Shane Croucher

Is there really not one single funny bone in any of those fusty, old, grumbly Tories?

Over at Tory Bear, there’s an air of pseudo-offence being taken at some comments on Twitter made by representatives of the Labour Party:

It takes a pretty sick individuals to look at the footage of a frail old lady enjoying a reward for years of loyal and great service to her nation and wish a violent accident involving stairs and skateboards upon them. You may disagree with someone politically but to wish them a violent death? Baroness Thatcher has been hospitalised in the past from falling down and to suggest the image of her falling down the stairs over a skateboard is in anyway funny or just reward to anyone is as deeply disturbing as it is shameful. Apparently this is funny though to Labour’s poster girl Ellie and Barnsley councillor Tim Cheetham.

So, a bit of slapstick humour about one of Labour’s biggest political enemies is completely and outrageously, apparently punishable-by-death-ably, far out of the realms of anything that’s funny? I take it Tory Bear makes sure he steers clear of shows like Have I Got News For You then? I mean, watching that would be enough to make him drink a gallon of bleach.

According to TB:

A joke here and there and a bit of banter is one thing but a line has very much been crossed here.

How bloody ridiculous. Especially seeing as he condones Jeremy Clarkson’s pasting of Mandelson. Clarkson’s article in The Times requests that Mandelson:

will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more…Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit.

Clarkson then bangs on for another 800 words of underlying xenophobia. I don’t like Clarkson. I think he’s a smug, bigoted, oafish twatface, but I’m not going to sit in a corner and cry as he insults people. I don’t like Mandelson, but plenty of people do. What makes Clarkson’s comments any more acceptable that those on Twitter? According to TB:

Yes it’s moderately insulting to a broad range of countries but what were you expecting when you read an article by Clarkson? Come on. If you don’t want to be offended, don’t read offensive peoples work. It’s not rocket science.

Get back to the real issues!

I posted the other day regarding the censorship of embarrassing information on the Wikipedia page for David Amess, Tory MP for Southend West.

Well, the user KellyPR seems to have stopped blanking out the pages. However, an anonymous user who only leaves their IP address, has been at it again. The IP address is 86.171.162.151 and can be found on the edit page history here.

I decided to track the IP, and found out that it can be located in London. Coincidence?

David Amess’s Wikipedia page used to contain information about his expense claims. It also contained information on when he was stitched up by satirist and comedian Chris Morris for his spoof documentary series Brass Eye. (Curiously, I couldn’t embed the youtube video onto this page as the embedding code was “disabled by request”. Hmm.)

However, we can see from Wikipedia’s ‘Revision of History’ for the David Amess page that a user called KellyPR has removed all of the content that makes Amess look like an arse. It paints the picture of his move to Southend West as perfectly innocent, with Labour’s Angela Smith winning his former Basildon seat. This perhaps reflected incompetence in his handling of Basildon, although KellyPR1234 decided that Amess had a “significant personal following”. Why leave, then? Southend West is an extremely safe Tory seat. You could put Gary Glitter in a blue rosette and he’d still probably win. Could it have been that Amess was running away from an inevitable defeat? Not according to the newly amended Wikipedia page.

KellyPR’s contribution list is solely made up of edits to Amess’s Wiki page. Indeed, most of the edits are described as “section blanking”.

Is this just some vigilante pro-Amess lover, working off of their own back? Or is it a pre-election damage limitation PR campaign for an under-fire MP?

I’ve contacted Amess to find out if he uses any PR companies, or PR people, and who exactly they are. If he is, I sure hope he isn’t dipping into the public’s purse to fund this wiki-purification.

p.s. I’ve quickly thrown the expenses bit back in, but I’m sure it could bebetter, so please amend, add – let’s undo the censorship.