>This is my blog, mine and mine alone. No-one else has any say in what I write, no-one else sees it until I hit ‘Publish’. If there is a conflict of interest between anything I may put on this blog and any voluntary (or other) position that I may hold in the community or elsewhere, then that is my responsibility alone and – if the conflict is irreconcilable – may require me to reconsider that community position.
It is in the nature of blogs that they are spontaneous, opinionated and personal, and I have every intention of continuing to say whatever what I wish on this and any other blogs that I am responsible for – and that includes subjective criticism (= personal opinion) on any films, tv programmes, books, records or choirs – or people – that I may wish to comment upon. I do so advisedly, and taking full responsibility for anything I may write.<\/p>\n
Some time ago a team that I am currently a member of signed a legally binding agreement with a 3rd party, and the agreement included an undertaking that they would not make defamatory comments about that party. I was not a member of that team at the time, and I was not – and am not – a signatory to that agreement. As I understand it, one of the clauses in that agreement was that it was not to be discussed with non-signatories and as a result I do not know the details – it therefore seems absurd to suggest that I am in some way bound, by association, by it or its terms. Nevertheless the person that I ‘criticised’ took it upon themselves to contact a conciliatory service and solicitor and threaten legal action against the team.<\/p>\n
Given that the ‘agreement’ does not extend to me (this has since been confirmed to me by a solicitor who was involved in drawing up the agreement), I intend to continue blogging as before and, while I have no wish to be unpleasant or defamatory, I reserve the right to say whatever the heck I wish on any of my personal blogs within the bounds of decency and legality. It is an unavoidable aspect of the performance\/entertainment industry that one gets reviews, both formal and informal, and I for one have certainly had my fair share of negative ones. An artist who is confident in their work should not feel threatened or undermined by criticism – one simply accepts or ignores it.<\/p>\n
I removed (deleted – not retracted) my post of 11th June as a personal favour to my ‘team leader’, who was being threatened with legal action despite it having nothing whatsoever to do with them. But I stand by every word that I wrote and, given the behaviour of the aforementioned third party with regard to it, I have half a mind to rewrite it and republish it. I have already accepted (and acknowledged to that person, in a private email) that it was written in haste and not subject to my usual editing process, and a simple “whoah, steady on, could you tone it down a bit” from that person would have worked wonders – the fact that he chose to threaten legal action, rather than contact me directly (yes, he has my email address and phone number) is perhaps the worst bit about this.<\/p>\n
I’ll be back – and if said person does anything else to annoy me then I’ll talk about them again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
>This is my blog, mine and mine alone. No-one else has any say in what I write, no-one else sees it until I hit ‘Publish’. If there is a conflict of interest between anything I may put on this blog and any voluntary (or other) position that I may hold in the community or elsewhere, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jeremyb.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}