knew someone cared enough to spend her whole day outside a clinic. Or maybe the pregnant woman decides she will continue with her pregnancy and contacts one of the charities such as Life that will give her practical help and advice with her pregnancy.
If this happens, this is bad for the abortion clinic. It is one abortion less for the day. It has lost a customer. One extra baby in the labour ward in nine months’ time, is one fewer infant remains to be disposed of that very day.
In short, a crazy lady standing outside their abortion clinic offering help is bad for business. And they can’t be doing with that.
Laura Perrins is a conservative commentator and former barrister. Subscribe to her Substack.
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“swapping out”
Oh dear. Criticising the very things being criticised. Swapping is sufficient.
A fair point, and well spotted… and happy to be corrected… but does it really invalidate the argument as a whole?
How? In 1945 the British population voted Marxist-socialist workers control the means of production, Comrade and sold out its manufacturing base (and soul) in exchange for – bang pans – an NHS and cradle-to-grave welfare state – free stuff, everyone leeching off each other.
It’s simple. Nationalise key industries, instead of profits going to greedy capitalists, redistribution to pay for NHS, free stuff, fairness, equality – brothers.
Result: capital to fund, expand, develop, only available from the taxpayer. Not enough. Borrow and print money. Still not enough. Chronic underinvestment. The workers collective demands more and more. Industry becomes bloated, uncompetitive. That profit disappears so borrow, print money to pay the shortfall and pay the increasing cost of NHS and welfare state.
Brain drain. Underinvestment, poor pay, high taxes, drives out best and brightest – engineers, scientists, designers – abroad particularly the USA and into their aerospace industry.
British aerospace collapses, car making is a joke, strikes daily – the end of the UK as a giant of tech development and innovation.
Result: £2.8 trillion debt, 7 million on (bang pans) NHS waiting list, and in 2023 220 000 died waiting… but had they lived treatment would have “free”… yippee!, a welfare state supporting 10 million impoverished immigrants, dependence on the Chinese command economy for what we consume.
Hurrah! And… full circle. 2025 UK population votes in Marxist-Socialist Labour Party and is shocked to learn it’s Marxist-Socialist and hasn’t kept its manifesto pwomises, the wotters, how beastly.
Those old enough will remember police, fire, ambulance with dignified British bells, not those common Continental – Hee, haw, hee, haw… klaxons.
I grew up with the two-tone klaxon so that’s all that I recall (we’re all products of our era, right?). Happy to endorse the British bell being brought back to service.
The classic parable of British industry would be: In Victorian times, someone invested a lot capital in building a factory somewhere in England. This factory made him and his descendeds very wealthy/ insanely rich and was kept running with minimal investments in maintenance until about the 1970s when the Victorian machinery finally broke down and couldn’t be repaired anymore. At this point, one of two things happened:
This is a story I part invented but I think it’s an accurate picture: The empire had served its purpose after the British elite had accumulated more wealth than most people can even think of. And since it was sort-of cumbersome and expensive to maintain, it was then dismantled using more or less poor pretexts (“Winds of change” etc). What remained was a British moor who had done his job and could go now.
How this process really started: From some time in the 19th century until 1914, Britain was the world’s dominant industrial, military and financial power. Closest competitor were the aspiring German Empire. The USA was mostly a rural and very much indebted backwater. Then, the so-called first world war started which people in Germany regarded as a combined attack on them driven by a French desire for Revenge for 1871!
and an English desire to get rid of England’s most successful economic competitor.
In autumn and winter 1914, the war had frozen in place along a line of fortified trenches running from the Belgian cost just westward of Ostend southwards and then eastwards through northern France to the east of the fortress of Verdun and from there southward to the Swiss border. The next three years saw yearly repeated anglo-french attempts to break through this line of trenches with every increasing use of preparatory artillery barrages followed by infantry attacks. This needed an enormous amount of artillery shells as tenthousands to hundredthousands of shots would be fired for any individual run of artillery attacks. Most of these shells were manufactured in the USA because enough workers where available there as the country didn’t participated in the war itself until 1918 and they were paid for by the British and French state borrowing money from American banks. The final outcome was that the USA became the world’s largest creditor and the British empire one of the largest debtors.
This pattern repeated during the second world war where military hardware on the Allied side was by-and-large all produced in the USA and then lent-out on use now pay later terms to the other Allied powers.
Totally agree.
US empire indeed. Britain is just a US state in many ways. Oddly, this American-state joined the US Empire’s German project called the EU. It then disentangled itself to further submit its interests to the War-Virology-NWO-WEF-CIA regime of the US Empire.
NWO is simply US hegemony. The Uketopian war is just an expression of the US empire’s quest to destroy Russia. That is why Vlad the Invader had to get busy in 2022 when poof! the Rona magically disappeared, though morons were stabbinated long after for the fake virus. The UK has played a most useful idiot in its screaming support for the US occupation of the Ukeland, pushing us to a nuclear confrontation. Well done UK.
