who's that girl?

Nasty Naz posted the picture below on his non-interactive "blog", about his visit to the Alan Place, Reading, residents' association shindig. He names Cllr John Ennis, who is (a) on the right in the picture and (b) Salter's lackey with no discernible integrity, and otherwise only refers to himself (I believe it is he, second from left) and "residents". However, I feel I must point out to Nasty that on the left of the picture is Alan Place resident (last time I looked), former Labour councillor and possibly the best Labour mayor Reading has ever had, apart from David Geary of course, Rose Williams. Why didn't you mention her, Nasty? Huh? Oh, of course, she is only a GIRL.

Carter-Ruck

Yes I know this is wikipedia, but it was the best I could do on a busy morning.

The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted. Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks.[1][2]
Contents[hide]
1 Origin
2 Examples
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
//
[edit] Origin
Mike Masnick originally coined the term Streisand effect in reference to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photograph of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns.[1][3][4] Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project.[5] As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.[6]
[edit] Examples
In April 2007, an attempt at blocking an AACS key from being published on Digg caused uproar when cease-and-desist letters demanded that the code be removed from several high-profile Web sites. This led to the key's proliferation across other web sites and chat rooms, in various formats, with one commentator describing it as having become "the most famous number on the Internet". Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, and had appeared in a song on YouTube which had been played over 45,000 times.[7][8][9]
In April 2007, Bhumibol Adulyadej, the King of Thailand, was portrayed with feet superimposed over his head, an act extremely offensive to many Thai people, in a video posted by a YouTube user named "Padidda". The Thai government banned the site for lèse majesté, and many other YouTube users responded by posting other clips even more offensive to Bhumibol, leading to tens of thousands of views.[9]
In September 2006, video clips portraying paparazzi footage of Brazilian television personality Daniela Cicarelli having sex with her boyfriend on a beach in Spain were uploaded to YouTube. Court injunctions, which culminated in the temporary blocking of YouTube in Brazil, proved unsuccessful in preventing the spread of the video.[9]
On December 5, 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer to a child pornography blacklist, considering the album's cover art "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18".[10][11] The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site,[12] and the publicity surrounding the censorship resulted in the image being spread across other sites.[13] The IWF were later reported on the BBC News website to have said "IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect".[14] This effect was also noted by the IWF in their statement about the removal of the URL from the black list.[15][16]
In early April 2008, The Church of Scientology's unsuccessful attempts to get Internet websites to delete a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology resulted in the creation of Project Chanology.[17][11][18][19] Similarly, the church attempted to remove a series of Operating Thetan (OT) document leaks from Wikileaks. Wikileaks responded by vowing to "release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week".[20]
In September 2009, the Photoshop Disasters blog posted an advertisement from Polo Ralph Lauren that contained a heavily manipulated image of a female model. The post was subsequently reprinted by BoingBoing[21]. Ralph Lauren issued DMCA takedown notices to BoingBoing's ISP and Blogspot, which hosts Photoshop Disasters, claiming their use of the image infringed copyright. Blogspot complied, but BoingBoing's ISP consulted with BoingBoing and agreed that the image was fair use. As a result, BoingBoing issued a mocking rebuttal[22], using the same image again and posting the takedown notice. The rebuttal was widely reported, including on frequently viewed websites such as The Huffington Post[23] and ABC News.[24]
On 12 October 2009, Trafigura instructed Carter-Ruck solicitors to seek an injunction preventing The Guardian newspaper from publishing a parliamentary question relating to the 2006 Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump scandal. The Guardian published a brief story about the injunction which led bloggers and others to track down the story and it was widely republished across the internet, became the top trending topic on Twitter and led to further questions in Parliament[25][26]

expenses

I only quote what Mr Salter is alleged to have said on the BBC (so it must be true):

Martin Salter, a Labour backbencher, said there was "a lot of anxiety and anger" in the House of Commons, with some MPs considering legal action.
He told the BBC's World At One: "I think there are some MPs who will feel very aggrieved at having the rules reinterpreted five years down the line, who may mount a legal challenge. Any attempt to apply a retrospective value judgment is undoubtedly going to be subject to challenge.

Might he be worried about retrospective "value judgments" given his own fraudulent claims for four years from 1997 to 2001- what might happen if the "value judgments" went that far back and they wanted their 40K plus back?

