Early on Friday, 10 October 2025, just hours before the start of the FiLiA women’s rights conference there that day, a group called Bash Back vandalised the Brighton Centre, as reported by the BBC.
Later that day, Sian Berry, Green MP for Brighton, posted on X that
The choice of Brighton was clearly provocative from organisers and the problems caused predictable.
The X thread is worth reading in full. Berry continued:
I raised this with the Council, including the leader, months ago and offered my help to prevent all this. Very disappointing not to have had this taken up.
Respondents naturally posed questions and comments about what Berry’s ‘help’ would have been:
And what exactly did ‘your help’ look like? Your help to ban the conference? Your advice to continue to look away as men terrorise women – no worse, you continuing to smear the women as the problem?
You can’t ban people from Brighton, Sian.
Rather than issue a statement in support of the conference, Berry chose to post a message that it was ‘provocative’. She made no criticism of Bash Back.
Bash Back describes itself as a ‘trans-led direct action group combatting the rising tide of bigotry in the UK’. Its attack on FiLiA follows the one during the summer, when the group vandalised Wes Streeting’s constituency office in Ilford, as reported by The Telegraph on 1 August 2025.
It has published an ‘action guide’ doc at www.transbashback.com/actionguide.pdf. For the record, here are some pages from the action guide. It’s nice that they ‘do not condone causing physical harm to any human being’.
