In amongst all of the hubris concerning Barnet Council Leader Mike Freer's comments referring to his opponents as "One Handeded Bloggers" a point which initially completely escaped me. I've got a friend who is an amputee and he pointed out that Freer's comments were extremely disrespectful to the disabled. I did a quick Google of "One Handed Blogger" and the top hit was this site - http://www.onehandedblogger.com/ - Unlike Mike Freer's Leaderlistens.com, this site is a rather inspiring blog, detailing the efforts and achievements of the author in overcoming his disability. As I've said before regarding Mike Freer's comments, I think they show extremely poor judgement and poor taste. One of the main functions of figures in public life is to behave with dignity and to set an example for others to follow. Of all the examples I've seen recently, that I may choose to follow, the "One Armed Blogger" is possibly the finest and he certainly shouldn't be denigrated in this fashion.It strikes me that Mike Freer has very little empathy with people generally if he can make such comments. I get the impression that he has a complete lack of respect for everyone apart from his close circle of friends. One such example of this can be found at his website - http://www.finchleyconservatives.com/photo-gallery.html - if you go down and right click on the second image of Mike Freer and select the "Save as" option, it displays the name of the file as saved on Mike's website.
This picture of Mike Freer, the Swami (an important religious leader in Golders Green) and his assistants has the title "mikeandasians2". I've taken the trouble to save a screenshot so that you can see what I saw - if you double click on the picture you will see it in full detail. Now if I was saving a picture of a meeting with an important religious leader, I'd like to think I'd show him and his assistants rather more respect than just describing them as "asians2". To then put that picture up on a public website is stunningly disrespectful and rather incompetent. If you were wondering why I was saving this picture, earlier this month, I wrote a blog called "Religion in Barnet" about how local politicians seem to be using the various faiths in the Borough for their own ends. When I write blogs, I usually look for suitable pictures to make them more interesting. When I saw the title of this picture, it only reinforced what I was saying about politicians locally using religion as a way to garner a few extra votes.At the very least, I would expect an explanation and an apology from Mike Freer to one handed bloggers and to the Swami of the Golders Green temple for these horrible insults. Maybe he can put the Leader Listens blog to some proper use for this apology.
*** Update 10:30 09/03/2009 - Just a quick note to show the Barnet Eye gets things done. NO apology yet, but at least he's changed the offensive filename for the Swami picture
Mike Freer’s comments were offensive and crass and he should issue a public apology. Whatever a politician may think about his critics, he should never express those thoughts publicly in such graphic terms. Mr Freer is an experienced politician and should have known better. Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.
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