This entry was posted on
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at
10:59 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

Tch. And to think that only last week he was returning from Teh Holy Land with a message of peace, mung-beans and understanding:

Iain Dale – Parliament Should Decide on Prisoners’ Voting Rights – Not Judges: When you go to jail you forfeit the normal rights you enjoy in society – your freedom, and indeed your right to choose the government. Yet now some unelected European judges are apparently about to force the British government to give prisoners the right to vote. This is something the LibDems have favoured for some time and it seems they are about to get their way. I wonder who Ian Huntley and Fred Rose West will vote for. This is nothing to do with human rights. It’s about whether judges, rather than Parliament, should be able to decide who votes in UK elections. What on earth is the point of Parliament if its sovereignty can be usurped like this? This has all arisen after the despicable John Hirst (who served 25 years for axing a woman to death) took the issue to the Court of Human Rights. Pity he never thought about the human right to live of the woman he killed, eh?

Judging by Iain’s judgmental tone, it’s less about the principle of sovereignty and more about the moral injustice of evil-doers having their wicked way with our democracy; he’s obviously so outraged about it that he can barely restrain himself.

In fact, Iain was so adorably strident at one stage that he appeared to forget that Fred West is a lifeless corpse and has been unable to vote or do any thing except decompose for well over a decade.

(The criminal dead are rising from their graves and voting Liberal Democrat! We must flee!)

And his views on a custodial sentence equalling a total suspension of liberties raise some interesting questions; like, for instance, where might one draw the line? When Iain’s drink-driving pseudo-blogging chum Paul Staines was tagged for 3 months and effectively under house arrest from 9pm to 6am, was he also not allowed to vote at nights?

But what should really get your attention in the wider scheme of things is the totally unnecessary attack on John Hirst that Iain launches while knowing that he plans to deny his target any right of reply.

(Iain Dale has banned John Hirst from commenting on his site, and has just now deleted Hirst’s attempt to respond to his post and switched on comment moderation. Is in unclear at this stage what justification Iain gave/gives for Hirst’s ban, because he keeps retro-moderating his ‘rules’ post without leaving the slightest hint about what has been changed or when. Also, his latest rules declare that you can be banned for making/repeating “spurious allegations” against the host. This seems fine on the surface of things until you realise that Iain thinks and acts like a petulant child when you confront him with evidence that he’s wrong/lying, and will forever remain in complete denial about what he will regard to be a “spurious allegation”. Any further attempt to address the matter will result in bullying and/or stonewalling tactics and mealy-mouthed accusations of you being dishonest or ‘unreasonable’ about the matter.)

I will remind you at this stage that Iain Dale presents himself as an ambassador for blogging at every opportunity he gets, despite his not actually standing by any of the principles he lays claim to when he does this.

For starters, there’s this habit of denying, manipulating, frustrating and complicating responses under comments (up to and including arbitrary bans) and going after people knowing that he is going to deny them a right of reply in this way, but this post is also typical in that Iain fails to link to a single item, group or individual mentioned in it.

[Psst! Did you know: Iain Dale didn’t even read a transcript of the relevant Ross/Brand show until the week after he passed judgement on it; 28 Oct, 2nd Nov.]

Related:
A Lanson Boy – But Dale is also an arse…