26th September 2016

Thanks go to @AJobTracker – david morgan on Twitter – for checking the recently released crime stats for Wallasey, Merseyside – in particular the Manor Road / car park area where Angela Eagle’s constituency office is situated.  The police have now completed their investigation and nobody has been arrested in connection with the incident (criminal damage).

We won’t be linking to any mainstream media coverage of this incident because 12+ large circulation newspapers became foreseeably and avoidably laced with falsehoods at the time – and we at Wirral In It Together value our reputation.

The inaccurate content was centred around headlines faithfully telling us Angela Eagle’s constituency office – or the window to that office – had been smashed with a brick.

Even today, with our Daily Telegraph-centred complaint to IPSO now failed and forgotten, this post factual climate persists and dominates, with lies being built upon for their own ends by those with an axe to grind.

Ironically, here’s an excerpt from a Daily Telegraph article published yesterday written by prominent Scottish Tory – if that’s not a contradiction in terms – Ruth Davidson.  Upon reading this, we wonder if she has any measure on how damaging it could be to her own reputation to reheat proven falsehoods months later, then serve them up as ‘fact’:

The underlined section above helpfully links readers back to the original inaccurate July 2016 article that we complained about in August – the one that the press regulator (whose editors’ committee is chaired by the Daily Mail’s editor) sees no problems with.

So that’s the background to all this.  Now to the latest potential #Brickgate development.

Merseyside Police were reluctant to answer in full our five question FOI request placed on 2nd August 2016, preferring to keep it brief, stating ‘yes’ they turned up to the scene when somebody rang them.

We’ve since appealed to the Information Commissioner on 16th September but not received any response yet.

Following an initial confused reply, after internal review, Merseyside Police used just one exemption to withhold the information we were seeking – Section 30 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Given the above, I’d imagine the police are going to hold out at tribunal and will not want to provide a description of the alleged ‘brick’ or projectile. They’re also unlikely to confirm that it existed in the first place.

Guardian journalist Ewen Macaskill raised some very pertinent questions here regarding the existence of the mythical ‘brick’ – which only succeeded in shifting the spotlight onto Angela Eagle’s trusty media assistant Imran Ahmed and his dubious motivations.

Why the public servants at Merseyside Police would want to proceed down a path of denial, obfuscation and non-co-operation really is the classic “mystery wrapped in an enigma“.

…and advising us, presumably with a straight face, to search post factual content on the internet is a rather poor alternative to doing their duty and giving the public the facts.