Anthony Hook has the story.
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4 Comments
Very useful post by Anthony. Being falsely accused or threatened with legal action can be very stressful, and it is good to know that we have people willing to help and advise. The Tories threatened legal action a few years ago after we questioned the fact that their candidate (a retired planner, and a current planning consultant) might have an undeclared conflict of interest on planning matters! On this occasion, simply ignoring the threat proved enough, but many on our campaign team had sleepless nights. Get advice as soon as you can. For councillors, ALDC is the place to start, IMO. Certainly, their advice was very valuable to us.
Having been one of those people at ALDC TAG refers to this is a useful reminder. Generally I’d say that the vast majority of threats of legal action against Lib Dem campaigners either had no foundation or were not followed through. The key point is to get advice at an early stage and ALDC or Mark would be the best place to start.
The second point is that a lot of the situations where LIb Dem campaigners want to TAKE legal action are equally ill-founded. Situations like Watford, Miranda Grell and the one Anthony describes are pretty rare. The best thing in almost all cases is to get on with your campaigning or deal with it as “straightforward” negative campaigning on which there is a variety of advice and training sessions.
Injunctions are, as Anthony points out a powerful weapon that can be deployed. They would IME be of relatively limited use as you would almost certainly have to prove that something was at least clearly and demonstrably false for a Judge to consider forbidding a party to put material in an election leaflet.
More than that however is the practical point that if a campaign against you uses injunctable material it is likely to either be used late on or only come to your attention late on. At that point the damage may already have been done and you’d be better spending the time campaigning rather than in court.
are we in a glass house though?
Never, ever get involved with legal processes unless you have exhausted all other possible courses of action. As a young general election agent I was advised by a former candidate (and barrister) to threaten the Labour agent with a writ for libel. He, as a prominent local solicitor, laughed off the threat, and a few years later got his own back by suing me for libel for a relatively innocuous ‘slur’ against a couple of local Labour councillors. Every legal action I have seen in the Party has been disastrous for those involved. If I see something I think is dubious in a Focus I am printing I stop and query it: don’t say it, however angry you are.