You have to be a very early bird, as his many followers on Twitter know, to be ahead of Cllr. Mick Grant, one of the Ward Councillors for Ashby on North Lincolnshire Council.  Mick is a long standing and hard working Councillor with a great interest in Housing Policy and Homelessness issues, so it would have come as no surprise to his followers that his early morning Tweet on Friday 26 August 2011 concerned Conservative-led North Lincolnshire Council’s attitude toward homelessness in the area.

Cllr. Grant was an early convert to Social Media and both his blog and Twitter account are widely read across North Lincolnshire.  He also knows the power of such avenues, giving a voice to those who, for whatever reason, are not normally heard.  Similarly, he is not one to get swept up in the knee-jerk reaction style of our present national government which yesterday hosted a meeting with major players in the Social Media game: Twitter, Facebook and Research in Motion.

Government Ministers were almost falling over themselves in the haste to be the first to threaten closing down Twitter and other social media during civil disturbances, following riots in London, Birmingham and Manchester amongst others.  These plans have now been abandoned.  The subject, according to this morning’s Independent “was not even discussed during an hour-long meeting between senior ministers, the police, and representatives of Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry”.

The Government has now had to, once again, engage in a rapid back-pedal after being alerted to the pitfalls of a policy put forward "in the heat of the moment". It seems that Whitehall sources have privately admitted they were not now seeking any new powers to censor the internet – a position which contrasts with the tough rhetoric of David Cameron when the Commons held an emergency session on 11 August.  Cameron told MPs: "We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality".

Up and coming Tory MP Louise Mensch, using the Twitter medium and without, it would seem, any sense of hypocrisy of her action, argued the same case by tweeting: "I don't have a problem with a brief temporary shutdown of social media.... We'd all survive if Twitter shut down for a short while during major riots”.

Far be it from me to say but Dave, Louise as Mark Twain wrote “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt”.

Keep on Tweeting, Mick, yours is an important voice.