The electorate should have the right to freely express their rejection of Woolas in a rerun election

Given Political Betting's fixation with the Phil Woolas case over the last few months, I didn't exactly faint with amazement at Mike Smithson's instant dismissal of Iain Dale's stated reasons for (improbably) backing the ex-MP's legal fund. In one sense I agree with Mike - I don't think it's inappropriate for the courts to step in and nullify an election result in a case where the electorate's right to "free expression" has been infringed, and I also think this is clearly one of those cases. But there are so many separate issues bound up in Woolas' application for judicial review that I don't think it's good enough to just curtly say, as Mike does, that "Iain is wrong". You don't have to want to see Woolas reinstated to think, as a matter of principle, that -

* It's a denial of natural justice that there appears to be no right of appeal in this process.

* The democratic process is not enhanced by barring Woolas from standing for election for three years.

On the latter point, while the voters may have been denied their right to free expression in May, it's hard to see how that could be the case if Woolas was permitted to stand in a rerun election - they now have all the information they could possibly need to form a proper judgement of him. That being the case, shouldn't they revert to being the boss from now on, instead of having one option artificially denied to them?

Woolas today, the Snarl tomorrow?

To turn now to a meatier aspect of the Phil Woolas ruling (assuming it stands), the first thought that occurred to me is that it's only a matter of weeks since Iain "the Snarl" Gray appeared in a Labour Party Conference Broadcast and uttered the extraordinary words "over the last three-and-a-half years, the SNP have broken every single promise they have ever made". If we are now going to have a firm legal precedent that politicians cannot knowingly make statements that are demonstrably untrue, presumably in future the SNP will be able to challenge such broadcasts. But what an immense pity Gray didn't make such an absurd claim during the formal period of an election campaign...