We The Voters Will Decide Who Is A Fit Person To Be A Councillor...

...the MoS can now reveal that days before Mr Stevens was arrested, a Northamptonshire Police detective phoned Jonathan Ekins, a former local Tory mayor for Wellingborough, and allegedly told him Mr Stevens should be 'removed' as a councillor because of his views. In a statement to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, Mr Ekins said Detective Constable Amelia Thompson told him Mr Stevens was about to be arrested 'for a serious offence'. 'She said in their opinion the police felt that he was not a fit person to be a councillor,' he said. 'DC Thompson said Anthony Stevens should be removed from being a councillor.'

It's the sort of massive overreach that you'd expect from the police force of some benighted Third World basket case of a country.  Which I suppose we now are...

It is claimed that in a later call, DC Thompson told him police had learnt Mr Stevens had attended a meeting at the same time as a Labour councillor thought to have complained about his tweets. This, she said, was a breach of his bail conditions and she warned him officers would arrest Mr Stevens 'on the spot' if he turned up at another meeting attended by the Labour councillor.

And Elkins - surprisingly, for a modern Tory - decided he wasn't going to take this lying down: 

Mr Ekins said: 'My response was, rightly, to remind DC Thompson that she would be welcome to try but that, as chair of the committee, I have the right to … instruct security officials to remove the police for public disruption of a democratically constituted meeting.'

I expect the useless Home Sec is letting the IOPC run with this one, but he should be worried that anyone would think that this was within the police's purview. 

Andrea Williams, of the Christian Legal Centre, who is representing Mr Stevens, said: 'What happened undermined and trampled on our law, democracy and freedoms on every level.'

Indeed it did. This DC should be directing traffic on Gruinard for the rest of her career.