Corrections on the Frome UKIP poster
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Ukip councillor from Somerset claims Liberal Democrats 'hacked' his email to produce an error-strewn flier after being schooled by a disappointed English teacher. A teacher in Somerset has left her mark on the 2015 general election after pointing out more than a dozen errors in a Ukip campaign leaflet.
Armed with the traditional red pen, the disappointed English teacher circled a grammatical mistake in almost every sentence of the flyer.
The flier about free parking was distributed on behalf of UKIP councillors Sharon Snook and Derek Tanswell and has since gone viral on social media.
Cllr Tanswell later claimed the leaflet had been produced by Lib-Dem rivals as part of a dirty tricks campaign against him.
The teacher, who has not been named, was so shocked by the litany of mistakes and spelling errors she decided to mark it.
She pointed out the long sentences, lack of full-stops, missing apostrophes and incorrect words.
The mistakes including using the word 'perpetually' instead of 'perpetuity', American English, clumsy 60-word long sentences and missing possessive plural apostrophes.
The leaflet repeatedly uses the word 'your', instead of 'you'll', and at the bottom states 'IF YOU VOTE UKIP YOUR GET UKIP'.
A son's friend photographed the teacher's corrections and uploaded the picture to Reddit where it has been viewed more than 200,000 times.
The leaflet boasted about Snook and Tanswell's campaigning which led to the creation of ten free parking spaces at the Cattle Market car park.
On one side they state how UKIP will "take back control of our boarders" (sic).
Cllr Tanswell said his email had been hacked to create the error-ridden pamphlet which was then printed off and distributed in his name.
A former Lib-Dem councillor himself, he added that he had called in police after getting 'scores' of phone calls making threats on his life.
"They have been hacking into my emails, the Liberal Democrats. They have been hacking it and that's what they did," he said.
"They've hacked it all. They've hacked my email and I have the police looking at it now.
"It's the Liberal Democrats who are doing it all. I'm receiving about 20, 30 phone calls before 12 o'clock today threatening to kill me. The police are on to all of that."
The 48-year-old, who runs a plumbing and heating company, added: "I used to be a Liberal Democrat councillor.
"About a month ago, I left the Liberal Democrats to go UKIP and obviously a lot of them don't like it, so they are producing stuff like [the flyer] and putting it out and putting my name to it."
A spokesman for the Liberal Democrats said: "The idea that the Liberal Democrats had anything to do with Cllr Tanswell’s absurd allegations is categorically untrue. Liberal Democrats take the accusation that the party was involved in illegal activity such as the hacking of emails seriously, and the local party is exploring its options."