Bishop Hill A bunch of monkeys
May 28, 2007 Labour Having found myself in the odd position of praising Labour Home for its response to David McLean's Freedom of Information Act, I was almost relieved to read a real howler of an article up there today.
The author of the piece, who goes under the nom-de-blog of Howlermonkey (you couldn't make this up, could you?), writes about the antics of an evangelical christian called Richard Turnbull, who has apparently been telling us that we're all going to hell. This doesn't actually strike me as very interesting in itself - I thought this was what evangelical christians did - but there you are. However, Mr Howlermonkey goes on to make a gobsmackingly pathetic attempt to link Mr Turnbull to the Conservative Party. The article is called "The Tory Taliban in Oxford" and includes this little nugget:
[Turnbull] Also suggested that Torie party donate 10% of it’s income to conservative evangelical Collages such as Wycliffe.
If you refer back to some of the original sources for Mr Monkey's article - the Guardian and the Indy as far as I can tell - the facts were reported thus:
In [his speech], Dr Turnbull also warns against the danger of liberalism in the church, talks of ‘the strategic nature’ of evangelical control of training colleges and calls on conservatives to siphon off 10% of their financial contributions to the Church of England to help pay the costs of like-minded colleges.
So in fact Mr Monkey is, either dishonestly or foolishly, conflating "conservatives" with "The Conservative Party". To judge from his writing, I am relieved to say that it appears to be the latter.
Labour Home is much improved since its relaunch, to the extent that I'm now a regular reader. But I do wonder if they are just going to get themselves into trouble with their relatively open editorial policy. If they allow writers of this quality to infest their site, they will end up looking like, well, a bunch of monkeys.
Reader Comments (1)