Rona fascism, the Climate Con, WEF – all the NWO globalist institutions are somehow linked to the US Dystopian NWO
Rule Brittania? Nah, The Fools in Britannia more like it.
There is a completely different take to the last 70 years, and that is that old Europe has been dominating the US in the manner of a dominating wife in a traditional wife role who basically has her husband do all her bidding. (Not a statement about men and women, just an example of one particular archetype.)
The US protects Europe. And if Trump’s narrative is to be believed, Europe fleeces the US economically.
The telltale is the reaction to the US wanting to change the relationship. The old European powers are up in arms and in disarray over the prospect that things aren’t going to carry on as they were.
That is certainly not the reaction you’d expect from the subservient, badly treated side.
‘The US’ shares access to some of its military infrastructure, especially in the area of satellite reconnaissance, with its NATO partners, and the NATO is procedurally geared towards being led by American officers. As always, the American armament industry also plays a prominent role here but in form of providing products in exchange for money. Lastly, the USA still has quite a lot of nukes and thus, maintain the nuclear balance of power, of however questionable usefulness this might be. Both Great Britain and France have their own nuclear deterrent and France isn’t even part of the military structures of the NATO since de Gaulle withdrew from them. Germany, as usual, is prohibited from owning or controlling any nukes. Great reason for Trump to whine about it not having any.
The USA has a standing army of less than 500,000 soldiers and the combined forces of the European NATO states easily outnumber that. Further, Germany, traditionally one of the larger military powers in Europe, is prohibited from maintaining more than a pretty tokenistic military force by the so-called “2 + 4 treaty” where the USA was a part of the 4 (the two were the FRG and the GDR). There’s no “US protection” in this area. A nice example of this would be the Enhanced Forward Presence of the NATO in Eastern Middle Europe: This is exclusively European in all areas where even a remote danger exists while pretty nominal US troops are only in safe positions in in eastern Poland.
Well, you better get in touch with all the European leaders to let them know because they all seem in a panic about the poential withdrawal of US military protection.
You’d better come up with some kind of counter-argument in case you want to prove my statement wrong instead of jumping to making untrue statements about a different topic.
You also still haven’t answered the question what kind protection the UK derives from serving as sort-of an US aircraft carrier for offensive military operations elsewhere.
Innocent ascriber inclined to Micawberomics here. Article and preceding comments amount to – Follow the money, the militarism and the myths?
Sirens? Pah! Ambulances should have bells.
They had the Green Goddesses on a brief return during the Fire strike back in 2002.
Britain’s economic and military decline is the product of an education system biased towards the Arts rather than science, and towards pure science rather than technology and engineering. The madness of Net Zero could only happen in a country run by people who are completely clueless about engineering and technology.
Britain’s participation in the “war on terror” (and the disastrous failure of that war) stems from a common failure to understand islam on the part of both Britain and Americans.
As Julian Assange puts it, the Afghan War was a long protracted money laundering operation by design.
‘Twas ever thus. Back in the 1960s, my father (an engineering lecturer at a Technical College, that later morphed into a Poly offering Business Studies, and is now a University offering a degree course in Comedy Studies) lamented the arts and humanities graduates running the country.
I’d extend “technology and engineering” to encompass trades like electrician and plumber that require technical knowledge and practical skill. Usually well-grounded and in demand, in my experience.
Presumably the book doesn’t deal with the way membership of the EU meanwhile chewed at Britain’s administrative legs making it insecure in standing on its own after Brexit.
Presumably, when Starmer says record investment is coming in to the UK he means more of our home-grown enterprise is being bought by foreigners.
Dear oh dear that ‘special relationship’ notion again. Old Mother Britain (or should it be England?) still thinking of the USA as her little baby, failing to notice the larger number of German and other European populations among its 19 C settlers, and of course numerous other nationalities whose influence on US character and interests is more important.
Like it or not societies need leaders because the majority of any population want no more than secure sources of food, warmth and shelter without having to fight for them. Our British leading class blundered into the 1914 war, destroyed itself and has been replaced by others pursuing personal gain in much larger markets for money, goods and ideas.
If you are running a humongous trade deficit, which we are and have been for decades, you have to export something to pay for those imports. And we have been exporting our industries themselves. We have been selling our country for trinkets.
The alternative is to have a huge devaluation in your currency. Personally I would prefer that. (Sterling does seem to be significantly overvalued, with computer equipment that costs £1,000 in the UK for example, costing $1,000 in the USA.) But people don’t like that. The trinkets get expensive.
There is one other alternative of course. Reciprocal tariffs to keep out artificially cheap imports. But the great and good tell us that could never work so obviously it’s a non-starter.