Well, well, well. Recently in a Twitter exchange, the ‘Official EDL’ account decided to call TELL MAMA ‘liars’ for working with a local police force on alleged hate speech tweets that Tommy Robinson had been promoting through his personal account in 2012. In the bundle of tweets were also those from the ‘Official EDL’ account, which many of us can agree, are sometimes imflammatory and denigratory to all Muslims, rather than extremists within Muslim communities which the EDL says it is targeting.
So, here we go. Over the space of July to September 2012, members of the public were sending in tweets from Tommy Robinson to TELL MAMA, some of which were being targeted at Muslim women who were deeply offended by the sexist and prejudiced tweets that they were getting and which they believed were hate speech. Over this period, this information was sent into the police leading to a formal interview with Tommy Robinson. Ever the ‘courageous patriot’, Mr Robinson took the fifth as they say in the US, (don’t mention it, sore subject for him), and said nothing. The investigation was dropped with a list of reasons provided to TELL MAMA. In total, 40 separate pieces of evidence were provided to the police force in question.
We believed that the judgement of the local force on this issue was wrong. Barrister’s opinion confirmed that the force could have done more in relation to the case. We have passed this opinion to the force concerned and the detailed analysis has also been provided to the Crown Prosecution Service and we have asked for a review of the evidence and the process conducted by the local force. We await a decision on this within the next few weeks. Suffice as to say that the next time the ‘Official EDL’ account shoots off the hip with a libellous statement, we hope that they seriously consider the legal implications.