Lois McLatchie Miller - Protecting Everyone’s Right to Live & Speak the Truth in the UK

Show notes and Transcript

Lois McLatchie Miller is the senior legal communications officer for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) UK and is a regular media commentator. 
She joins us to discuss the work of ADF who's tagline, “Protecting everyone’s right to live & speak the Truth in the UK”, is needed more than ever. 
Are Christian freedoms really under threat in the UK? 
Lois discusses a number of issues which are off limits legally. Speaking up for the rights of the unborn. SIlent prayer on a public footpath. Common sense factual statements on gender and sexuality. Asking people if they want to talk about the sanctity of life. Criminalising thoughts that are the wrong emotion. So many views and actions have been attacked by this so called conservative government. And where is the church amidst this woke wave of censorship?

Lois McLatchie serves as a senior legal communications officer for ADF UK . She works with journalists and press representatives to advocate for fundamental freedoms in the “court of public opinion”, both in written pieces and through public speaking.
Before beginning her current role, Lois was a legal analyst on ADF International’s UN Advocacy Team at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. There, she provided Member State representatives with key legal resources and amendatory language which promotes the inherent value of every person. She is an alumnus of ADF International’s Veritas Scholarship, under which she she completed training on on international law, communications and argumentation.
Lois also holds an LLM Human Rights Law with distinction from the University of Kent, and an MA (Hons) International Relations from the University of St Andrews. During her studies, she participated in Areté Academy and Blackstone Legal Fellowship, where she completed extensive research on bioethical issues, including surrogacy.

Connect with Lois and ADF UK...
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                         x.com/ADF_UK
SUBSTACK      tradical.substack.com
WEBSITE          adfinternational.org

Interview recorded 5.4.24

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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on X https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

I'm delighted to be joined today by Lois McLatchie-Miller. Lois, thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Great to have you on and followed you on Twitter, on your many, many different media outlets in the UK, GB News and Talk TV, Talk Radio.

People can follow you.
There is your Twitter handle and all the links are in the description.
You're the Senior Legal Communications Officer for ADF, Alliance Defending Freedom.
I followed ADF for many, many years.
And it's ADF.UK, but everything is there.
And I think the tagline on ADF on the Twitter is protecting everyone's right to live
and speak the truth in the UK, which is under attack.
And that's truth with a capital T.

Maybe we'll touch on that as well.

I said before, I've had the privilege of doing work with Paul Coleman, who's your
executive director.
Great to have you on and discuss this whole area, which I don't know if we've talked
about for a long time on Christian freedoms.
But maybe I'll ask you a simple question that the left trans say, of course it's not, and that is freedoms, specifically Christian freedoms.
How are they actually under threat in the UK?

Yeah, well, thanks for that question.
Well, I think looking around us as Christians in the UK, we can sense that there is a changing culture, which is fine.
Christians at the church have survived throughout thousands of generations of many different challenges.
But the one that faces us today is one that's particularly sensorial.
I say that because of a lot of the legislation that has been brought in recently in my home country in Scotland, most notably, but also across the UK, where the ability to speak truth.

We're taught to speak in grace and truth is increasingly being reduced for the fear of offending somebody sometimes or because, more likely, different ideologies set to take precedence.

I think, in Western countries, there has always been one belief or one ideolo​gy that is dominant.

In and many years ago, that was the church.
The church had in place blasphemy laws back in the 1600s.
It was wrong to stop people from challenging or questioning the church or even having conversations about what different interpretations of the Bible might mean, of course.

We should have allowed those conversations.
It was wrong to always impose blasphemy laws with very harsh sentences.
But what we're seeing today is in the West, in the UK and across different countries like Finland and across the European Union; we're seeing laws come in which actually just reverse that and we have situations where we can't speak out against what are considered to be the true dogmas or the the most popular narrative views of our day.

Whenever we're in a situation like that uh that's a disadvantage to everyone because we don't get to have the conversations about important societal issues that we need and especially right now it is a disadvantage to Christians who are commanded and who love to be able to speak about their beliefs and share and exchange them with other people.

And maybe you want to touch on the role of Alliance Defending Freedom.
I know that you work here in the UK, but I initially saw it as as a U.S organization.
I think it's expanded now to to many parts of the world.

