The candidate cannot say with 100% certainty who is or who is not a member. If a candidate was required to do as you say, s/he would expose her/himself to the possibility of publishing a falsehood (even if an unintentional one), and indeed a false accusation of misleading voters. You refer to membership cards, but as I said in my previous post this is not proof of current membership (a former member may have stopped paying subs but still hold an apparently valid card).
Mark,
To some extent, I understand your point. Yes, it would be perfectly possible for someone to lie to a candidate, when offering to endorse their candidacy, but I can't really see why they'd bother.
If a candidate has made a genuine attempt to ensure that their listed supporters are identified as NUJ members/non-members as appropriate, it would be wrong for it to count against them if it subsequently emerges that they've been conned by a supporter.
I remember, on numerous occasions, reading an award-winning journal published by another trade union. On the letters page, it seemed to be common practice for the correspondents to add their membership numbers after their names when writing to the magazine.
Taking your point that a candidate can't be completely definite about a supporter's membership, it ought to be possible to ensure that all candidates, in future, include a statement on their websites to the effect that where a supporter has a number after their name, that corresponds to their NUJ membership number, and the absence of such a number indicates that the supporter is not a current member.
Regardless of the outcome of this election, I'm tempted to raise this suggestion at my branch, with a view to getting a motion presented to a future ADM. I think it can only help with clarity.
You said: "As to whether accusing someone of using a “politician's phrase” in the context that you did is defamatory would, in the end, be for a court to decide (as are all matters of "meaning"). But there can be no real doubt that such an accusation is defamatory because it carries the meaning for a “reasonable reader” of someone giving a dishonest answer".
Can I make it clear that I don't for one minute think that you, or any of the other candidates are being dishonest about whether supporters are NUJ members or not. All of the candidates have answered the essential question, albeit some have given more information than others.
Many politicians are decent, honourable people, who don't, as a rule, set out to deceive. However, many of them are also well capable of answering a question in a less than fulsome manner, and of using a deft word or phrase to avoid giving information that they would rather keep to themselves. If you accept that (not an unreasonable presumption), then the words 'politician's phrase' can have a far wider meaning than your narrow interpretation above.
Surely, a 'reasonable reader' would have to have have a very jaundiced view indeed of our politicians to assume that the words 'politician's phrase' can
only be read as a suggestion of dishonesty (and I say again, that wasn't how I intended it to be read at all).
Anyway - all of this is pretty academic, and probably of only limited interest to anyone else, so I'll leave it there.
Regards
John
