A belated right of reply to Kirsty Strickland, James McEnaney and David Clegg

Further to the post about the confected John Mason controversy the other day, I've just been made aware of a thread on Twitter that was partly about little old me.  It involved CommonSpace columnist Kirsty Strickland, James McEnaney of both CommonSpace and RISE, Vonnie Sandlan of the NUS, Jenni Gunn of RISE, and the Daily Record's political editor David Clegg.  It's from three days ago, and I would never have even been aware of its existence unless someone had just kindly pointed me in that direction, because no-one involved in the discussion bothered alerting me to what was going on at the time.  Kirsty Strickland rather strangely used a screenshot (since deleted) of some of my tweets to kick the exchange off, as opposed to using Twitter's in-built reply or quote options - presumably that was a deliberate choice to make it more likely that I would be kept in the dark, and wouldn't have a chance to reply.

(Click each image to enlarge.)

Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I have no complaint in principle about the failure to alert me.  We're all voluntarily engaged in public discussion and argument, and it's totally unrealistic to imagine that elaborate 'cricket rules' are going to apply every time one person criticises another.  For my own part, I frequently make criticisms of people without going out of my way to attract their attention to it (indeed I'm doing so right now).  However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that at least two of the people involved in the discussion, namely Ms Strickland and Mr McEnaney, do believe that very extreme cricket rules should apply to public debate, which ultimately is the entire basis of their condemnation of me.  Mr McEnaney in particular seems to devote half his life to self-righteous rants on social media about other people's supposed lack of civility.  Ms Strickland, as you may remember, wrote at length a few months ago about how upset she was (and perhaps with some justification in that particular instance) that people had gossiped about her brief association with the BBC without taking the first step of privately contacting her to establish the facts.  It does seem extraordinary that someone with that track record would use a carefully-edited set of tweets to cynically brand an ideological dissenter as some sort of beastly harasser of women, while deliberately taking steps to conceal from that person what she was doing.  When I pointed out the blatancy of her double-standard, she just seemed to think the whole thing was quite amusing.  The only conclusion I can draw is that the 'civility warriors' on the radical left imagine that the rules they seek to impose on others should cease to apply to themselves as soon as someone takes issue with a particularly sensitive part of their ideology.

There's probably not much more I can say about Mr McEnaney that you're not already well aware of, but it's certainly worth pointing out that, contrary to his claim in the above screenshot, it was he who blocked me.  It's true that I blocked him straight back as a matter of personal pride, but the correct sequence of events does put a rather different complexion on things.

As far as David Clegg is concerned, it seems to me he allowed his disdain for Stuart Campbell to cloud his judgement, and as a result I don't think he covered himself in glory on this occasion.  It looks very much as if he only glanced at Kirsty Strickland's edited screenshots, and concluded on that ultra-casual basis that I was guilty of some sort of unspecified 'behaviour'.  If he had actually bothered to read the much longer thread that the screenshots were drawn from, he would have discovered that a very angry individual (not Ms Strickland - someone else entirely) was transparently trying to incite me into saying something that would give her a pretext to report my Twitter account, and I was refusing to play along with her little game.  Instead, the exchange descended into a sort of extended 'ping-pong match' in which each of us was using almost identical words to repeatedly ask the other to stop posting critical tweets.  (The point I was making was that she self-evidently wasn't practising what she was preaching, and that my requests were exactly the same as hers, and were no more or less important than hers.  In contrast, her own purpose in prolonging the exchange seemed to be simply to try to get my account suspended.)  I would still be extremely keen to hear an explanation from Kirsty Strickland, James McEnaney, David Clegg, or anyone at all really, of how it's possible to read that completely 50/50 slanging-match and come to the conclusion that I was somehow the 'aggressor' and the other person was a 'victim of sexist harassment'.  Nobody has even attempted to explain it so far, and I think if they were being honest it would just boil down to "she's a woman, you're a man, and different rules apply, sunshine".  I'd suggest some on the radical left really need to step outside the bubble and reflect upon how that sort of nonsense damages their credibility with what I'm tempted to call 'real people', both female and male.

Of course, the other enormous howler Clegg of the Record made was in branding me a "Wings acolyte", without even bothering to check whether Stuart Campbell and I even follow each other on Twitter.  We don't, and in fact Stuart has only just removed me from exactly the same Wings blocklist that Clegg is complaining about.  Standards of basic journalistic research do seem to be slipping all round these days...