Paul Staines withdraws false claims… will Iain Dale do the same?

This entry was posted on
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
at
1:43 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

Last night I ran out of patience with both Paul Staines and Iain Dale and their repeatedly publishing/allowing false claims about me on their respective websites. Typically, these are often confused with banter or abuse (or deliberately presented as banter or abuse), but I made it clear to Paul Staines yesterday that I would no longer be tolerating the repeated claim that I am a paid servant of Tom Watson, the Labour party or the government, because it simply isn’t true.

Paul Staines has now removed a large number of these false claims from his website, and I’ll conduct a further check later (it may take a while as this been going on for years) but he has acted on everything on the shortlist of archived entries I made privately last night (i.e. a list that Paul has not seen), so he is taking this seriously and actively seeking out relevant errant entries. Good.

And I did it all without the help of a lawyer.

(If you spot any more, let me know, as we have an agreement that no such claim is to be tolerated on the order-order.com website ever again.)

Compare this to the actions of Iain Dale, who refuses to even discuss this matter (or any other), and is now winding his readers up and publishing false claims that I’m a mental case, along with further allegations/implications that I’m only upset about false claims that I’m in the pay/employ of Tom Watson, the Labour party or the government because… erm… I’m in the pay/employ of Tom Watson, the Labour party or the government!

This pigheaded publication of outright lies on his site about me and others while I am banned from responding should give you some idea why I might have cause to re-dial Iain about 40 times last night (while he was busy being hilarious and deleting comments from me but not about me on his site). I wasn’t going to stand for it any more and I wanted the ‘in pay of’ matter at least settled immediately. I still do.

The ‘threats’ he speaks of are actions I will be forced to take if he continues to publish false claims about my integrity (again) and now mental state (again) on his website.

Again, I will be trying to resolve the conflict without turning to libel lawyers, but Iain’s appallingly dishonest escalation today isn’t leaving me much choice.

REMEMBER: FFS, as with Staines, I’m not asking Dale for a front-page apology or a humiliating climbdown… I know he’s far too precious for that. All I asked him to do last night was remove claims about me from his website that he could not back with evidence, and he wouldn’t even bloody well talk to me. He still won’t, even when he’s blogging about me *and* and letting his readers slag me off under comments…. which is, you know, a major part of what I’m upset about in the first place.








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