It's to my mind, it's probably the major Christian organization defending individuals' rights to speak truth in many areas in society.

And the attacks are becoming wider and wider in every area.
But maybe our viewers in the UK may not be so aware of ADF.
Do you want to just let the viewers know what ADF is and what actually it does?

Yeah, absolutely.
Well, ADF stands for Alliance Defending Freedom.
And the US reference that you mentioned, well, we as an organisation began in the US over 25 years ago.

But, 10 years ago, we started up a new branch of ADF, called ADF International, which is headquartered in Vienna.
We, as a new international organization, have an eye to keep the right to live and speak the truth free all over the world.

So, we have an alliance of over 4,000 lawyers who we support.
Whatever their challenges are in their own country, to the concept of being able to speak the truth.

They can come to us and we can support them in being able to take these things through courts.

And we also have in-house legal teams based in situations of political significance: at the European Union, at the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, or we have a big office in Washington DC because of the Latin American jurisdictions there or the institutions there.

Here in London, we have an office ADF UK, and we work in-house to be supporting these rights, to be serving serving those individuals who are dragged through courts unfairly because of their faith.

Or to be promoting in the media and in politics, these foundational ideas that are core.
For example, over here in the UK, freedom of speech has been a core value to the Brits for a long, long time, as well as supporting things like the right to life, again, which has been secured in our understanding of human rights law in the West for a long, long time.

Although, we have an international presence in each location that we're based in, we work locally with a local team working on local issues with local laws.

I think there's a big difference between stateside and over in Europe where in the States you wear your faith on your sleeve more.

The conversations are, I think, more vocal and more public, where certainly in the UK, your faith is supposedly a private thing that you keep away from your public life.

Is that one of the reasons why we've got to where we're going; Christians taking themselves out of the public sphere?

I think probably these things are symbiotic aren't they.
As laws and culture and this kind of concept of cancel culture increases it can put pressure on Christians and others of minority beliefs to stay quiet and then that can perpetuate the kind of myth that these views are outdated and don't really exist and therefore legislation comes in to make it even more difficult to express our faith and therefore this cycle kind of continues.

And that's one of the reasons why it's so important for Christians to be standing up for their freedom of speech.

Sometimes, this can be seen as kind of an icky thing to do to be engaging in our rights and we were supposed to, you know, we are called to be persecuted and some people feel awkward or difficult about speaking up for their rights but we're encouraged to do so, because Paul the apostle when he was under pressure for assessing his beliefs he called on the Roman Roman justice system and invoked his rights as a Roman citizen.

And it wasn't because he was afraid of going to prison or afraid of suffering, but it was because, for many reasons, firstly, upholding justice in a country is important.
Secondly, because this can be an opportunity to share our story with a wider group of people and to secure the right for them too, to be able to live and speak the truth, to share their faith.

It's important to engage in the structures of society that we have around us.
And of course, we know that the message of Christianity can have a phenomenal impact, not only in the lives of individuals and in us loving our neighbour to be able to share the truth like this, but also in societies.
If you look to pre-Christian Rome, for example, the culture was more hedonistic and awful than today.

They were engaging in child sacrifice in some instances.
Women were treated as about the same worth as a loaf of bread.
Babies were exposed on rubbish heaps if they weren't wanted simply because they were girls.

Yet, Christianity came in with a transformative message and instituted this first concept that we ever had of having human rights, of having the equal dignity of each person just because they are human.
That is a message that we still carry with us today, the equal dignity and worth of each person, no matter black, white, male, female, born, unborn, child, adult, all of these things.

We believe that they have equal dignity and worth.
We believe that no child has ever been born in the wrong body, for example. And these are values that can be positive and make a hugely positive impact on those around us.

There are great reasons to be upholding this freedom, to be able to share our faith, to be able to share this perspective in society and help shape the laws around us to be the best that they can be for the flourishing of everybody.

I've been surprised.
I mean, I remember back when I was working at Christian Concern and engaging with churches.

And you're kind of thinking, well, surely churches should be engaging in this fight.
But it seems as though often, and maybe Americans may think, you've got to stay at church.
You're in a wonderful position.
Well, it's not necessarily so.

And it seems that the church have retreated and left the fight to organizations
like ADF.

