Please note that the post below was published more than ten years ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by th...
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Those criticisms stand, Chris. Why not respond to them?
While hoping difficult questions will simply go away if you ignore them might be Johnson and Cummings' preferred aoproach, don't you think you should put the record straight?
2) This is not a "more anodyne post," but an update. If I had been trying to back away from what I had previously written I could easily have amended or taken down the previous post.
3) I did respond, at some length, to your previous criticisms.
4) You are very quick to question the integrity of others when you disagree with what they write. If I operated on the same basis I would have made the same accusation against you that you keep making against others.
2) Taking down or amending your earlier post would have evidenced that it was not correct. That wasn't an option for you, certainly not an easy one, if you were to maintain your stance that what you said was justified. Instead you've moved on with further posts that signally don't repeat the untruth that the NHS is well-prepared and well-equipped to deal with Covid19.
3) At the time of writing you had NOT responded to two specific criticisms, one relating to a tweet by a South Cumbrian GP, the other to the use of EWRS as a bargaining chip.
4) I'm not "very quick" to question the integrity of those I disagree with. But I do question the integrity of those whose words and actions strongly suggest they lack integrity. If you wish to question my integrity, please do proceed. I'm more than happy to justify what I say and do, in detail.
2) If I find that I've made a mistake on this blog or any other form of social media and said or repeated something which turned out not to be correct, I always take it down or correct it on the principle that I do not want wrong information against my name on the internet.
The only thing which would be risky would be to make the false claim that it had never been there in the first place, especially if one is called on it. Where appropriate I would include in the corrected post a formal correction, retraction or apology. I've not had to do it very often - the last time was a Facebook post about candidate Trump in 2016 when it turned out I had been taken in by a trickster - but anyone with way too much time on their hands how searches the entire history of this blog will find
(a) two or three instances where I have corrected a significant mistake and duly apologised, and
(b) a rather larger number of instances where I've corrected a typo and if appropriate thanked the person who called it out, the most recent case being one you called out about a week ago.
3) Those of us with a life do not spend all our time online and may legitimately take up to a couple of days to respond to posts. I don't have a staff to manage this blog or the comments on it. When I arrived home after a period away from my desk I put up a memo I had received with the latest government information on Coronavirus, got something to eat, watched a film with my wife, and then checked and worked through the comments which had come in since lunchtime the previous day, which happened to display most recent first. The first one I saw was the first comment above on this thread from you, and as I had responded in detail to quite a few points about Coronavirus I said so.
I did consider deleting the comment above when I realised that you had made two additional posts in the previous 36 hours which I had not yet seen at the time I wrote the one above and therefore had not had a chance to answer.
I decided that my point that I had responded to your previous issues was still relevant because, in my humble opinion, it was unreasonable of you to implicitly accuse me of not responding to your new points before giving me at least 48 hours to see them and respond to them.
4) I am not questioning your integrity. I am making the point that it is far too common these days for people to question the integrity of those who say things they disagree with when they have no direct evidence of deliberate dishonesty, as you did when you accused me of deceit for posting in good faith a memo I had been sent about Coronavirus.
4. I neither accused nor even implied deceit! I was suggesting you were ignoring difficult questions and trying to move the debate on, rather than answer valid criticisms - in what sense is that accusing you of deceit?
If I had claimed to have responded to all your criticisms that would indeed have inferred that you were lying and I would have taken the comment down as soon as I realised that there were comments I had not yet responded to.
As I said on my previous post, I am not questioning your integrity.
4) You did use the word deceit in a description of one of my original coronavirus posts which I took to be getting at me (and took exception to.) If that was not aimed at me I withdraw the point and apologise.