On March 19th, I drew readers attention to a nasty bit of bullying from John Mann MP threatening a Retford Resident (RR) with a libel suit and police for asking a reasonable question about Mr. Mann’s expenses. RR asked not to be identified in this blog, but was aware that John Mann would know who he was from the email exchange published.

A few days ago, RR and his wife received some Mann propaganda. The envelope it arrived in is shown below.

You can see the hand written annotation to the return address. It appears innocuous enough unless you know the background.

This is clearly intended to intimidate RR.

Putting the frighteners on a pensioner and his wife is a despicable act and adds a new dimension to Mann’s aready questionable behaviour.

My advice to RR is to take this to the police.

The old saying that today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper (pre Health and Safety) doesn’t apply to the web.

True, causes will be taken up and run their course and be replaced by other more recent causes. But while printed matter ends up in the blue bin and gets recycled into toilet paper (which, to be honest, it was in  the first place), web content never goes away. It hangs around to haunt anyone who is imprudent enough to get the attention of the media, large or small.

Try Googling for “John Mann libel” or “John Mann ASDA” and you’ll see that this site and the other blog sites which support me are all there for everyone to see, right up at the top of the search engine rankings.

So anyone looking for the Gospel according to Mann on Google, Yahoo or Bing will have quite a few versions to choose from.

And unlike the recycled newspaper stories, they will be there till the end of eternity.

NOTE: To the Diddy Manns who leave comments here. Unless you are commenting on the article, your comments will not be published.

A few scant weeks after signing an Early Day Motion calling for the reform of libel laws ‘which stifle free expression’ , John Mann threatened a Retford resident in his sixties with  libel action for asking questions about his expense claims.

After seeing Mann’s threat of libel action against me, a Retford resident got in touch and sent me copies of an email exchange between himself and John Mann in February this year. He has asked not to be identified or quoted directly as he is concerned about police involvement. More on that later. But he is aware that Mr Mann will know his identify.

The exchange started civily enough, with the Retford Resident (I’ll call him RR) asking John Mann if he had repaid any expenses and did he employ any relatives.

Mann replied via his parliament.uk email address asking for RR’s home address to which he would send a copy of the Legg report.

RR replied with details of a specific repayment which he had been made aware of, coincidentally the one which I had highlighted and ultimately led to Mann’s letter to me, and asked Mann to clarify it. He also asked again for details regarding employment of family members.

Mann’s reply consisted of two short lines:

This is inaccurate and libellous.

Any such libel will be actioned

RR replied, pointing out that Mann had again avoided answering the questions and saying that the voters should have a chance to make up their own minds about the subject.

Mann’s reply was even shorter than the last.

As you are using a fake name this will then go directly to the police.

RR was not using a fake name and pointed this out to Mr Mann, also stating that he was greatly concerned by Mann’s threatened involvment of the police. So much so that he had passed the correspondence to his solicitor.

This email exchange continued further, with Mann NEVER SATISFACTORILY answering the questions and alluding to a plot by the Conservatives and/or ‘the people who stole the miners compensation money’. He again referred to RR’s emails containing libellous material and repeated the threat of legal action.

This is blatant bullying of a constituent by Mr Mann, using his position as an MP to try and stop any questioning of his expenses by the voters.

He was elected to represent his constituents, not bully them into silence.

This is part of a pattern of bullying behaviour by John Mann.

He is unfit to represent the people of Bassetlaw in any capacity and in light of these revelations, should resign his position immediately and allow the local Labour Party to field a candidate who would have the constituents’ interests at heart, not their own.

In December last year, an Early Day motion was proposed by Lib Dem MP, Evan Harris.

The Motion is thus:

That this House notes that human rights activists, scientists, writers and journalists are prevented from publishing, and the public prevented from reading, matters of strong public interest due to the chilling effect of English libel law; further notes that libel actions in England and Wales cost 100 times more than the European average; further notes that the costs of defending a libel case are usually prohibitive and that even successful defendants do not recover their full costs; and further notes the report of the United Nations Committee on Human Rights which criticises English libel law for its stifling of free expression globally due to libel tourism whereby foreign complainants bring cases against foreign writers for alleged libel in overseas publications; believes that public interest is endangered by powerful vested interests and corporations being able to intimidate writers into not publishing; further believes that the libel laws discriminate against average and low paid people when victims of defamatory comment in the pages of national publications; recognises the recent report by Index on Censorship and English PEN, Free speech is not for sale andfurther notes the campaign for scientific freedom by Sense About Science; welcomes the formation of the Libel Reform Coalition to campaign for law reform; and calls for a re-casting of the libel laws such that, while individual reputation is protected against malicious or reckless smears, lawful free expression is not chilled and there is a fully effective public interest defence for both scholarship and responsible journalism.

Phew! A bit of a mouthful, but it says esssentially that the existing libel laws intimidate writers and stifle free expression and need to be changed.

http://www.edms.org.uk/edms/2009-2010/423.htm

It was signed by John Mann.

Yet he sends a letter threatening me with a libel action because I publish something he doesn’t like.

This is my MP.