That's your job to speak truth and we'll quietly have a Bible study on a Wednesday evening and that's kind of our job ticked.
I mean, how do you see that?
Because, really it should be the church that are standing up for rights and freedoms and truth in the world.

Yeah.
So, the church has a commission, doesn't it, to be sharing the message and making disciples of those who believe.
And I don't think that everybody in the church has the same necessarily frontline role in the politics that I do.

I think that we all are called to have different parts of the body, but especially when we have state churches.
But the church as an institution in society does have freedom to be able to speak into the societal issues of our day and to be sharing a perspective about how lives can be approved for everybody.

And I think that church leaders have perhaps lost confidence in their ability to do that, that they do have a voice, that they can speak to politicians, they can speak to newspapers, to society and share their perspective and that it isn't wrong to do so.
I wonder if there's been a little bit of a shyness over the last 50 years and speaking externally, but also internally about some issues that can be seen as controversial and maybe not having the language to articulate these things well.

It is so important that we do so because we know, we believe the Bible as a church, not just because it's the Bible or because we're told to do so, but because we fundamentally do think it's true.

We do think it holds valuable knowledge about how to best support everybody in society, best point them towards the way that they can be flourishing the most.
If we truly believe that truth, then it is unfair, unjust and unkind of us to not be sharing that message, to not be speaking out.

So, if we take our mission seriously, if we think that this is good for society, then we must be speaking about these issues in compassion and grace and holding out the wisdom that we've been taught.

100% Many of our viewers, not necessarily Christian viewers, may be non-Christian, but I think certainly the response we've got is many people looking for what truth is and looking for certainty in life, especially during the last four years of COVID chaos and trying to find that certainty.

I want to talk to you about the the pro-life conversation and the Christian freedom conversation wider.

I do need to ask you as a scoff of the the chaos that's north of the border.
We've all read about uh it wasn't an April fool's joke it was actually the SNP going fully woke and restricting all conversation.

As been reported on a lot, but maybe you want to just mention that, firstly, as an example of this wave against the right to speak what you believe.

Sure.
Well, like I mentioned earlier, it was 1697 that the last man in Scotland was condemned for blasphemy.

He had, Thomas Aitkenhead, a 20-year-old Edinburgh student who had questioned the validity of the miracles of the Bible and made some jokes about Scripture.
He was condemned for that, and that was absolutely wrong.

That law went defunct for hundreds of years nobody used it in 2021 it was repealed finally, but on the same day that it was repealed a new blasphemy law was put into place.

That came into action on the 1st of April this year.
That law creates a new offense called stirring up of hate.
I certainly don't like to be hated.

I don't like anyone else to feel hated either and obviously we've talked about Christianity.

Christians should never be called to be stirring up hate in any measure.
The problem with this law is that we don't know exactly what kind of language can be seen to come under this.

There's no definition of what it means to stir up hate and essentially it's been left wide open to abuse for the government to decide what speech they don't like and to ban that now JK Rowling very famously tested this law right in the morning that it came out.

She tweeted, of course, some some fiery tweets about trans activists.
She asked the police to come and arrest her if she had done anything wrong.
The police investigated these tweets that had been reported as a hate crime.
They found that they did not meet the threshold and that is good.
It is really good that we've had that benchmark set for feminists that these particular tweets did not meet the threshold.

However, we don't actually know, because there is no clear definition if different tweets were worded differently on a different day.
And perhaps even might I add, coming from somebody who isn't as famous or on a big platform, or doesn't have the world's attention watching them.

We don't know if the police will find a different reason as to prosecuting tweets as hate crimes and we don't know also about other topics that haven't been tested so JK Rowling talked about um trans activists and their link to criminality.
We haven't tested this out when it comes to speaking about marriage we know one of the protected categories within law is obviously transgender identity and sexual orientation so we don't know about Christians who might speak out about marriage being between a man and a woman and if in different contexts.
That could potentially meet the threshold.

There's many Questions about this law that we have not been bottomed out.
Police of Scotland had three years to clarify you know to a greater extent what this law was really going to mean for us and really all the best they came up with was a kind of campaign about a hate monster and watching out that the hate monster doesn't doesn't get you doesn't cause you to accidentally commit a hate crime I think it's very disappointing from our establishment that we're in this situation.

I do see it as a new form of blasphemy law and that can essentially be used in the future to to criminalize people who are simply expressing their beliefs and it creates it's a culture I think of kind of you can't say that.

