Tuesday 19 January 2016

Time for Lucy Allan to be open or resign‏

It's what Lucy Allan didn't tell us in her interview in Monday's Shropshire Star that is most important


Last week my MP Lucy Allan sent me a despicable email which many of you will have seen. It was despicable because it was an attack on all of us who believe in the right of free speech and that our MPs should be open and accountable for their actions.

All I did was to ask Lucy Allan why she will not publish the email she claims contains the words 'Unless you die' , those three words which she added to the email of a Labour Councillor's son making it appear that he had written them. 

When we ask someone a simple question we expect them to give us a straight answer. Lucy Allan firstly gave me an answer which totally avoided my question and then gave me an answer which was incomplete, confusing and seemed inconsistent with her previous public statements. It was only natural for me to seek clarification on her answer which I politely did earlier this month, only to be met with her response that my conduct amounted to stalking and that any further contact with her office will be considered harassment !

Lucy Allan gave a lengthy interview to the Shropshire Star on Monday . This was her chance to try to silence her many critics who have been calling for her to publish the unseen email which she claims contains the words 'Unless you die'. This has been seen by many as a 'death threat' that Lucy Allan had added to her constituent's email. I saw it more as a wish that she was dead than a death threat but it was still an utterly repugnant set of words to add to her constituent's email, giving us the impression that he had written them himself.

In her interview Lucy Allan failed to explain why she would not publish the email containing the words 'Unless you die'. You would think that if she really wanted to bring an end to the public clamour for her to publish the email and to stop her losing further support from her slim 730 majority that she would have addressed the key question that her critics like me have been asking for many weeks. 

Lucy Allan said in her interview: 

“There were allegations I had doctored a constituent’s email.......It was absolute nonsense.''

I do not understand how Lucy Allan can make this statement because if you look at the evidence it is obvious that she did doctor the email from the Labour Councillor's son and gave the impression that the doctored email came from him. She did not just add the words 'Unless you die' to his email but made substantial changes to his email to make it appear much more serious than it actually was. You can see the full set of changes that she made at Point No 7 here.

Lucy Allan also said in her interview

“What I had literally done is posted stuff I had received. Yes I had not made it definitive that this came from one alias and the other came from another alias but I know they were acting in concert.”

This is a very serious allegation. For the very first time Lucy Allan is publicly claiming that the words 'Unless you die' came from someone who was acting in concert with the Councillor's son. How she knows that is totally beyond me but she has once again made a very serious claim without backing it up with evidence. She has also failed to explain why she decided to only take the 3 words of 'Unless you die'  from this unseen email rather than publishing a larger extract of that email and why she decided to add them to the email from the Councillor's son and quoted him as having written those words when that was clearly untrue. 

She has previously told us that the words 'Unless you die' came from a separate email received on 27th November 2015 which was anonymous and which she did not regard as threatening. If Lucy Allan is now making this new allegation about people acting 'in concert' then why didn't she tell us this before and why didn't she publish that other alleged email separately rather than take just the 3 key words 'Unless you die' to add to her constituent's email ?   

Until Lucy Allan publishes the email which she says includes the words 'Unless you die' there is no evidence to support her account that those words did not come from her own hand and more and more people are going to think that her explanation, in the absence of any evidence, is untrue.  It really now is time for Ms Allan to be open with us all or to resign. 



Neil Phillips

A Telford resident who until now was a Conservative supporter