Brit politicans' expense claims and censorship

For the last ten days or so the media have been full of the scandal of British Members of Parliament's claims for expenses, something that puts our own Travelgate scandal of a few years ago in the shade.

But it seems that some MPs have fought back, and have accused the media of stirring the pot for sinister reasons of their own. And this has led to media censorship of an MP's blog.

St. Aidan to Abbey Manor: Fightback MP silenced - what do you think?:

Well, if you can find anything libellous at the cache of Ms Dorries blog, you're more perceptive than I am. Here is what I think is the offending passage (if you've read her blog, it could be any one of several, e.g. reposting a 'Private and Confidential' letter the Telegraph sent just hours before splashing her personal finances all over the next issue), which I'm posting because

a) this is a free and democratic society, and if MP's have to have their expenses open to scrutiny then their arguments should be open to scrutiny too.

b) I dislike censorship, whether it's happening to Dave Walker, Nadine Dorries or anyone else. Hey, even people I dislike. Most of them.

Dave Walker posted cartoons on his blog about the mismanagement of the SPCK Bookshop chain when it was taken over by a couple of American businessmen, who then tried to bully Dave Walker into silence because he had exposed their unethical practices.

This looks even more sinister, however Craig Murray - Support Nadine Dorries' Freedom To Blog:

It is now confirmed that Nadine Dorries blog has been taken down by her webhosts after threats by lawyers acting for the creepy and anti-democratic Barclay Brothers. I particularly dislike them because they destroyed the Scotsman, which was once a good newspaper.

Nadine Dorries had accused the Barclay Brothers of outing the sleaze about MPs in their Daily Telegraph as part of an anti-democratic plot. The same accusation was in this Independent piece at 2am yesterday. The Independent has edited it out.

It almost inclines one to believe in conspiracy theories. Let's do away with elected government, and have the world ruled by the media for their own profit. Big Brother, in Orwell's novel, was an evil dictator who took over the reins of government and controlled the media and everything else. But Big Brother has now been reinvented by the media as a "reality" TV show, and popularised, and suddenly The Daily Telegraph is Big Brother, and British MPs are the "housemates".

The Daily Telegraph used to be known as the Daily Torygraph, but the opinion that it is trying to suppress is that it is actually trying to score votes for a couple of parties way to the right of the Tories.