You know, we'll chill conversations about important societal issues even in the home.
This reaches into the family dinner table.

Where it still applies, and if kids were to report their parents for their quote-unquote hateful beliefs if that's what they've been taught in school or hateful beliefs, then their parents could be ended up in trouble for what they've said there too.
I think it's a very far-reaching law.
It is something to be concerned about.

And it's frightening that a government are trying to legislate feelings.
Maybe the first government in the world to say a certain feeling or a certain emotion is wrong.
I guess we'll be told what emotions are right and you must feel those emotions at certain times.
And then it falls on the police and in some ways although it's the bobby on the beat that they will have to implement this.

They're probably thinking this there are no guidelines this is not explained properly and it it's dangerous.

We see it time and time again.
Legislation coming in that's worded so badly, so widely, that actually it's up to any individual.
And on a Monday someone could be arrested,  on a Tuesday they're not and that's frightening.
I guess no safeguards and it's so subjective.

Yeah, that's right.
I mean we've seen this actually with hate speech laws across the world, so we kind of have a flavour of where this is going already.

ADF International was supporting a case in Finland and still is a politician a parliamentarian of 20 years and a former Home Secretary, and a grandmother mother.
Paivi Razanen, tweeted in 2019, she tweeted a Bible verse and she challenged her church leadership as to whether they should really have sponsored the Pride parade in Helsinki.

She felt that that was perhaps an inappropriate thing for a church to be doing.
She was charged for hate speech.
She was dragged to the court.

She's been acquitted twice at the district court and the court of appeal, and her case has been appealed a third time to the Supreme Court in Finland.
The charge that she has been, or what she's been charged under carries a potential sentence of up to two years in prison.

We don't think that she would get the full sentence, but the fact that that hangs in the air is quite phenomenal.
We've seen where this lands of grandmothers being dragged through courts for years for tweeting their beliefs.

Again, in Mexico we've seen this with politicians out there who we've supported, who were convicted actually of gender gender-based political violence for having expressed their beliefs on biological reality.

Their are cases being appealed to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, but there are two politicians whose careers have been severely jeopardised because they simply tweeted their well-founded beliefs about reality.
They spoke the truth.
We know where this goes.
We know how the story ends.
For Scotland and Ireland are now looking at putting in place their own hate speech law as well.

It is concerning, but we're going to have to wait and see how this shakes out.
Of course, like you say, it comes down often to an individual police decision on the day, and Police Scotland are now a centralised unit.

There's no kind of peer review between different forces in Scotland.
It really is down to just one hive mind making the decision on what could count as offensive in the future.

The police recently in Scotland said that they were no longer going to be investigating over 24,000 crimes including some examples of theft, because they simply don't have the resources, but we're told that they are going to be investigating every single report of hate speech that comes in.
And we've had over 4,000 so far.

Bear in mind that this law has been enacted for four days.
If you can compare the before and after the effect this is going to have on our resources of policing in the country when it comes into looking about who said what on Twitter.

It's a phenomenally interesting place for a country to be, but we're going to see how it shakes out in the next few weeks, I imagine.

It really is weird whenever politicians are more concerned of hurdy words than rape, because the rape convictions are, what, one and a half percent, I think, is a conviction from an allegation to conviction.

And yet, it's falling over themselves to find a word that may cause someone offence somewhere and to go after that.

It is unbelievable the waste of finance and police resources of going after something while you've got these massive problems in society and simply turning a blind eye to it.

Yeah, no, absolutely.
And you're right.
Hate isn't a human emotion.
It's a motion of the human heart.
It'd be as well trying to ban greed or envy or lust.
Hamza Yusuf.
Justin Trudeau.
Simon Harris.
All of these guys can try to ban hate, but that's not essentially what it's going to make the difference in society.

Do we have societal issues, societal tensions, of course we do, but resolving those conflicts is going to take more conversation not less.
Telling people that that their views or that they are bad people for expressing beliefs is not going to be helpful in engaging those societal conversations.
If we let bad speech go underground and be hidden, then it festers into even worse speech for the issues that the government is concerned about.

Having conversations out in the open is really the best place for a democracy to be.
We need to have these types of conversations and the marketplace of ideas will sort itself out.

