Mediaboss Marketing

There's not really any dispute that the UK Liberal Democrats party sold voter data for 100,000 to the Remain campaign in 2016, though the Information Commissioner's Office tried to suppress that revelation until after the coming election; the Libdems say they did nothing wrong, but when Opendemocracy's Jim Cusick approached the party for a statement ahead of an article, he got no reply.

What happened next is...weird.

After Cusick's article went live, an aggrieved Libdem "senior official" wrote to Opendemocracy, demanding to know why their statement hadn't been included in the article. Cusick said it was because he'd never received a statement, but if they'd furnish one, he'd include it. But instead of a statement, Cusick got a legal threat from an expensive firm of solicitors, Goodman Derrick, demanding that the article be censored, either by removing "all derogatory and disparaging statements" (having read the article, I couldn't find any statements that qualified), or removal of the article altogether.

Given that the Libdems style themselves "the party of liberty," that is indeed weird.

But what happened next is weirder.

Opendemocracy asked the lawyers to provide a statement from the Libdems to include in their article, pointing out that they'd made three such requests without a response. In the absence of any statement from the Libdems (apart from the legal threat conveyed by their lawyers), Opendemocracy made a "surmise" about what the Libdems didn't like about their coverage and amended the article.

Then they heard from the lawyers again, stating that the Libdems had provided an "on the record" response to Cusick's article, on Nov 12, and they attached that email as proof.

Here's where the really weird stuff comes in.

Cusick didn't ask the Libdems for comment until Nov 13, which meant that the email the lawyers had attached as evidence had apparently been sent a full day before Opendemocracy wrote to the party seeking comment.

Opendemocracy wrote back to the lawyers, asking how this was possible.

When the lawyers did not reply, Opendemocracy wrote again, saying that they were about to publish a story about this and seeking comment. This time, someone from the Libdem press office called Opendemocracy and said a "mistake had been made" and said there was an investigation ongoing. So Opendemocracy generously gave the Libdems even more time to reply before publishing.

The party finally wrote back with a statement saying that "we have been made aware that the information openDemocracy subsequently received from the Liberal Democrats was incorrect. We have suspended a member of staff involved and are following due process."

But in addition to this, the Libdems' lawyers wrote back to Opendemocracy, repeating the threats over their coverage of the Libdems' data sale, and insisting that neither the lawyers nor the party had known about the fake email (Opendemocracy called it a "crude forgery"), despite the fact that Opendemocracy had painstakingly detailed their multiple attempts to solicit a comment from the party without a reply.

This is an embarrassment: as Opendemocracy points out, it doesn't rise to the level of open fraud committed by the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson, but the Tories don't style themselves "the party of liberty." Speaking as a former Libdem party member and campaigner (I'm a member of the Labour Party now), I don't believe the party should have flogged off voter data, but even moreso, I don't think that any party can be said to stand for "liberty" when its response to negative press coverage is to threaten to rain down expensive, punitive legal action from fancy lawyers.

First, why was the Lib Dem press office so desperate to discredit our story? In Jim Cusicks initial communications with them, he told them we had seen internal documents about the Lib Dems lucrative 2016 data sale. If, as they strongly maintain, the party had acted in accordance with the law at all times and had done nothing wrong, why did someone think it was important enough to repeatedly make false claims, including a faked document, via expensive lawyers?

What did our story reveal that prompted this level of duplicity?

Second, the replies from Goodman Derrick were issued on behalf of the party and of its leader, Jo Swinson. This assumes that senior figures were involved. Who sanctioned and signed off this aggressive legal pursuit, including the letter with the forged email? And how might Lib Dem supporters and donors feel about this appalling use of party funds?

Perhaps most importantly, though, what does this whole episode say about the so-called Liberal Democrats regard for fact-checking, accuracy and press freedom? We at openDemocracy are a small team. The distraction has cost us valuable staff time and legal bills, which could otherwise have been spent on doing actual journalism during the final weeks before the most important election in a generation.

What are Jo Swinsons Liberal Democrats so desperate to hide? [Mary Fitzgerald/Opendemocracy]

For many years, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a newspaper columnist for the Telegraph, where he espoused some of the most reactionary, disqualifying garbage ever published by a mainstream UK publication, a trend that continued after he began his political career. Business Insider has rounded up a "greatest hits" reel of Bojo's most disgusting []

For more than a decade, Britons have relied on Mysociety's Theyworkforyou to find out who represents them in Parliament (as well as the regional assemblies), find out what those people are doing and saying, and to get in touch with their lawmakers and their fellow constituents to hold them to account.

The UK is having an election in less than a month, and last night, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn debated Tory archclown Boris Johnson for a televised debate in which Johnson had to defend his record as a lying, racist, philandering, cowardly failure of a human being, and of a leader to his party and the []

In the early days of the web, everyone wanted a .com domain for their site. As a result, all the good ones got snapped up. But .com no longer has the cachet it once did. In fact, many new businesses and individuals are opting for other top-level domain extensions. One of the most memorable is []

When the SNES launched back in the early 1990s, it changed gaming forever. One of the innovations was a gamepad with four action buttons something that has remained a constant on controllers ever since. The 8BitDo SN30 Bluetooth Gamepad brings that iconic design up to date, with Bluetooth connectivity and support for multiple platforms. []

After a long day at work, cooking a meal from scratch can seem like too much trouble. Unfortunately, the alternative is usually something unhealthy. Enter the Mellow Sous Vide Precision Cooker. This compact water bath uses cutting-edge technology to cook meat and veggies at the perfect temperature for exactly the right amount of time. It []

Original post:
Opendemocracy: the Libdems tried to censor our article about their sale of voter data, then used a forged email to intimidate us - Boing Boing