'If Tories want less police paperwork they need to stop sharing misinformation on X' - by Emily Maitlis
Emily Maitlis reacts to elected officials sharing misinformation on social media relating to migrant hotels and asks the question – what are our politicians really for?
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In brief…
- As protests broke out outside hotels housing migrants across the UK, Conservative MPs shared misinformation on social media, with the police stepping in online to correct those sharing right-wing propaganda..
- Emily Maitlis asks what the purpose of our elected officials really is, if they can’t be trusted in moments like this.
What is a politician for? That’s not meant to be a broadside. It’s not a cheap swipe of invective against an increasingly beleaguered profession. It’s a question that seems to take us to the heart of today’s hottest of hot-button issues – asylum, migration and protest.
Do we look to our politicians to calm things down, or stoke things up? Do we need leaders or listeners? And if they are listening to worries based on conspiracies that they themselves have spread - well… does that still count as listening? Monday morning, after a weekend of protests outside migrant hotels in various parts of the UK, began with Shadow Justice Minister Robert Jenrick telling us the UK was ‘like a tinder box’.
I always assumed a tinder box was a metaphor for something highly flammable, but the literal meaning is ‘a box containing tools with which to start a fire – flint, steel etc – essential before the invention of the match. In this light, the Jenrick catchphrase works much better: The box (tinder) enables you to start the fire.
It’s the verbal Zippo he is never without. And a certain few of his colleagues seemed keen to help with a few arson-adjacent tweets. That is, until, they were forced by the MET Police to retract and delete them. Nadhim Zahawi – the actual former Chancellor of the actual UK posted on X that ‘the reason why the people of the UK will revolt’ is because police had ‘banned protests outside the migrant hotel in Canary Wharf’. He was quoting journalist and author Isabel Oakeshott, writer of the David Cameron 'autobiography' with the tale of the pigs head, and the person who leaked private messages from Matt Hancock sent during the Covid 19 pandemic.
This latest claim was (gasp!) untrue. No ban. And it fell to the police – the people in whose hands we place the dolling out of law and order – to correct a man whose parliamentary status denotes him as ‘the Right honourable’. Neil O Brien, once on the softly spoken, more considered wing of the Conservative party, now Shadow Minister for Development posted: “Joke, regime, we must end it all”, because he’d seen a video claiming migrants in Canary Wharf were working illegally. The video came from a right-wing X account.
The police had to put O Brien right too.
Nick Timothy – one-time adored advisor to Theresa May, now an elected MP, quoted another video claiming to show an illegal Deliveroo worker getting a police escort and wrote: “This sums it up… The police… Do they even know the law? Facilitate illegal working. Is the state working for us or for the people leeching off us”.
Nick gets to claim the moral high ground in this dubious cesspit of sewage by at least having the guts to delete the tweet once he was shown it was incorrect.
Once again, it fell to the police – not just to stop protesters or counter-protesters getting hurt, or indeed migrants inside a hotel – but to cut off the supply of lies spreading from our elected officials. Stopping misinformation that could cost lives. Last time I checked the Conservatives were berating the police for spending too much time on paperwork. They could make everyone’s job easier if they just stayed off their socials.
But back to Mr Jenrick, who made a series of claims this morning with hard stats to back them up, before admitting he “didn’t have good data”, before telling us he had to be “honest with the public… whose patience had snapped”.
You’ve told everyone they’re being banned, conned, lied to, and threatened. And then you wonder why they turn violent. That’s not honesty. It’s an election campaign. When Nigel Farage talks about a country on the brink of civil disobedience it’s not a warning, it’s an invitation.
It is absolutely ok for the public to wonder what’s happening to their town centres, their hotels, their services and their taxes. It’s ok to ask about the toll of irregular migration on the communities in which they live. Those questions deserve answers, facts and data –, not dodgy videos.
So back to my first question, what is a politician for? Leading, or misleading?
Once you give up on reality and replace it with incitement, fear and performative outrage you’re sending out one really clear message: They’re not doing this for us. They’re doing it to help themselves.