Councillors defended their decision to ban an anti-vax conference from taking place in Totnes Civic Hall, during a heated debate with event organiser Stephen Hopwood.

Dr Hopwood, who formed the New World Alliance in September 2021, booked the hall last November for a self-penned ‘truth conference,’ featuring speakers including Gareth Icke, son of conspiracy theorist David Icke.

But the Paige Adams Trust, to which councillors are automatically elected as trustees, overwhelmingly voted to veto the gathering after receiving “multiple” complaints from residents.

Speaking at the town’s recent full council meeting, Dr Hopwood reported the conference went ahead at an alternative venue instead, and invited councillors to watch it online to satisfy themselves the speakers are not “anti-semitic, white supremacist or fascist.”

He then asked members to revoke their decision and permit him to hold the conference in the town hall later this year.

Demanding answers, Dr Hopwood said: “I would like to ask you why on earth you felt it was appropriate to cancel the conference, and whether you would be so kind as to allow me to have the conference in the new year?

“I was very concerned about freedom of speech and freedom of assembly both of which you feel willing to prohibit in our community.

“You prejudged it, it was prejudice and that’s not on.”

Cllr David Matthews admitted he was the only councillor who voted for the conference, in order to “uphold the principle of free speech.”

He said: “I would rather judge what someone says after they say it than before they’ve said it. To do that is bizarre and totally inappropriate.”

Cllr Emily Price asserted people do not have to promote opinions they do not agree with, and that councillors did not ban the conference, they just chose not to host it.

Cllr Price said: “The people who made the decision were able to access the very widely available material by the speakers on that subject, so it was quite clear what they were going to say.

“Wrongly or rightly, we decided we did not want to host that conference; we didn’t ban it, we didn’t tell anyone else not to host it, we just chose not to host it.

“That is not the same thing as stopping free speech. Any business, any charity, any venue, any web platform, any newspaper can chose what it wants to provide a platform for and we can too, and we did.”

Cllr Price continued: “As a charity governed by a statutory organisation, we have a responsibility to go with a working definition of truth.

“And in my view, hence my vote, a working definition is through a scientific consensus.

“Now, I understand that you have found a few people who disagree with scientific consensus, but in the same way that if you add up a hundred numbers a hundred times and get the same result 99 of them, if anyone is arguing for the number you come up with once, there’s a sign of some kind of bias.”

Also responding to Dr Hopwood, who stood as a Freedom Alliance candidate in Devon County Council’s May 2021 elections, Mayor Cllr Ben Piper said: “We are responsible for the wider community, and Dr Hopwood – so called – I will put it to you that actually you got 189 votes out of three-and-a-half thousand.

“You don’t count as a major force in terms of the voice of the community, and that’s called democracy.

“We had all kinds of representations from all kinds of different areas who formed everyone’s personal decision to vote against you using that space.

“Normalising a platform for you in this community was not considered to be in the interests of the community in terms of our response to our directive, and that is democracy.”