Jenrick welcomes moves by police to investigate man wearing guillotine t-shirt
Robert Jenrick has said he is “pleased” that the police are investigating a man who wore a t- shirt depicting a guillotine and said it was important that Reform ‘is a party of free speech’.
Speaking on GB News he said: “I’m pleased that police are taking seriously the individual who actually wore the T-shirt because that’s clearly by far the more serious offence in the context of Ann Widdecombe’s murder just a few weeks ago.
“The hundreds of death threats that Nigel has received, including some which are very serious indeed; as you know a man was recently arrested for threatening to kill him. Another man is in jail, an illegal migrant, for literally coming across the channel with the express purpose of killing Nigel.
“In that context, it cannot be right for somebody to be sporting that T-shirt and then putting it out on social media. But whether Zack Polanski should be charged or not, it was clearly a very foolish thing for him to do.
“His three quarters of a million followers on Instagram, that’s a lot of people saw that, and I thought it was very poor of him last night to go on to telly to say that it was a mistake, but not just have the common decency to apologise to Nigel Farage for that.
“And almost to make it seem as if his dislike of Nigel, Reform and our politics was so great that he couldn’t bring himself just to say a simple sorry.
“The easiest thing in the world would have just been to say sorry, then you might have felt that it was heartfelt, but it didn’t come across that way.
“I think that [Polanski’s] a bit of a nasty piece of work. He parades himself as someone who you know loves everyone, is kind, he wears his lanyards and his badges and so on.
“But actually, what do we know about him? Well, he keeps very poor company. You know, his voters seem to include Islamist extremists and God knows what. I think people are seeing through Zack Polanski.
“I think it’s very important that Reform is a party of free speech. We cannot be a party that wants to police tweets and kind of hurty words and offensive things. That’s the opposite of what Reform stands for.
“But there is a line to be drawn where it genuinely incites violence or even murder, and I do think this crossed that line.
“I mean, remember this is a T-shirt with the guillotine dripping in blood. We’re preparing this for Nigel, and the context is incredibly important here. That this is an individual, Nigel Farage, who I think we can all agree is in genuine danger, as evidenced by the people who have been arrested and are in jail for trying to kill him.
“So it was deeply inappropriate. It’s obviously up to the police to decide how they handle this. I don’t want it to be handled in a two-tier fashion, where something against Reform is handled very differently to Lucy Connolly and plenty of other examples that we could name.
