Banned

Repeatedly mentioning that you had cancelled your subscription to the paper is outside the bounds of our Community Standards as well – off-topic and derogatory towards the Guardian as a whole. You should appreciate that the moderation team has no access to the subscription records in order to ensure that we don’t have one rule for subscribers and one rule for others. We have to apply the rules regardless.

Bans are not necessarily permanent, but we don’t immediately reverse bans as a matter of course. If you contact us again following our standard three months cooling-off period and still want to comment we will review the situation and can look into reinstating your account then.

I realise that this could easily degenerate into a “he said, she said” debate because you, my loyal reader, are highly unlikely to trawl through several dozen articles over two years to comments as to how I broke the rules. But I plead guilty to having made the comments they emphasise. I have, once, referred to the hard left writer Owen Jones as “cyber bully” with a “massive ego” because, in my view, he is and he has. It is simply a matter of fact that many “Grauniad” columnists are Oxbridge educated (hello again, Owen) and that their more left wing columnists attack Labour with as much energy as they attack the Tories.

The hard left columnists have an agenda, which has included and to an extent still includes open support for hard left politics. They were and are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and are highly critical of mere mainstream Labour supporters and MPs. Labour leader Keir Starmer has been repeatedly called a “liar” by – yes, yes: again – Owen Jones but for some reason he enjoys so-called free speech in the on-line and paper editions whereas some readers don’t.

I have, indeed, referred frequently to cancelling my subscription in the comments section on the grounds that I did just that. I resented paying the wages of columnists who repeatedly make political and personal attacks on senior Labour politicians. But according to The Guardian, I am not allowed to say what I really believe about the motives of such columnists.

Oddly, they do not mention my frequent praise for Marina Hyde, John Crace, Raphael Behr, John Harris and countless others but then I suppose praise is within their rules.

I had no idea I had served “multiple premoderation sanctions”, possibly because there are often long periods when I simply don’t offer comment. They must too have reinstated me without saying anything. Well, thanks for that.

I’ve got nothing to cool-off about so in three months time I won’t be getting on my hands and knees to beg the paper to allow me to post only comments that the moderators like. Sod that. Instead, I’ll cancel my online subscription too and keep the extra couple of quid a week I pay them and give it to a food bank instead.

When the likes of Jones, Aditya Chakrabortty and Andy Beckett are free to make personal and political attacks on people but I am denied the freedom to call them out for what I consider them to be, then something has gone wrong. I’m not getting into a debate about it with them. Their attacks are free speech and mine are “smear tactics”. Fuck that. They’re not having my money anymore.