A4E, the company making millions from miserable "New Deal for the unemployed" courses seems to be very worried about people drawing attention to their highly-profitable (to them, not taxpayers or the unemployed) activities.

The Void blog reports that A4E appear to have used legal threats in an attempt to silence the websites New Deal Scandal and Watching A4E. Rather than attempt to prove that the websites aren't speaking truth, the company whose director owns at least one stately home prefer to:

have snuck behind the backs of the bloggers to threaten the platform they published on. And so far both those platforms have backed corporate might rather than the bloggers, hacks and citizen journalists on which their empires are based."

New Deal Scandal, for instance, were censored for simply reporting on a notice posted at Companies House. Neil Watson has resigned as a director of the company. (See screenshot from the Companies House records, and this cached copy of the offending article) Why did this make them blow their top?

Clearly, A4e are very sensitive about the source of their wealth: it's you. They make a fortune from government contracts, while Ofsted report a "very low progression rate into jobs of 18%" for at least one of their sites. Are they worried that the more people find out about their services, the less they might seem to be worth spending public funds on?

Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty have compiled some of the information about A4e into a newsletter that has apparently been very popular during breaks at the courses run at A4e's poky office on Lothian Road.

In a recent post, The Void calls for solidarity and support for the bloggers and jobseekers under the thumb of A4e:

A4e seem to put a lot of effort into protecting the upstanding citizens of the internet from the truth about these shady corporate scumbags.
If you google A4e, all but two of the entries on the front page are websites run by A4e themselves. Google ‘A4e are cunts’ to get a more accurate representation of what most people think of these bullying … cunts.
Blogs and websites, even those on the left, have so far remained quiet on this issues. We say attack now and attack often. If they want a war with the interweb, then let’s give ‘em one.
And if you’re one of those lefties who just doesn’t like to think about the unemployed too much, well, good news, you don’t have to! There’s a whole load of liberal issues to get your teeth stuck into.

• Do you care about the Palestinian people – kill A4e in the face
• Care about local services being sold off to private companies – kill A4e in the face
• Care about freedom of speech and internet censorship – kill A4e in the face
• Care about benefit fraud – kill A4e in the face
• They are even involved in tormenting asylum seekers and immigrants by helping to administer the ‘Life in the UK’ test. So No Borders types join us and kill A4e in the face.
• Or if you just care about the poorest and most vulnerable people in our class being exploited, bullied and harrased just so A4e founder Emma Harrison can buy more stately homes then kill A4e in the fucking face.
• And they probably do some really bad shit to the environment as well.

So there you go, there’s something for everyone. Fire at will.