A tweet, the police, and ten Ukip policies. It doesn’t sound like a particularly conventional formula for a crime drama, but a rather sinister-sounding story is currently unfolding from a blogger’s bedroom in Cambridgeshire that leaves both police and Ukip party officials with a number of pressing questions to answer.
Michael Abberton, whose blog is called Axe of Reason, tweeted out a fact-checked version of a poster listing ten controversial policies attributed to Ukip. Abberton, who describes himself on his blog as “Definitely biased to the left”, explained how he wanted to check the list of policies really belonged to the eurosceptic party, and so fact-checked each one, before tweeting it out last Monday.
Here’s the tweet:
10 Great Reasons to vote #UKIP. I don’t know who made it – so I referenced it from official #UKIP websites pic.twitter.com/GXnikZ3Blg
— Michael Abberton (@MichaelAbberton) May 5, 2014
Abberton then wrote a blog post on Sunday detailing how the police came round to his house on Saturday afternoon to question him about the tweet, and asked him to “take it down”, as well as not to make public the fact that they had come round to visit him.
The Cambridgeshire Police have confirmed to BuzzFeed today that they did indeed visit his home, commenting that it was to check whether offences had been committed under the Representation of the People Act, a law that deals with the electoral system:
We were called with a complaint about a message on social media at about 12.40pm on Friday. Inquiries were made as to whether any offences had been committed under the Representation of the People Act but none were revealed and no further action was taken…
And a spokesman for Cambridgeshire Police told the Guardian:
A Ukip councillor came across a tweet which he took exception to. The name of the person on the tweet was identified and that individual was spoken to. We looked at this for offences and there was nothing we could actually identify that required police intervention. Clearly, the councillor was unhappy about the tweets. If every political person was unhappy about what somebody else said about their views, we would have no politics.
Abberton’s MP, Lib Dem Julian Huppert, tells me he has written to the Cambridge area commander, and is “awaiting a response from her about exactly what happened”.
He is concerned that the police visit was inappropriate:
I struggle to see exactly what it could have been that would have been an offence in this case, and I’m looking forward to hearing the justification. Because otherwise from what I’ve seen, it does seem like an inappropriate for the police to be involved, and certainly Michael Abberton’s description of the conversation suggests that they went a lot further than just trying to establish if he’s committed an offence, but went to the level of asking him to take down the comments, not to tell anyone that they’d been round, various other things like that., which assuming that to be true, it is clearly inappropriate…
The clear question is whether there is a genuine allegation that he committed a criminal offence. And if there is such an allegation, then clearly it’s alright for the police to investigate it, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that there was a clear allegation of potential criminal activity. And it’s clearly inappropriate for the police to take action on political disagreement if there’s no real sense that there was a criminal activity involved, and having seen the tweets that he [Abberton] sent out, I can’t see in what way it would have violated the Representation of the People Act, I can’t see any way in which it could be seen as being threatening or abusive.
Huppert has been in touch with the blogger electronically this morning, and remarks that his constituent is “clearly concerned” about the situation. “The idea that this could be seen as intimidation, whether pushed by police officers or whether pushed by Ukip is clearly an alarming one,” he adds. “The role of the police is clearly to defend a free and open democracy, and given that I haven’t seen any detailed allegations that he’d committed any sort of offence, it does seem odd and inappropriate for the police to be questioning him like that, and I can see why people would find that very intimidatory.”
The Cambridge MP sees “a lot more scrutiny now of what people within Ukip are saying”, adding, “I can see that many of them are uncomfortable with being challenged on their manifesto and on comments that their spokespeople have made.”
Secretary of Ukip’s Cambridge branch, Peter Burkinshaw, says he hadn’t heard the story, not being “into social networking”, but comments: “I wouldn’t have thought it was criminal to tweet your opinion about something if it’s not slanderous. I don’t understand why the police would go round… In principle, if the man’s just voicing an opinion, I can’t see why it would involve the police at all.”
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