Friday 9 April 2010

a vexatious complaint

is what Mr Salter tells us he has been the victim of, see below:

There is a concern, to which I hope Members will turn their minds, about complaints to the Standards and Privileges Committee. I have been the subject of a vexatious complaint and ended up having to take legal action-I made history by being the first person to sue a sitting Member. It is awful for a Member to have an unresolved complaint having over them. Where possible, I hope that the Commissioner will resolve complaints or publish interim findings so that Members who are the subject of vexatious or politically motivated complaints do not have them hanging over them as they face the electorate, because we all know how easy it is to imply ill of people purely on the basis of an unproven accusation. Furthermore, on the other side of that concern, there are three or four complaints against Members still outstanding because they have failed to co-operate fully with the Committee and the Commissioner in the hope that judgment can be deferred until after the election. That is also wrong, as those matters should be resolved.

There are some factual inaccuracies, to put it kindly, in the above.  Mr Salter may well, as he tells us, have been the subject of a vexatious complaint, but he did not "make history" by suing a sitting Member.  He sued the chairman of the Conservative Party and a person who was at the time a prospective parliamentary candidate in the Conservative interest, and who subsequently became a sitting Member, which position he is likely to resume at the forthcoming general election.  The evidence for that complaint was supplied in part by me.  The evidence supplied by me was factual.  Mr Salter knows that.  I supplied the evidence publicly, and have repeated it a number of times since.  He has not sued me.  And I find it interesting that Mr Salter uses his last opportunity to speak in the House (an opportunity of which he rarely availed himself over the 13 years he held office, never even having spoken on a major parliamentary occasion at all) to call for Members to be spared "politically motivated complaints".  Poor little loves.  This is the same Mr Salter who spoke in impassioned language for protection for MPs from public scrutiny and from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.  The government told him to piss off on that occasion.  

I have blocked a number of comments following my recent posts about Mr Salter and Mr Howarth.  This is a family blog.  However I wonder how common it is for a single blog comment to include the words "girlie" and "cunt".

Nice people, those Reading boys.  Not.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Who are you going to write about now that Martin has wandered off?

Perhaps something on the current candidates for Reading West