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Tuesday 11 January 2011

TPA Joins With Rumour Merchant

Hardly had I made adverse comment on the apparent double standards of Paul Staines, who blogs under the alias of Guido Fawkes, than he appears in my field of vision once more, this time using the persona of the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics, which is a front organisation run by Staines and with very little recent activity.

The Sunlight Centre has previously promised “resources for bloggers” and claims to be modelled on the Sunlight Foundation in Washington DC, but there have been no resources made available, and apparently all that the Centre does is to pursue politicians who have proved immune to the nudge-nudge and routine smear of the Staines blog.

This, though, has clearly not deterred the folks at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) from linking up with Staines: their lead story right now (1830 hours), on Labour MP Eric Illsley, who has pleaded guilty to false expense claims, urges the signing of a petition calling for Illsley’s resignation from the House of Commons. The petition has been started by Staines’ front group the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics.

So the TPA is making common cause with someone whose blog advertises “plots, rumours ... conspiracy ... tittle tattle” and “gossip”. Something to bear in mind when the next TPA “report”, replete with all its “research” and masses of turgid “detail” is released.

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