A civil servant said she felt pressured to resign from her job at the Department of Work and Pensions after being investigated for sharing posts from Reform UK on her personal Facebook account. The Times has the story.
Michelle Cochrane, 45, who had been working as an administration officer at the DWP since July 2021 said she ran into trouble with her employer when she started sharing social media posts that were critical of Labour in June and July this year.
The posts related to immigration, the early release of prisoners and the handling of public finances by Labour.
There were 14 posts in total, including 11 from Reform, one by the UK Independence Party, one including a Daily Express news article and one post from Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform.
One post by Reform featured a picture of people on a boat at sea wearing life jackets and read “watch the population explosion in real time” and “Britain needs Reform”.
Cochrane, from Blyth, Northumberland, added a comment to another post by Reform, reading, “time not just to limit it, but end it”.
Despite the posts being on her personal Facebook account — which made no reference to her work or employers — Cochrane was told in August that she would face a disciplinary hearing.
She was told that an investigation would be undertaken into the posts she shared and she would probably be dismissed if she was found to have committed gross misconduct
During the disciplinary hearing in October Cochrane argued that she had a right to “freedom of speech” and claimed other colleagues had shared posts from other political parties without facing repercussions.
The civil servant said she felt “railroaded” into resigning as she felt her dismissal was a “foregone conclusion”, saying she wanted to protect her mental health from the “traumatic” episode.
“I felt I had no choice but to resign. I felt I was pushed in that direction,” she said.
“I deleted my whole Facebook account as soon as I realised it was an issue. The majority of what I was posting was just reposts from the Reform Party‘s Facebook — I wrote a couple of things myself but nothing extreme.
“I feel like if I reposted things from the Labour Party I would have been OK. Colleagues have done that before and no action was taken.”
Worth reading in full.