The ideas that need to be fleshed out can be done so with debate and discussion.
I think that's the direction the West needs to be headed.
It was certainly historically where we seem to be headed for a long time when we've taken this U-turn back to a kind of more authoritarian, censorial approach, which I think is going to not have the desired consequences of our government.

I want to move on to life.
Lots of conversation, probably in the UK more on what they call assisted dying or assisted suicide, which is assisting someone to end their life, so to murder.

We've seen that, especially probably during COVID, it's becoming even a bigger conversation.
I see a number of MPs just get rid of the older members of society and that fixes us, the survival of the fittest.
It's a frightening.

I guess,  where the conversation goes when you don't have any Christian ethos or belief of the value of life.

But the value of life at the beginning as well; I mentioned to you before we went on we've had uh some great individuals: Scott Klusendorf and Seth Gruber, and Janique Stewart.
It's always great to drop this in the conversation, because when you look at the other alternative media, I think this is a topic that people are afraid to go on and choice seems to trump life and the right to the individual.

Maybe you want to touch on what the situation is in the U.K for me for U.S audience who aren't sure.

What is the life abortion situation in the U.K?

Legally speaking our uh our laws in effect allow abortion for any reason up till
24 weeks.

Then after 24 weeks there's three reasons why it could go all the way up to birth.
One is in cases of disability.

For the child, one is if the mother's life is at risk, and one is if there's a risk of serious risk of physical or mental injury to her as a result of the pregnancy.
That's as things stand now.

We are are a bit of an outlier in Europe.
Average kind of benchmark for European abortion caps between 12 and 15 weeks.
At 24, we're almost double.

We are much, much more liberal in our abortion law than others.
But an amendment has been put forward as part of the criminal justice bill in our parliament by a politician who would like to see abortion decriminalised all the way up till birth in the UK for any reason.

Whether you count yourself as pro-life, or pro-choice, or pro-abortion or whatever label you hold, this iteration of an abortion law is extremely dangerous and
should be opposed.
The reason is that it puts women's lives in danger.
We have a scheme in the UK called Pills by Post.

Since the pandemic and now permanently, a woman can call up an abortion provider, say that she is less than 10 weeks pregnant, and the abortion provider will be able to administer her by the post Misoprostol pills for her to perform her own abortion at home.

The danger with this, of course, without saying obvious, is also that a woman can essentially acquire these medicines very easily, even after the 10-week mark all the way up to the 40-week mark.
And this has happened in various instances.

There was a case over the summer of a lady called Carla Foster who performed an abortion by obtaining pills in this way on, I think it was, between a 33 and 35 week
old baby I believe.

She had a very traumatic experience performing her own abortion in her bathroom at home and she talked she later named her baby who she had to give birth to of course, after having performed the abortion she named her baby Lily.
She talks about the traumatic experience that was.

Now, if we we take away laws which prevent women from doing this, because a small number of women have got around the system to do it.
If we take away laws that prevent many more women from doing it, we'll have so many more women like Carla who obtain a very dangerous style of abortion at
home like this.

It would be an absolutely traumatic result for women.
So, no matter what your ideological stance on abortion is, this is something to write
to your MP and oppose, because no woman should be going through an abortion alone at home.

We're told it was meant to be safe, legal and rare.
There seems to be none of those things.
Now, there's also been another amendment proposed to the same bill that MPs will have to pick between.

The second amendment looks at this 24-week mark and says, well, hang on.
This means that now that babies are surviving from 22 weeks outside the womb.
We now have situations where in the same hospital; there can be a woman having a 23, 24 week baby aborted whilst the same age of baby is fighting for their lives and we're supporting them to survive.

How can we just be discriminating against these two children simply because one is wanted and one is not.
That doesn't seem just at all.

They're taking the very they made the very modest and moderate proposal of simply lowering that limit on abortion from 24 down to 22 in line of the current state of viability in the UK.

Now, of course this still makes us very much out of sync with Europe which is 12 to 15 weeks, but it is a step towards a more humane view of life.
I think it's something that should be definitely supported by all MPs.
Again, it's not even a defining ideological stance.
It's not the Only pro-life.
People should think this...

It is just a reasonable measure to take to ensure that babies of all, at least at the same age, are treated equally.

