Why did the police follow up a UKIP complaint about a blogger?

Last week a good friend of mine (who has previously guest posted on Hynd’s Blog) posted the original of this poster (minus the sources). What ensued was a discussion about the origins of some of the claims.

It is with interest then that I heard this morning about the chap who posted this alternative poster (trying to ascertain which claims were true and which were not) being visited from the police (you can read his whole account here) in relation to the poster.

In his account he says that:

‘they [the 2 police officers] said this was in relation to a complaint that had been made by a certain political party in relation to tweets I had published about them’

This seems bonkers doesn’t it? UKIP, lodging a complaint with the police (as far as I know this guy hasn’t broken any laws) against someone who has tried to reference a poster that was attacking them? And then, either more strangely, the police actually following it up.

Either way, both his local MP (Lib Dem Julian Huppert) and Jenny Jones (Green in the House of Lords) have promised to follow this up on his behalf.

And there are some interesting questions that hopefully one or both of them will ask. Like, why were the police following up a non-legal complaint from a political party?

I am no expert here but surely this cannot be normal procedure can it?

I will look into it some more and post any follow up information below.

UPDATE:

A police statement (quoted by The Guardian) says that he has done nothing wrong but fails to say why the police officers were there to begin with:

A Cambridgeshire police spokesman said: “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.”

As for being told not to tweet about the visit, the spokesman added: “I don’t know if he’d have been told that. It’s certainly not the advice I would have given him. A gentleman has a right to free speech – absolute total right to free speech – we can’t tell people what they can and can’t say on the internet, as long as it’s within the law. We certainly don’t go to people’s houses and say: ‘You can’t tweet about this’. This is not 1930s Germany.”