Nadine Dorries and Self Pity

Witness Nadine Dorries blathering on in The Daily Hate about how hard life is as an anti-abortion pro-life campaigner:

Pro-abortion activists deluge me with hate mail, or call on the police and public authorities to investigate me over some time-wasting, invented grievances — like whether I have a permit to hold a press conference on the green outside Parliament, or whether a certain salary payment to my staff is justified.

We only have Dorries' word (for what it is worth) that she is deluged with hate mail by pro-choice (not pro-abortion) activists. As for the grievances - Dorries is an elected politician proposing policies that will have a national impact. Therefore, she is and should be subject to rigourous scrutiny. Especially in the aftermath of the Expenses Scandal - a scandal in which Dorries herself was involved at the very least in a peripheral way.

Indeed, one member of my office recently left my employment because she was so fed up with this endless oppression from campaigners.

Oppression? Please, get a grip. Pressure is the very best you can argue your people are under - and they work for an elected representative, so they should expect to have to deal with public pressure.

Because I am an MP, the police and other bodies have no choice but to investigate, no matter how frivolous the complaint: then the campaigners run off to their supportive friends in the Left-wing press to say that ‘Nadine Dorries is under investigation’, always declining to report a few days later that I have been cleared.

The police and other bodies should investigate all complaints regardless of whether Dorries (hardly the most impartial of sources) finds them to be frivolous. And there is something rather amusing in someone criticising others for using the left-wing press using the medium of the right-wing press. Pot and kettle, Nadine. And I doubt whether you or The Daily Hate will be retracting the unsubtle and inaccurate dig at one of your most eloquent and persistent critics when it is pointed out to you and the terrible rag voicing your self-pitying and unconvincing opinions.

Even my own family is in the firing line. One of my daughters works in my Parliamentary office, so she sees all the cruel messages, while my other daughter, during her last year at school, had to put up with snide comments from teachers whose dogmatic feminism had been offended by my stand.

Well, I don't doubt that you can complain about those snide teachers if you so wish, Nadine. Assuming, of course, there is something meaningful for you to complain about other than your seemingly self-perpetuating persecution complex operating in overdrive. As for the daughter who works in your parliamentary office - it is her choice to take a nepotistic job with her mother, and if she doesn't want to be exposed to the "cruel" messages (which could just be those messages that do not agree with Dorries' positions) she should get a real job in the real world.

Yet what are all these campaigners so scared of? Why should they be anxious about women being offered independent advice?

I think people who are pro-choice would favour independent, neutral advice. Dorries wants to reduce the number of abortions; I think there is nothing wrong with those of us who are genuinely pro-choice questioning the extent to which Dorries' independent advisors would be neutral.

If they are really as pro-choice as they pretend, they would support my proposal. That is what women in this country deserve.

Except the reason why people who are pro-choice do not support Dorries is because, by attempting to reduce the periods in which women can have abortions, Dorries is reducing choice. She is attempting to reduce the control women have over their own bodies. And I can only speak for myself, but I really doubt that is what the women in this country deserve.