Are you really making that allegation?

Thanks for the considered reply, I do appreciate you taking obviously quite a bit of time to get back to me.

You’ll forgive me for remaining sceptical of your honest intentions for at least a while yet though. As you won’t tell me who you are, I have to go on what I can surmise from limited evidence – which doesn’t yet give me cause to believe you. There are six main stumbling blocks for me.

I was going to write them here, but then it got a bit long and bullet-pointy (and grew from four to seven and then shrank again), so I put it over here.

Cheers, John

Although we’re not card carrying Tories by any definition, we have admitted we are slightly right of centre. It is surprising then, that it falls to us to lecture the ‘Labour minded’ on the importance of free speech and open political debate.

If LabourList was just Derek’s personal blog where he wrote his own posts and deleted dissenting comments, kind of dull, but fair enough. But what we have is a Government sponsored propaganda machine with the *appearance* of free and open debate. This insults everyone from Tory troll to Labour grassroots members who want to have a decent online conversation. Are you really saying that you only want to read articles written by people you already agree with, commented on by others who share the same viewpoint? Sound likes a waste of time.

“Ergo, if Derek and his partisan mates want to talk to each other online, that’s somehow deeply sinister”. You seem like an intelligent chap. Are you telling me that there’s nothing sinister about articles written by Peter Mandelson and moderated by Derek Draper? Come off it. I don’t think you believe that and neither do grassroots Labour members.

You’re right about the WordPress deployment being less than perfect. However, the markup is all 100% valid and accessible – which is more than can be said for the shabby LabourList coding that is a technical disaster. We took the view that it would be better to spend time making sure the site could be read by anyone, regardless of visual impairment rather than promoting the site with tricky SEO. We will implement pretty permalinks and tagging shortly.

You’re wrong to think that there is any intention to ‘starve’ LabourList. If they allow dissenting views to be heard (or read), LABOURIST would be pointless. As it is, we have been live for a little over 24 hours and already have seen over 4500 page views. We are simply feeding a demand created by LabourList.

Yours is only the second critical comment I have seen – the rest of the feedback we’ve had is entirely positive – and not just from Conservatives.

Genuinely, I suggest you try to take LABOURIST at face value and embrace the opportunity to participate in a more meaningful debate.

You’re right about Schillings, though