jrawle wrote on Nov 27
th, 2008 at 10:25am:
Perhaps you should try not to tell people what they should discuss so often. Not everyone's interested in joining some sort of campaign group. Some of us prefer simply to discuss numbers and help others when they ask queries, rather than jump on them for not wading through the masses of information and poor site navigation...
Hear, hear, hear, jrawle. Despite his constant denials ever since SilentCallsVictim arrived on the scene in our campaign (having largely achieved success on the Silent Calls front in his own one man campaign) he has regularly sought to both dictate how many of the much more longstanding members of this forum (you will note that we are both Supreme Members of the forum while he is only a Senior Member) should carry out their campaigning activities and to largely consider only his way of doing things to be the correct one. Also despite his repeated denials he definitely now is positioning himself as MrSayNoTo0870 with the media because he already has the media contacts and credibility to do so and also tends to put his points in the sort of bland, low key, inoffensive, reasonable chappie kind of a way the media seem to like for this issue. Although the media do seem to like militant firebrands like myself when covering other more emotional issues (road deaths and their connection with speed limits or otherwise for instance where BRAKE, roadpeace and other such groups trade on nothing other than gut emotional reaction not backed up by scientific fact) with this 084/7 issue they seem to regard it as a small beer personal finance matter that must be covered in a low key way. And for this SCV's approach seems to fit the bill neatly.
Also SCV occasionally claims to be willing to introduce other active forum members to his media contacts but in practice this never ever happens and he always ends up in the media himself since it is perfectly obvious that one of his main motivations as a campaigner is not just to achieve success on the issue but to also see his own name up in lights as much as possible. You will note how he even chose a forum name that made his own real world identity pretty obvious to anyone who has been following telecoms issues in the media.
SCV has regularly sought to chide my own methods of opposing the 084/7 abusers and seeks to preach that his own methods of only picking on an easy targets and then sending briefing notes to those individuals principally able to control the decision making processes of the body in question is the only likely successful route. Whilst I cannot fault him for the number of hours he puts in to the cause (as it is clearly considerable) if he continues to seek to tell us that there is only one acceptable way to campaign then he must go back and pick a topic to campaign on where he is the only main protagonist and there is not already a large body of existing campaigners who he has sought to join late in the day.
I have always found with this website that over the four or so years I have been involved that I and most of the main activists have always shared an absolutely remarkable commonality of mind about what is wrong with 084/7 numbers and why we feel so upset about them. But right from the start I always found I did not have this common mindset with SCV who always sought to approach the campaign with the mindset of a large company team player quietly trying to persuade his bosses that his ideas were their own and then no doubt hoping for the next promotion in return. Whereas many of the rest of us are more Frenchman at heart who prefer direct action at the burning barricades in trying to find an alternative geographic phone number to ring today and also direct to the point emails to the outfits concerned telling them why they are a bunch of unprincipled two faced double dealing charlatans.
Now that may not be SCV's way of doing things and I do not demand that he adopts our ways any more than I expect to suddenly campaign along the lines that SCV finds comfortable. But like you what I do find odd is when he seeks to lay down the law on how we should campaign when he is not the site owner or forum moderator but only another forum member.
Oh and by the way he won't like this discussion being in public (and would have sent me another chiding private message about this post if I had not added this last paragraph telling him it was pointless for him to do so) as just like the main large company 084/7 abusers he always likes all discussions on campaigning tactics to take place behind closed doors and out of public scrutiny.