That no baby's life is being ended in the womb that could be surviving on the outside.
My hope is that plenty of people in the U.K will see the sense in this, see the justice in this, and write to their MP and encourage them to support the amendment for 22 weeks and opposed the amendment for 40 weeks.

Sorry, that was a lot of information in one go, but I hope that it came across okay.

No, it did.
And the changes in legislation are often incremental that you don't go for it straight away.
It is a conversation and slowly you have to move people with you.

But it's interesting, the state, the conversation in the legislation, acouple of states on the heartbeat legislation, and that goes around actually what is life?
Can we define what life is?

And I've been perplexed with conversations with those who are are absolute desperate for abortion.

It's actually something that people are really fired up with, certainly in the left.
And I remember touching on different issues, and it's fine, you touch on the issue of abortion, how dare you stop a woman taking the life of her child.

But that conversation of life, and I don't see that as much in the UK, because the Harvard legislation, what is life?

You feel the pulse, actually the heart's beating, and that makes sense.
I would go down to conception, but hey, let's have a conversation.

But no one seems to understand what life is and that seems to be the crux of the problem, I think.

Yeah, and I think ideologically we're always put into this debate mould where we're told that we have to pick between a woman or her baby, you know, it's like pro-woman or pro-baby.

Some people say that, you know, we should protect the woman at all costs and therefore if she doesn't want to have a pregnancy in her body at at all, then like it's absolutely her choice and the child gets no rights.

There's not many people who go to the full extreme of saying that at any point up to birth, she should be able to make that choice or even after birth.
Very few people would go to that extreme.
But there are some.

And on the other side, we have this kind of polar opposite opinion of only the child's life matters.
And the woman doesn't matter at all.
And forget about her.
We just have to protect this baby's life.

I personally never met anyone who said that, but I'm sure that there have been instances where that's come across.
And that's obviously not right either.

We're kind of locked into this strange polarization where actually very few people think on these extremes.

And I think what most of us want to see is an option where we can protect both.
Can we find solutions where we can protect both mother and baby?

And I think that's what needs to come through far more in this debate into the mainstream and stop feeding this idea that we can now just have to pick a tribe and in fact look to solutions where we can support mothers and support babies far better.
I know the U.S have a great network of pregnancy help centres, which I think do a great service to women, because many, you know, in one in five women in the U.K who have had abortions say that they didn't want to, they felt pressured or
pushed into it.

So, if we had better options of support, and I think we can all work towards situations where we can be doing more to support and encourage women to take the empowered step to choose motherhood, to choose life.
In a culture where so often they're told that the only option is abortion and that they have no future apart from that.

So, I'd love to see further changes in our culture towards supporting women.

And I guess the danger is the organisations that provide abortion make money from it.
BPAS are not going to provide a conversation with a mother saying, actually, these are your options.

The option for them is one thing because that's their business.
We don't seem to have a, mothers don't seem to be able to have a conversation, actually, of the options.

And it seems to be if a mother is thinking of ending the life of her child, then she's kind of funnelled into one direction, and that is abortion.
I think that probably needs to change.

I guess that partially is the role of the church to have that conversation.

Yeah, there's a lot more we can be doing for sure.
I think we can all agree that women deserve far better than abortion.
When we think about it no little girl ever grows up saying I would love to have an abortion when I'm older.

It's never an ideal choice so, the fact that we are in a culture where one in three or one in four women are ending up having abortion is a great failure on society.
It's a great failure in the rhetoric that, you know, my body my choice is so empowering when in fact it's really allowed men and family members and people that were meant to be rallying around women in crisis pregnancies to say, well, your body, your choice, your problem, I'm out.

And the kind of abandoned woman to a responsibility that was always meant to be shared.

So, I do think there's a lot more churches and charities and things to be doing, but we also, we do have great charities in the U.K who do volunteer support.
Outside abortion facilities and have made a real life difference in the lives of many women who have chosen help and decided that they would like to continue their pregnancies if only they could have support.

But unfortunately, we're seeing a clampdown on their work at a governmental level, which I think is the most anti-woman policy that this government has ever proposed.

Completely. And you've written to Rishi Sunak. Have you got a reply back to your letter?

I did not.
You know it's so funny I I wrote that letter it wasn't an ADF initiative I would just write to my MP, but my MP is standing down and I knew that she wouldn't agree with me anyway on this.

