
U.K. Parties Prepare for 2015 by Erasing Web Histories - JumpCrisscross
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/u-k-parties-prepare-for-2015-by-erasing-web-histories.html
======
rjknight
"Removed" makes it sound like a sin of commission, where it's more likely that
they decided to re-build their website and didn't see a point in having a
historical archive of speeches, policy documents etc. on there. To the extent
that political parties are marketing operations rather than history societies,
this is not really surprising.

I'm not sure how this kind of thing used to be handled prior to the web being
a major campaign tool. I wonder how easy it was to get hold of the 1992 Labour
election manifesto in 1997, when such things existed only as printed
documents.

There has always been a thriving cottage industry of political obsessives (in
a good way!) who maintain their own archives of this kind of material. It
turns out that you can't get old election manifestos from the Labour party,
but you can get them here: [http://www.labour-
party.org.uk/manifestos/](http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/) \- and
the Conservative one here:
[http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1992/](http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1992/)

I'm not sure what's best here. Should we put greater pressure on political
parties (and other similar organisations) to maintain a public history of
their own activity despite this being sometimes against their self-interest,
or should we support the efforts of third parties who archive this stuff
without such conflicts of interest? (Of course, the right answer might be
"both").

~~~
choult
I believe the Conservatives (at least) have also disallowed the relevant paths
via their robots.txt:
[http://www.conservatives.com/robots.txt](http://www.conservatives.com/robots.txt)

This then has the effect of removing it from the Internet Archive for a
start...

~~~
peteretep
Kind of makes sense too - you don't want people searching for Conservative
policies at election time accidentally finding the ones with the pressing
issues for the last election.

~~~
choult
... or for them to be complicit in laying bare their own hypocrisy ...

~~~
mattmanser
It's not hypocrisy to change your mind or change direction as the situation
changes.

~~~
makomk
Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly obvious that the Tories never
planned on following through with their promises in the first place. Their
original justification was that the country's finances were so bad they
couldn't afford all the things they'd promised. However, now that everyone's
mostly forgotten what they originally said and they've deleted it from the
internet David Cameron has declared that his policy of closing and crippling
the Government services he got elected on the promise of protecting is
permanent and has nothing to do with the country's financial state after all.

------
arethuza
I'm delighted that my choco ration is going up to 25 grammes.

~~~
lutusp
> I'm delighted that my choco ration is going up to 25 grammes.

I suspect that Americans, and those under 30, aren't going to understand this
reference. As to those both American and under 30, well, they're double double
plus unable to understand this reference.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present
controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

~~~
Sambdala
For what it's worth, most Americans under 30 have probably read 1984 in
school.

~~~
lutusp
> For what it's worth, most Americans under 30 have probably read 1984 in
> school.

Didn't know that, thank you, many years since I was in school. So has 1984
replaced Catcher in the Rye? That would be a shame, as well as a difficult
choice.

------
mtgx
I'm very disappointed in how archive.org handled this. I mean, they just
delete all of their archives as soon as the source blocks archive.org or
requests they delete its archives on them? Then what's the point of it all?!

~~~
pavlov
What do you expect them to do? It's copyrighted material. They can't retain a
copy if the author doesn't want them to.

~~~
sdoering
Well and that is the problem with digital goods. In "the old days" (TM) it
was, that libraries and library-archives had papers and reporting on these
speeches and oftentimes even manuscripts of speeches archived.

I would have loved to see a political party, or a newspaper request libraries
to delete their copies.

So, what is a digital archive other, then a library, our repository of shared
human historic-source-files? Why do we make it that easy for anyone, to
destroy things, that might be of interest to future historians/generations?

I strongly believe, that our day and age will be one of the least known to
future generations, as so much of the digital artifacts will be lost without
the smallest possibility, to recover any artifact of it.

And yes, it is copyrighted material, but was copyright ever conceived as a
tool for history-mingling or censorship?

------
hrnnnnnn
"Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in
written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and
the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all
records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows
that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it." \- George Orwell,
1984

------
lignuist
> Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party confirmed a magazine
> report on Nov. 13 that it had removed from its website speeches that
> predated the party taking power in 2010, as well as placing markers on its
> site asking search engines to remove these from their archives.

The standard behavior of search engines in such cases should be to remove the
entire website from the index. All or nothing.

~~~
richthegeek
> as well as placing markers on its site

I suspect what they mean is that requests for the files send an appropriate
HTTP status code (e.g. 410 - Gone). This is standard practice on any website
where something is no longer available and is used by search engines to spot
dead links.

It's not a request to Google for censorship.

~~~
vidarh
You suspect wrong: They added a long list of URLs for their news archives to
robots.txt:

[http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-
sector/2013/11/co...](http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-
sector/2013/11/conservatives-erase-internet-h.html)

This does not just cause search engines to stop linking to it, but also causes
all the main engines to remove it from publicly accessible caches, and causes
Internet Archive to remove the pages as well.

