It is now confirmed that Nadine Dorries blog has been taken down by her webhosts after threats by lawyers acting for the creepy and anti-democratic Barclay Brothers. I particularly dislike them because they destroyed the Scotsman, which was once a good newspaper.
Nadine Dorries had accused the Barclay Brothers of outing the sleaze about MPs in their Daily Telegraph as part of an anti-democratic plot. The same accusation was in this Independent piece at 2am yesterday. The Independent has edited it out. Annoyingly there is no sign of a google cache.
Nadine has completely lost it, after being caught lying about the location of her main residence, in order to cash in on the second home allowance. Her sense of entitlement has been getting up people’s noses for the last 24 hours. I cannot better the writing of Mr Eugenides:
http://mreugenides.blogspot.com/2009/05/good-night-and-good-luck.html
I have spent most of the past six years working against torture, and have met many victims, in some cases dead victims. So Nadine’s whinge that MPs were being tortured after being found out was extremely annoying to me.
But the bullying action by the Barclay Brothers against a blog is another example of the use of our absurd libel laws to silence freedom of speech. No court has ruled that Nadine was libellous. She did not have the chance to defend her views in court. She was simply and effectively silenced, and her entire blogging corpus taken down.
There are numerous ironies to this story. Here are a few:
– The Barclay Brothers have stopped Nadine when she was very effectively digging her own political grave.
– Nobody took seriously her argument that the sleaze revelations were an anti-democratic conspiracy by the Barclay Brothers. The Barclay Brothers will bring far more opprobrium on themselves by this action than was cast by the original accusation.
– If they go through with a libel action, the money Dorries stole from the taxpayer could end up with the even less deserving Barclay Brothers. Bloody Hell!
No doubt Nadine’s blog will still be back up and hosted somewhere safe. But this is a wearing process. When Usmanov did exactly the same to me, we had to change our main url from co.uk to org.uk. We lost ranking for three years worth of links: our technorati score tumbled overnight from 370 to 28, and still hasn’t fully recovered. Neither have our google or wikio rankings.
Bloggers can dispute heartily. We use our free speech sometimes to quarrel – I have been doing that too much lately.
But when free speech in the blogosphere is attacked, we have a tradition of standing together. I have benefited from that more than most. I will stand now by Nadine. If she wants her article republished, I will do so here..
UPDATE
You will find Nadine Dorries offending article in full in the comments section below. I do not agree with her, but I do agree with her right to say it. I know it is there and accept legal responsibility for it.