News Release

27th September 2004

LABOUR DIRTY TRICKS CAMPAIGN AGAINST MICHAEL HOWARD

Michael Fabricant accused the Labour Party today of preparing a "desperate dirty tricks campaign" after the discovery that the party has registered three websites in the name of Michael Howard, Leader of the Opposition.

They are www.michaelhowardmp.org, www.michaelhowardmp.net and www.michaelhowardmp.org.uk. In each of these websites the registrant or "admin organiser" is given as "The Labour Party" with their address being their HQ in Westminster, London. The contact name of the registrant is also given and that person is known to work at the Labour Party HQ.

The Conservative Party leader's official website is www.michaelhowardmp.com.

Michael Fabricant, Shadow Minister for Industry and Technology, who discovered the sites says: "I do not believe the Labour Party have registered these websites in Mr Howard's name in order to sell them back to him. That would be bad enough. I believe the plan was to launch a dirty tricks campaign. How desperate have they now become.

"By having 3 websites compared to the genuine one, search engines like Google, would be far more likely to hit on the fake website rather than the genuine one. What was the Labour Party going to put onto the website?"

Mr Fabricant, MP for Lichfield, said that this "cyber-squatting" was also in direct contravention of Government policy. "It exposes Labour as cyber-hypocrites," he said.

He said that when he asked Michael O'Brien, a Department of Trade and Industry Minister, a Parliamentary Question about cyber-squatting, the minister condemned the practice.

"Mr O'Brien described the practice as 'pre-emptive bad-faith registration', saying that 'cyber squatters exploited the first-come-first-served nature of the domain name registration system to register as domain names third parties' trademarks or business names of famous people as well as variations thereof'. Yet here is the Labour Party doing it themselves!" Michael says.