2 June, 2004: More threats

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So I am having an exciting week. Today's bit of wannabe-barratry comes from one C. Constable, presumably Christine Constable, one of the English Democrats' candidates in the North-West England region, and reads as follows: (typos as in original)

Subject: English Democrats Party - comments which are offensive

We advise you to remove offensive statements relating to the English Democrats Party. We have downloaded the offensive copy from your web-site and intend to prosecute you directly and your ISP if you do not remove the slanderous comments that you have published on your site.

We give notice that should the offensive material not be deleted from your site by 10.00am 4th June, we will instigate proceedings. against you.

C. Constable
English Democrats Party

It's sad that in a party as small as the English Democrats, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing:

I think that your latest Posting gives a far more `Balanced' view of the situation, and we will not now be taking any sort of action against you.
-- Steven Uncles (from the English Democrats)

Oh well. As Anthony has pointed out, political parties can't sue for defamation anyway; in any case my statements are certainly fair comment. So I shall take up the second part of Anthony's advice: while it would certainly be unladylike for Ms. Constable to fuck herself and the horse she rode in on, I take no hesitation in suggesting that she do so.

(Oh, and I should add that I am now very bored of the English Democrats. Giving them publicity of any sort -- even bad -- makes me slightly queasy. But there we go.)

(And before I pop out to the pub, I'll add a statistic, since my readers probably expect that. I've just counted the number of words on my web site; there are somewhere in excess of 120,000 in this web log alone. The English Democrats, by objecting to one of them -- `quasi-fascist' -- have made themselves and their behaviour a prominent -- and altogether negative -- topic of discussion around these parts. Not to claim that the readers of British political web logs form a substantial constituency -- but then, neither do supporters of the English Democrats.)


Copyright (c) 2004 Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License.