Still waiting for my own letter from Sir Thomas Legg - my not being resident in the UK might add a day or two on to the delivery time - but I know of at least one former MP who left the House in 2005 as I did and who lives in the UK who is still waiting too. And both of us claimed Additional Costs Allowance. For a London home. Which we actually had.

Guardian gagged!

before you break out the bubbly at the notion that the Filth has been stopped from spreading its racist poison, think on. Peter Carter-Ruck and partners appear to have secured an order preventing the reporting of at least one parliamentary question, which appears to be this one:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Prevention of the reporting of parliament? Now I know that it is said that if you want to keep a secret you should tell it to the House of Commons on a slow Tuesday at about 7 pm, thus ensuring that no media of any kind will pick it up and that none of your colleagues, family or acquaintances will hear it. But can m'learned friends really stop Parliament being reported? And should they?

Hat-tip Guido Fawkes for apparently being the first to break the injunction and publish the question, I am happy to follow him in this, and also to Iain Dale and others for highlighting it. It's important.

Country going to the bloody bow-wows, that's what I say.

In the name of God, go.

expenses

Readers will have seen that Sir Thomas Legg, entrusted with a review of the Additional Costs Allowance paid to MPs for housing, is to write to all Members affected this week. This will include me, as the first year concerned by this review is 2004-5, and I stood down from Parliament in 2005. I quote the following from a letter I received dated 28th September and signed by someone called Ed Wood:

"The security of the review data is being treated with the utmost care as it is clearly sensitive. Consequently Sir Thomas has decided that it would not be prudent to send the provisional conclusions to private email addresses in all but exceptional cases, since there is a small risk that email communications can be intercepted. If you have provided an email address, this will be used to notify you that the conclusions have been posted. Please let me know if this will cause you any problems."

It causes me no problems at all. Imagine though, they think the conclusions might leak? Surely not!

My own representations following the letter I received have been to say that as far as I am concerned it is perfectly OK to inform me by email of whatever they want to inform me of, and that I request that the inquiry be extended to cover the years 1997-2004. During the first four of those years, as readers will recall, Mr Salter claimed something over 40K for housing costs in respect of a non-existent London property. When the BBC and other media who had been reading this blog and making their own enquiries started asking him questions he told them he was suing me, to shut them up on the subject. It worked. However, it was a lie. No legal letter has reached me. Nor, I suspect, is it likely to.

Because, er, it's true. And the House of Commons has records to show that it is.

Reading West - oh yes

Mr Salter tells us, as I reminded readers inthe previous post, that he has been campaigning against development on the Bath Road reservoir site since 1996. Maybe. Good to see him change his tune from "always" to "since 1996". Though I don't remember him campaigning on this site in 1996. He stood down from the council that year, ahead of a corruption scandal. Between 1992, after the Cross Town Route public inquiry, and 1996, he was one of a small group of politically motivated men (and one woman, yours truly), who worked on the Borough Plan, to ensure that its political direction was correct. This was done under the direction of Dictatorship Dave Sutton. Salter was not only responsible for the allocation of the site for housing, as deputy leader of the council, but was actively involved and hands on in the specifics of allocation of sites for housing. So was I, and I had and have no difficulty with housing development on that site.

Both ways at once.

Bad faith.

Hein?

Reading West - ah I see

Nasty Naz has updated his website for the first time in weeks, on which I congratulate him, and I also congratulate him, as I have done before, on featuring on the front page a photograph of Reading West, unlike Mr Salter, who of course features Reading East, his favourite constituency. However, Nasty informs us that the Bath Road reservoir site was refused planning permission "on clear planning grounds" (oh yeah?) and that he had "worked closely" (doing what?) with those campaigning against the application, and with Martin Salter, who spoke at the meeting. Martin Salter it was of course who put his name to the inclusion of the site for housing in the Borough Plan for Reading in the 1990s when he was deputy leader of the then Labour council. Mention that did he? Thought not. No, he tells us (in a post on his site put up today, after the meeting and the result, called "Decision Time for Bath Road Reservoir Site") that he has been campaigning against development on that site since 1996. Utter bollocks. Bad faith. Mauvaise foi. Crap. Won't do. Not even the careful little weasel words he hoped no-one would notice, that development was not bad in itself, over-intensive development was. Well, the residents who didn't want the development have noticed, and unless Nasty Naz distances himself from this hypocrisy sharpish the political fallout will be on him. Oh dear.