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Apropos of nothing
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We start this week's newsletter with a thought experiment that has been troubling us for a couple of weeks now.
Person A accuses Person B, a security contractor at a lawnmower factory, of stealing lawnmowers.
The insurance loss adjustment report confirms that lawnmowers were stolen, and that Person B cut a massive hole in the fence big enough for a truck full of lawnmowers to drive through.
Does the loss adjustment report exonerate Person B?
This brainburner gets worse:
Person B takes Person A to court for libel for saying that Person B stole the lawnmowers.
Does the jury decide that Person A has (1) not told the truth, and (2) harmed the reputation of Person B...who, let's not forget, was independently found to have cut the hole in the fence big enough for a truck full of lawnmowers?
The final part of the puzzle is the most devilish question ever devised: find B.
Please send your answers to this almost impossible logical headscratcher to letters@oldham-owl.co.uk and we'll publish the best and cleanest ones as part of a special feature on the special people who subscribe to The Oldham Owl. We will accept answers in words, algebra and formal logic.
Miah did nothing wrong, according to Miah
This week's big article is the most boring thing we've ever published. It goes round in circles - slowly. It reads as if a lawyer has written it - a lawyer who has never read so much as a tweet, let alone a book. A lawyer whose sense of language comes entirely from the law. A lawyer who has never interacted with a human being outside of communications about law.
This is because the article is about Raja Miah, and because Raja Miah threatened to take us to court for libelling him before he'd even seen it. It doesn't half stem your verbal flow when someone with £100,000 raised in a few months from a rabid online following threatens to close you down.
Miah's followers are a real problem aren't they? They should be rounded up and poked and prodded for research purposes, then kept offline for the rest of their natural lives, which in most of their cases isn't that long in the scheme of things. Thankfully for those people and others, there's no chance anyone will ever give me any power, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
There were powerful reasons not to publish the article, not least that we have no money to defend ourselves and no time to fight a case of that sort. Raja Miah reckons, and we sort of agree, that he could shut us down for a misplaced comma. That makes you think twice cubed about hitting the publish button.
But then there's another powerful imperative working the other way isn't there? If you're in journalism for the public interest, and if you want to be fair to all sides, and if you reckon that someone isn't playing fair, you have to stick up for the truth no matter what, right? So what if he sues? It'll take up a certain amount of time and cause a certain amount of angst, and we'll have to check that we really have insulated ourselves from people trying it on. But what we gain is trust. What we gain is the experience of sticking to our principles under duress. If we sacrifice our principles out of fear, the forces of the counter-enlightenment win without a fight. Not happening.
Miah's tiny mind probably hasn't considered our options in the way we have.
We've set this company up in the UK, but if we find that the UK is - ahem - an unfriendly environment for free thinking, public service journalism, we can always set up in Delaware, the Cayman Islands or Vanuatu, and publish our work from there. Save your money - or, more accurately, other people's money - Raja Miah. Good luck with your Crowdfunder to send a libel writ to the Moon, Raja Miah.
You're reading this because you have taken out a free subscription to The Oldham Owl. You haven't read the long-form article about Raja Miah's Crowdfunder appeal because it's not available to you yet and won't be for another couple of weeks at least.
We value your support, but please consider taking out a paid subscription if you can afford it. Our pounds-and-pence subscribers have access to everything as soon as it's published.
The more paying subscribers we get, the more journalism we can afford. We don't pay for premises. We don't pay for admin (The Editor does it). We certainly do not pay for paper and printing (dead tree fetish madness nearly killed journalism). All of the money we get from subscriptions goes to producing and hosting public interest journalism.
Our plans are as cheap as they can be, and they cost a lot less than you pay for a lot of things you value less.
Reform clean-up shows they mean business
Yesterday I met Councillor Paul Taylor, Reform's new leader in Oldham, in The Bridge Inn. You'll have to wait till next week for the full feature on that interview, which will be an absolute banger.
Councillor Taylor doesn't know too much about the suspension of Councillor Gary Tarbuck from the Reform group, nor about the resignation of former group leader Councillor Lewis Quigg. The processes are beyond his ken - they are being handled centrally by the party rather than the Oldham organisation.
Ed Barnes, Local Democracy Reporter, wrote yesterday that the two cases were thought to be different, but The Owl has been able to corroborate that the two councillors were being investigated for the same thing: passing confidential political and/or personal information to (drumroll) Raja Miah.
This is entirely consistent with other information we have about Miah's weird afternoon in Rhode Island in September, when he somewhat pathetically (in the poetic sense) appealed to Reform councillors to visit him ahead of a crucial Oldham Council vote on interim governance arrangements. Miah did manage to disrupt that process but, in the end, his power over the councillors absolutely disappeared when the Reform group at large, with three hold-outs, voted for the proposals.
The departure of Councillors Quigg and Tarbuck is welcome. Their association with Miah was their undoing. They have shown themselves time and again to be utterly untrustworthy by associating with such a conspiracy nut.
The Reform party group that Councillor Taylor hopes to present to the electorate next May will be free of conspiracy loons and bigots. You can decide for yourself when you read the interview, but Councillor Taylor has convinced me that he is in this for all the right reasons, and that him and his council colleagues are capable people who can put the borough first.
Before the interview properly started, I asked Councillor Taylor what he meant when he said he wants to save Oldham. The first thing he said is that he wants to free Oldham from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which binds Oldham into things Oldhamers don't want. The example he gave was a refuse collection contract that provides a perverse incentive to flytippers.
The second thing he said was that he wants to free Oldham from its own reputation by challenging those who do the place down and give it a bad name.
Councillor Taylor did not use the Reform party's investigations of Councillors Quigg and Tarbuck as an example of saving Oldham, but I will. It shows that they mean business.
