British Election's 21st Century Dirty Trick

Dirty tricks in elections are as old as elections themselves. They are part of the reason that many voters are turned off, not understanding that they are part of the game. When they don't disenfranchise anyone, they are harmless. And if well executed, they take on the glory of a really good practical joke. This year, the British Conservatives have struck with a 21st Century move, a trick website targeting a sitting Liberal Democrat MP. Dick Tuck would be proud.

Mark Oaten is the sitting MP for Winchester, a member of the Liberal Democrats. His website is a rather unimaginatively chosen one -- www.markoaten.com. However, those in the UK are more familiar with the web syntax that usually gives them website suffixes like "ac.uk" or "co.uk." The Conservative Party's candidate, George Hollingberry, is using www.markoaten.co.uk as one of his sites. He says a third party bought it and let him use it. So, when people try to go to Mark Oaten's site, they don't get there if they use standard UK nomenclature -- they get the Tory site.

Mr. Oaten, who would probably win in any cybersquatting lawsuit, has demanded that Mr. Hollingberry call off the trick, saying it was "pretty pathetic." Whether Mr. Hollingberry will do so or not remains to be seen, but he claims this is just an example of "smart campaigning." Since the Labour candidate, Patrick Davies, isn't getting any press attention because of the row, he has called it a "piffling issue." UK Independence Party candidate David Abbott appears not to have commented as yet.

There was a time in British politics when the dirty trick was less technological. An apocryphal story has a die-hard Liberal activist taking an election flier from each of the other parties and wrapping them around two bricks. The brick with the Labour leaflet would go through the window of local Tory Party headquarters late one night, while the other brick surrounded in its Conservative leaflet would crash through a window at Labour's HQ. What made this so delightful came next -- a press release from the Liberal condemning the hooliganism of the other two parties.

Don Segretti, a minor player in the Watergate scandal, labeled these kinds of dirty tricks with a vulgarism for copulation with a rat. But by whatever name, it seems that these election shenanigans (distinct from stealing an election, which is a dirty trick and then some) have entered the third millennium thanks to Mr. Hollingberry. But the best dirty trick in Winchester this year might be the final candidate on the ballot -- an independent named Arthur Pendragon. His website is www.pendragon-independent.org, and perhaps running as King Arthur isn't such a dirty trick at all. Providing of course, the voter can be bothered to look him up at the library.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home