At the last minute I said, oh I'll write to Rishi, and I put it on on Twitter.
So thank you for saying and noticing that, I'm glad I'm glad somebody did.
Yes, no.

I wrote to Rishi because I think that we've had a quote-unquote conservative government for 14 years in this country.
But in the course of those years, we have seen the destruction of the family.
We've seen no support for mothers.

Our maternity policy, in essence, has really amounted to just cheaper childcare, which, of course, cheaper childcare is fine and good.
But many women feel that they would love to be able to invest more in their families, in their children by staying home, by having tax rewards for being able to put those years into early motherhood.

Yet we have very little support for the idea of a family other than getting women back into work as soon as possible.

We've had an abortion rate that's only growing under the Conservative government.
We've had pills by post implemented by this government and now potentially abortion up to birth under the the criminal justice bill amendment.

So I think it's an absolute blight on any party that calls themselves conservative, who should be standing up for family, for freedom of speech, for life and for cherishing these values that are so important to so many of us in society.
I felt frustrated that that had not been done.
And so I wrote a letter.

If only in the manifesto, all lives matter and both lives matter were two policies, I think, actually would have a very different society.

You know, it's funny, in the Conservative manifesto; I checked in the 2019 manifesto and family is mentioned dozens of times as support for the family as this campaign was promised to us.

But I personally have not seen any measures taken to support and uphold families.
I've only seen the opposite.

So I think that's a real miss by a government who could have done much better.

Yeah, if only we could listen to Hungary and have the most family friendly policies in Europe, it could be quite different.

I saw you, I think, recently, back in March, you'd been with, I think, Right to Life had been outside Parliament, highlighting what was happening.

Just mention that because it's important for the public to come around initiatives and to try and let MPs know that there is vocal support for policies like this.

Yeah, absolutely.
I really encourage everybody in the U.K to be writing to their MP about this.
The group right to life.

I think it's https://righttolife.org.uk, have a tool on their website where you can very easily write to your MP.

Put in your postcode and they'll let you know who it is and provide you with information that you can send on to your MP.
It's very easy, just takes a couple of clicks and, yeah, even if you want to do it in a different matter you just get in touch.

I think there's so many, I wasn't really aware until recently about the number of methods we do have available to us to engage in really important decisions that are made in Parliament.

Writing to your MP can make a difference if they're on the fence, or at least letting them know that people in their constituency do care about this issue.
It's something important to them and they of course are elected to represent you.
There's also things like public consultations that frequently come up, and it's always worth just filling out that consultation and making your voice heard and engaging with these tools that we have before us, because other people do.
And so if we're not voicing our own opinion in these measures where the government
is looking for opinions, we won't be heard.

I really encourage everyone to engage with those tools.

Completely.
And one MP who I saw you retweeted, a former guest of ours,  Andrew Bridgen.
His tweet was there should not be double standards when it comes to free speech, yet repeatedly we see evidence that Christian expression is harshly censored while the right to voice more fashionable views is protected.

This was a sign, someone holding up a sign if you want to talk you can talk, and this I think fits in with the buffer, so do you want to fill the audience in on that?

Yeah, of course he was referring to the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt Livia has been volunteering to help women outside an abortion facility for quite a few years now.

She's a retired medical scientist, and so she frequently has has held a sign that says here to talk if you want, or she's provided information about a helpline and just giving women that chance to talk over their options to hear about resources available to them, if they want, to consider keeping their child if it's if they're at an abortion, but they're not sure about whether they want to go ahead.
It's a chance just to look at other options.

I think you know pro-life or pro-choice,  especially if you're pro-choice, you should be pro having having these conversations, looking at all the true choices.

However, Livia was recently charged and now faces trial because she held this sign near an abortion facility in Bournemouth, where there is a buffer zone, or a censorship zone, as we sometimes like to call them.
Placed around the clinic.

These buffer zones have been rolled out in five places across England and Wales so far, and under new legislation coming in soon, they will be rolled out across the country, and it makes it a crime to engage in influencing within 150 metres of a clinic.
The law, the regulation that Livia was charged under prevents her from agreeing or engaging in disapproval or approval of abortion.

So again, it's very, in both instances, it's very vague, ambiguous language and the authorities have deemed in Bournemouth that just by offering to talk.
They're here to talk, if you want; that Livia has committed a crime.

