Is Labour’s River ward candidate “4real”?

If I were newly-elected Labour councillor John Jones right about now, I would be?hastily?distancing myself from the man who has been selected by the Labour Party to stand alongside him next year.

Adetomi Yemi (Twitter name @Tomo4real) yesterday openly used a vile word (I’m not going to repeat it as it goes too far even for me, but let’s just say it starts with a ‘c’, and sounds an awful lot like ‘punt’) to describe Kelvin Mackenzie, the former editor of The Sun.

Indeed, Yemi, a third-year Politics and International Relations student at the University of Kent, has used the word before. On 14 October, he wrote: ‘Getting peed off by Max Hastings and David Willets’, immediately before using the same word to describe them. That that time he used?asterisks?to hide part of the word does not dilute its effect.

I’m always keen to support freedom of speech and freedom of expression, especially in political discourse, but for a supposedly serious candidate to use such a vile word so openly sends out entirely the wrong message both about them and their colleagues.

Defending himself on Twitter to a (rightfully)?disgusted?Conservative candidate, Yemi said ‘silence will be d best response for u. My twit page is for my expressions ONLY and I dont need to be formal, u need not read also.’

There is a fine line between personal views and indecent comments – and Yemi has done a tremendous triple jump way over it. Formality is not a pre-requisite for Twitter (its 140-character limit makes that difficult to achieve) but to suggest in some way that fault in being disgusted lies with the reader is naive at best, and just plain stupid at worst.

As candidates build up a local profile, the community (through individual investigation and media scrutiny) become more interested. The media will try to find any scandal possible (which a third-year politics student should, in theory, already know) and individuals will try to find out more about the character of their candidate.

Seeing someone looking for their vote using such a powerful expletive will certainly not win their support – whatever their leanings.

Update @ 01:15

One of the offending tweets has now been removed (though, naturally, I have kept copies of both), and Yemi is keen to impress that “My twitter page is for me and my friends ONLY so if you don’t like what I write, I REALLY CAN’T HELP YOU.”