A row about a misleading clip is not a row about discretion

The story

Metro reports a row between Robert Jenrick and Reform over a clip relating to small boats crossings, each side accusing the other of misrepresenting the footage. The dispute is over what was said and how it was edited, not over any policy, charging decision, or enforcement outcome.

The reframe

This looked, at first pass, like it might belong here: a political dispute, small boats, accusations of bad faith. But there is no rule in this story that is being applied to one party and not another, no enforcement decision, no institution exercising discretion. It is two political actors disputing the honesty of a piece of media each has used against the other, which is an ordinary feature of political conflict rather than an example of selective enforcement. Included here, briefly, so a story that resembles the project's material on the surface does not get counted as evidence just because it appeared in the same week as stories that are.