Saturday, August 09, 2008

Spck, St. Stephen the Great, Dave Walker etc. Roundup

Matt Wardman has posted a good roundup today of where things are at, and added yet more bloggers and sites which are carrying the story. I'm thrilled to see that the Facebook group has cleared 400: it was 425 members when I looked just now.

Meanwhile Bishop Alan has emerged from Lambeth to blog on the Private Eye report, and Phil Brewer, one of the SSG management team, has been locked out of his own shop in Sheffield for not paying the rent. Wonder if anyone's told the landlord he's filing for bankruptcy?

No sooner do I try to quieten down on this than lots of new articles turn up. That last link is to quiet a heated debate on the role of the original SPCK trustees in all of this (also here). I must admit that I was quite surprised to discover on the Charity Commission website that the original Society of St. Stephen the Great had only turned over £28,728, with most of this being donations from J. Mark Brewer. That's less than half of our parish turnover, and I can't imagine us being asked to run a chain of national bookstores.

It's also being noted that search terms like Brewer and Pritchard, J. Mark Brewer, Society of St. Stephen the Great and the like on Google are increasingly turning up stories related to the silencing of the SPCK bloggers and the poor handling of the business and its staff. And I guess the longer this goes on, the more that will happen. It would be incredibly embarassing if the top Google search for 'bplaw' (the shorthand for Brewer & Pritchard Law) turned up here, or even worse here.

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