Reform deputy leader Richard ‘Big Dicky’ Tice is getting peculiarly exercised about the case of an anonymous X user who has had a conspiracy-fuelling post reported to the police.
‘Cillian’, a blue-ticked non-UK based account with 175,000 followers and an avatar of Jesus Christ, posted lies about charity the Welsh Refugee Council (WRC).
The account posted a video showing schoolgirls welcoming refugees to the country and explaining the help they could get from the charity, with ‘Cillian’ claiming it was “using 12-year-old girls in ads meant to entice migrant men to come to Wales. Most members of this council are from the Middle East, India and Pakistan”.
The video, however, was made in December 2022 by Year 7 students from Brynteg School in Bridgend and was aimed at the women and children then arriving from Ukraine. The WRC was barely involved, not that that stopped assorted numbskulls on Elon Musk’s hellsite threatening to kill its staff.
The death threats have been reported to South Wales Police, who say that “the matter is being looked into”.
This prompted Tice to post: “If true what is the South Wales police force playing at? Is Wales now an Orwellian, anti free speech dictatorship? This madness is why @reformparty_uk is doing so well in Wales. Voters are sick of this wasteful nonsense.”
Quite why Big Dicky is so concerned about a case entirely unrelated to his Bognor and Skegness constituency is unclear. Surely it can’t be because one of the many other conspiracy theorists who shared the post online was one Isabel Oakeshott – journalist and partner of Richard Tice!
Oakeshott’s retweet of these dangerous fabrications has so far attracted 1.5 million views. Even though the post has been exposed as false, she has failed to delete her amplification of it and instead whined on X that “in this dark country of ours, the cops are still coming after people for what they call ‘spreading misinformation’ on immigration and other matters. Otherwise known as ‘telling uncomfortable truths’…”
Isabel has yet to share her thoughts on what should happen when the uncomfortable truths aren’t actually true…