------
casca
This is a very strange action. It's almost as if they thought that some simple
technical tricks could remove things from the Internet. Now there will be even
more interest in comparing what they've said in the past with what is said in
the future, and other organisations - now familiar with the Wayback Machine
policy will keep mirrors.

As a quick fix, the wonderful British Library has a service called
www.webarchive.org.uk. Here are some speeches from 2008 :
[http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20081209103831/...](http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20081209103831/http://www.conservatives.com/News/SpeechList.aspx?SearchType=NewsDate&SearchTerm=080101-081231)

They also seem to have done something with their YT channel. For example, this
video is dated Mar 21, 2007, but when viewing the channel and sorting by
oldest first, it's not there:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPpcuh7DF8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPpcuh7DF8)

~~~
bendtheblock
Streisand effect:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)

------
SilkRoadie
Such is the nature of politics. I don't know what politics are like elsewhere
but in Britain it goes something like this..

At Prime Ministers Questions.

Opposition: Another bank scandal, not doing enough, blah blah blah

PM: _ignores question_ Well the hypocrasy, in 2009 opposition was shaking
hands with these people. In 2005 you praised the banks blah blah nonsense
blah.

In UK politics any position you take today is used as a weapon against you
tomorrow. This is my understanding of why things are being deleted.

Take the conservatives. Before the banking crisis they wanted to match Labour
spending. On crime they wanted to hug a hoodie.. now they believe in
Austerity, blame Labour party for the financial problems and are tough on
crime. Turns out that the world changes and so do policies and I guess this
drastic step is to reduce the ammount of ammunition each other have.

I am not sure it matters that they are deleted. Surely the websites of
political parties should reflect the policies of today. It is up to
historians, archivists and the media to note and store the speeches of
yesterday.

~~~
dspillett
_> In UK politics any position you take today is used as a weapon against you
tomorrow._

As it damn well should be. If I'm voting for a person or party on the basis of
some promise they are making about a given policy or a claim that they have an
understanding/capability of something, I want to be able to see their history
of keeping (or not) said promised and proving (or now) their actual
understanding/capability.

Someone who has a history of being badly wrong and/or not keeping their word
is someone I'm less likely to trust. That'll be the majority of current
politicians (ours and those in other countries). I don't consider this
position to be at all unreasonable. Someone who actively hides that they were
wrong in the past, and/or made promises that have since not been kept, is
someone I trust even less.

Removing the content from their site to replace it with up-to-date positions
I'm OK with, we understand it is a fluffy promotion site rather than a library
of meaningful and historically accurate information anyway, but actively
working to have the old content removed from other archives is simply not on
IMO.

------
HarrietJones
It took me two minutes to find a speech from Gordon Brown on the labour UK
website:

[http://www.labour.org.uk/gordon_brown_conference](http://www.labour.org.uk/gordon_brown_conference)

Saying "The opposition Labour Party has eliminated all news items from before
Ed Miliband was elected its leader in September 2010 from its website." seems
a little strong.

------
knapp
By no means comprehensive but there are several speeches archived on this
site, set up by academics at Swansea University:
[http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-
archive.htm](http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm)

------
tehwalrus
Glad to see the Lib Dems haven't been caught doing this (yet).

~~~
csmuk
Well everyone's well aware of the promises they broke so there's no point in
hiding it or it'll make them look even worse (if that is possible).

~~~
tehwalrus
well, if you want us to keep our promises you have to vote us in to a
parliamentary majority. My frustration with how crap our MPs have been is
still high, but they do have a reasonable (ish) excuse.

~~~
csmuk
I doubt that would happen if they did. Not only that, the whole ward system is
clearly biased towards morons who are easy to sway towards the party rather
than a fair representation country-wide.

There is no excuse. Stick to the manifesto or we should be able to fire them
instantly and force another election.

~~~
tehwalrus
nope, I disagree. Parliamentary elections don't always give majorities, nor
should they. Indeed, I'm in favour of Proportional Representation which makes
it nearly[1] impossible to win a majority.

Indeed, even if someone _can_ win a majority, it's very bad liberalism to say
they should be allowed to implement _anything_ \- politics is as much about
fighting the tyranny of the majority as implementing what you want to.

Of course, when we're talking about the NHS changes, which were in _no_
manifesto, but seemed to have been a tory plan for many years, we have a right
to be angry. Indeed, the Lib Dem constitution has almost certainly been
blatantly violated in respect of this and other policies - Our MPs aren't
whippable on anything that isn't party policy, with the exception of the
Coalition Agreement (which was passed by a vote at a special conference
session, which I attended.)

Of course, they seem to accept the government whip on such matters, which
makes activists like me very depressed for the state of our MPs (who are
mostly the richest activists from their local area - since we're a very poor
party who ask our candidates to fund their own campaigns - this is the reason
I'm in favour of some sensible way of state funding parties, although I don't
know I've ever heard a good implementation.)

[1] SNP. populist party without any real philosophy, thus able to seem to
appeal to everyone simultaneously.

