I see that the Terry Watch blog was the subject of a piece in last week’s Sunday Herald (via Jeff).

I didn’t read Terry Watch. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it was still going. I expressed my discomfort about the blog not too long after it started, actually.

I’m not particularly a fan of these negative campaign blogs as a whole. I think inevitably the heat / light ratio increases in such blogs. For that reason I didn’t ever check the blog while I was compiling the Roundups. For the same reasons I also ignore blogs such as Ridiculous Politics and Fib Dems — both blogs which now appear to be defunct. It’s possibly fair to say that Terry Watch too is now defunct.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly a fan of the Terry Watch blog, I can’t agree with Jeff’s assessment that Terry Kelly was the victim of “bullying” here. I haven’t seen the controversial images that were posted by Shotgun (not a blogger I’ve ever been a fan of). From what I have heard though they certainly crossed the line.

But a lot of what I saw on Terry Watch could be bracketed under ‘fair comment’. Some excellent bloggers were involved in the site, some of whom have found their names being dragged through the mud in the comments over at the Sunday Herald website quite unfairly.

Indeed, the whole piece, written by Jasper Hamill, looks like pretty bad journalism to me. Through a sleight-of-hand Hamill attempts to associate the Terry Watch blog with racist hate-mail sent to Terry Kelly. To link the blog to this mail without any evidence is pretty disingenuous, particularly since the anti-Terry Kelly backlash began several months before the Terry Watch blog was set up. I, for instance, wrote about Terry Kelly as early as 2006, and again here. I followed up a couple of months later describing him as The greatest argument against representative democracy — a view I stick to.

If you read the article carefully it is clear that the controversy surrounding the Terry Watch blog was caused by Shotgun. But the story is “sexed up” with liberally-sprinkled references to Right for Scotland, revealing his identity in the process. The reason the story mentions RfS? Because he once stood for the Conservative party. In other words, this story is yet more of the “Booo! Tories!” nonsense that I wrote about last month.

The headline is, “Failed Tory candidate contributed to hate website attacking political rival — ‘TerryWatch’ blog contains uploaded photographs of Labour councillor’s daughter doctored to create obscene images”. A more faithful headline would have read, “Random shock-blogger Shotgun posts offensive images” — but that would have taken the wind right out of the sails of the story.

Plobotsky continued the ‘guilt by association’ theme set by Jasper Hamill, accusing several top Scottish bloggers of being culpable for Shotgun’s images. Obviously, though, they are not culpable for Shotgun’s images. Clairwil has explained why.

I guess the difference between Clairwil et al. and Right for Scotland is that RfS apparently continued to post after Shotgun’s images were published while the others decided to stop contributing. That perhaps demonstrates that RfS has slightly poor judgement, but it hardly shows any malicious intent. I feel sorry for him that his name has been dragged through the mud as a result of gutter journalism. Thankfully a few of the comments provide testimonials outlining RfS’s good character, which I see no reason to doubt.

As for Terry Kelly, I can feel no sympathy for him. As I recall, the original reason why Terry Watch was set up was as a response to Terry Kelly’s thoroughly abusive responses to commenters on his blog. As I said in that post I wrote last year, the Kellys (Terry and Rayleen) have a pretty solid track record of baselessly accusing other bloggers of being mentally ill, racist, homophobic and whatever slurs he can manage to shove into the debate.

Once, instead of engaging in a proper conversation with me, he decided to slur me by saying that I must either be a nationalist or right-wing. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think if you have been reading my blog for any length of time you will come to the opposite conclusion. Terry Kelly obviously couldn’t be bothered actually reading my blog and engaging in a sensible debate, so decided to resort to ill-targeted personal attacks.

That wasn’t my final encounter with him though. He went back to Scottish Roundup, calling me “janus faced C - - -”. One can only guess what his four-letter C-word was supposed to be, but at least he had the decency to censor himself on that occasion. Given his track record, one can only assume that he is crying crocodile tears when he complains about the robust nature of Terry Watch in the Sunday Herald piece.

However, despite being at the receiving end of his terrible debating skills, I did not feel the need to take part in the Terry Watch malarkey. I felt that Terry Kelly’s own blog did the job for Terry Watch. You don’t have to spend long reading it to realise that Terry Kelly is an utter buffoon, with badly-thought out opinions and a debating style that borders on the abusive who routinely fails to publish legitimate comments. In short, it sums up everything that is wrong with the anything-as-long-as-it’s-Labour mentality that exists in the west of Scotland.

Did Jasper Hamill’s piece mention just how bad a representative Terry Kelly is? Just this weaselly-worded phrase: “ill-thought out proclamations which, among other things, claimed women were “thick”". Calling women thick is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem with Terry Kelly. Delving into the bizarre views of Terry Kelly and just what accounts for the fact that this man gets elected time after time would have made for a much more worthy story than trying to attach the blame to RfS for something he didn’t do.

As for the suggestion that the Terry Watch blog represented bullying, I would think that this is an overstatement. Bullies are people who pick on the weak and powerless. As a Labour councillor, Terry Kelly is certainly neither weak nor powerless compared to the bloggers he crosses swords with in his own borderline-abusive manner. To call Terry Watch a bullying campaign is surely an injustice to the many people who are the real victims of bullying.

As long as the content is non-abusive, there is a place for a blog like Terry Watch, no matter how negative it is. Terry Kelly is an elected representative and therefore ought to be held to account. And as Clairwil said, I doubt Terry Kelly entered politics without being thick-skinned enough to take robust debate. He certainly knows how to dole it out.

There is a lesson from all of this though. As bloggers, we have a responsibility to ensure that high standards of debate are adhered to. Both Terry Kelly himself and the Terry Watch blog probably failed on this account. Indeed, online debates are well known for descending into flame wars, tirades of abuse and disrespect. How to keep the standards of debate high will be the subject of a future post here.