A Reform UK councillor has spoken about her experiences after she was arrested at a Pride event over assault and criminal damage claims and had to wait six months before being told that the charges had been dropped.
In an exclusive interview with Patrick Christys Tonight on GB News, Amanda Clare said: “Well, I’m a local councillor. I’ve been a councillor since 2019 and I’ve been campaigning, really, within the council formally, around a lot of areas of policy capture to do with the LGBTQ+ agenda, if you like.
“So to do with looking after children and our policies there to do with schools and what guidance we give to schools in that regard, and lots of other areas as well, our safe spaces within leisure centres. Pride was just one of those areas that I was interested in.
“I’d seen some images of a drag queen on a stage with a bunch of children around him, and he was very scantily clad. And I thought, well, that raised the alarm bells a little bit. I wasn’t sure how appropriate that would be.
“I thought, well, I’ll go along. I’ll just have a look, and I’ll just see what’s going on for myself. And some of the things that I saw really concerned me, so I got photographs and I got video footage of those things, because the stuff that’s publicised around pride events often looks nice and shiny and happy, but you don’t always see some of the other stuff that’s going on.
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“The first Pride event that I went to was in Chester, and that was in 2023 and they had adult sex toys – they had sex toys on sale around children in a child-accessible area, some of which looked like children’s toys.
“They were like pastel colours, unicorn shapes and things like that. And they also had burlesque striptease in front of children as well at that event, as well as all of the ideological stuff.
“The next year at Winsford Pride, they had promotion of double breast amputations to children and things like that. It’s really quite severe. And actually, some of the stuff that we’ve seen at Pride events, the expletives that have been used…have been so extreme that we’ve been told as councillors that we can’t mention those words in council meetings because children might be watching the live stream. But on the other hand, it’s fine for children to see them somehow at Pride events.
“And so my involvement hasn’t really been to oppose Pride as such, it’s just been to go along as a councillor, to observe, to gather evidence if there are problems, and to push for policy changes, which I did actually manage to achieve.”
On her arrest, she said: “There were allegations of assault and criminal damage against me, but the officer that arrested me didn’t see this. He just took somebody’s word for it. This was after he’d seen myself and my friends incited against from the stage by the drag queen, by the drag act, who pointed me out and said that I was homophobic.
“We were then surrounded, three of us, female, my female friends, by 40 people shouting, waving progress Pride flags right in our faces, right in front of our cameras, pushed and shoved. My friend’s phone was knocked out of her hand. Someone live streamed me and accused me of being there to photograph other people’s children.
“This is what they do. It’s smear tactics all the way. The thing that happened by the side of the stage, because I am discussing with my lawyers what my next steps are, I don’t kind of want to go into detail around that, but the opposite of what I was accused of is what actually happened.”
She added: “I didn’t know how long this was going to drag on for, and I know the power of smear campaigns, so I didn’t want to kind of impose that onto my employer, which was Sarah Pochin at the time.
“I willingly resigned my post, but Reform retained the whip and have provided me with a lot of support behind the scenes, and are delighted with the outcome, with the fact that the charges have been dropped. There was never a case to answer.”