We're thrilled to be defending or to be supporting Livia's legal defence, because we believe that everybody should have the right to be engaged in these conversations.
Nobody should be on trial just for having a belief about abortion or for offering to talk in any circumstance.
The UK has public streets.
We've always been able to express our views.

We have a culture of democracy here and we can't understand why some issues
are banned in certain places just because the government might not like what
we have to say.

So, that's one to watch out for.
We're grateful that five politicians last week, as you alluded to, have spoken out
for Libya.

They've seen what happened in Bournemouth and they're aware that the new legislation coming in will roll this out across the U.K and we could see many more cases like Libya's.
We've already seen a few.

There was a priest, Father Sean Gough, who was arrested and put on trial, unfortunately vindicated, for holding a sign saying, praying for free speech.

There was Isabel von Spruce, of course, most famously, also supported by ADF UK, who was arrested, actually twice, for a viral video for praying silently inside her head.
So, this law has a very far-reaching consequence, even into the minds of individuals who are poor life.

So something that whatever you think about abortion, we should be concerned about any form of censorship in our country and be able to keep those conversations open.

Well, that, I mean, no one would have five years ago have said actually praying silently would be illegal in the UK.

But in effect, that buffer zone legislation forced through by my MP, sadly to say, actually is, it means that prayer is now criminalised 150 yards from every abortion centre.

That's how it's been acted on by the police.

Well, we do have an opportunity to engage here for the better.
So, the legislation that has been passed by the government bans influencing, like we talked about, very vague or unclear exactly what this means.

Now, because it's so unclear the government are going to provide or the home office are going to provide guidance within the next few weeks to explain to police and prosecutors exactly how they should act outside of buffer zones and we know of course that freedom of thought is protected absolutely in human rights law as incorporated into the U.K law as well.

It is wrong that Isabel was arrested for praying inside her head and the government have a chance to clarify here what the line is for being able to at least hold thoughts and conversations in public.

Now, let's be clear for a second.
We all disagree with harassment or intimidation or violence or anything like that.
Nobody should be engaging in harassment of women in any situation.
Of course, not here either.

So, we're all comfortable with laws, which have already existed for a while, that
ban that.

But the government must clarify that while this legislation applies to harassment,
It must not apply to silent prayer or simply peaceful prayer on the street or conversations like the one that Livia was trying to hold.

A consensual conversation between two adults.
So, that kindness is going to drop fairly soon.
You know, there's still opportunities to engage with that.
Again, you write to MP and encourage them to contact the Home Office about this and encourage them to do the right thing and clarify that we need freedom of thought and freedom of conversation.

I mean, why not write to the Home Office as well and give your opinion?
There is a chance still that we'll be able to preserve this and we'll have something to watch out for in the next few weeks.

And just to finish, Lois, let me reiterate your comment about engage with MPs.
You mentioned there was five and one of them, the awesome Carla Lockhart,
DUP from Northern Ireland.

And you realize there are voices, there are MPs who actually do have a belief.
They are conviction politicians and they may be fewer of them than there used to be,
but actually they are still there.

And I think it's vital for us, whether you're watching it as Christians or not,
whether you just believe in these fundamental rights that actually do engage with your MP, because you will you will find there are good MPs and you may be blessed by actually having a good MP different to Lois or myself that maybe don't have.

Yeah Lois, there is, just want to reiterate that because there are good MPs and they will be fearless on speaking up on these issues.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely I mean the the buffer zones debate in parliament before it was passed It was a very fiery debate and we were encouraged, although unfortunately the vote did not go in our favour when it came to the amendment.

We were encouraged about the number who did stand up and in fact mentioned Isabel von Spruce by name in their speeches.

So, we can see that these stories do have an impact.
And hopefully because of the attention that has been shown to Isabel and the unjustifiable arrest that was made for the thoughts that she had inside her head.
We hope this information will trickle through to MPs and government officials in places of power and we will be able to protect that freedom to pray silently at least.

Lois, thank you so much for your time. It's great to have you on.

As I said at the beginning, I followed ADF closely and people can find all the links.
If they just go to your Twitter handle, they can find the links for ADF and find the links for your Substack and everything is there and it is in the description.

So thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much. Thank you for all that you do.