Last month, I registered as a supporter of the Labour Party in order to vote for the leader and deputy leader. I am a lifelong Labour voter, and no, I don’t care what you think about that, and if you tell me what you think about that in the comments, I will let your comment through solely so that I can edit it to replace your drivel with the word “Bellend”. WordPress lets me do this, friends, so choose wisely.
The choice of candidates for Leader is as tempting as being asked whether you want a smack in the face or a kick up the arse, while the inevitability of Deputy Tom Watson is just horrible. There are few experiences as emetic as opening an envelope to find Watson’s huge smug face staring out at you. If only I had a dartboard. Nevertheless, if the party is going to let me participate in the process of choosing which leader will lose the 2020 election, it seems churlish to pass up the opportunity. I actively want to vote for Stella Creasy, so there is some crumb of meaning in there somewhere, apart from the fact that she’s not going to win.
When I signed up, the Labour Party required me to agree to receive communications from the party. There was no more to it than that, and no terms and conditions for me to consult before signing up. It was a fait accompli – sign up and get the messages or go away and don’t vote. This is a straightforward breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR). Communications from a political party are marketing. Regulation 22 states that marketing emails can only be sent if the recipient has notified the sender that they have consented to receive them. Consent is the same ‘freely given, specific and informed’ consent that you need for Data Protection. If there is any doubt about what that means for marketing emails, the Information Commissioner’s excellent guidance on Direct Marketing is – by ICO standards – uncharacteristically clear: “Consent cannot be a condition of subscribing to a service or completing a transaction”.
Labour cannot lawfully make the receipt of marketing emails and texts a condition of registering as a supporter. Every email and text sent to a registered supporter who has not actively and separately consented to receiving the emails and texts is a breach of PECR. The breach is particularly serious in my case, because in 2013 I exercised my rights under Section 11 of the Data Protection Act with all of the serious English political parties (and UKIP); this means that none of them can send me marketing, and so even the junk mail that each of the campaigns is sending me by post is unlawful. This is not my view; this is the view clearly expressed in the ICO guidance. The fact that I can opt-out is irrelevant. I should not have to (and anyway, I already have). Labour is arrogantly and cynically ignoring legislation that it passed when in government in order to hassle its most active supporters.
Inevitably, privacy champion Tom Watson has sent me the most emails, and demonstrated the least compliant approach. One of the emails had an option to tell Watson if you were going to vote for him, and so I clicked on the link to say no. I was then presented with a webpage asking me who I was going to vote for, as well as two pre-ticked boxes for ‘Send me email updates’ and ‘Send me text message updates’. A pre-ticked box doesn’t constitute consent (consent has not been ‘given’), but nevertheless, I unticked the boxes, clicked the box for ‘Stella’ and submitted.
Instantly, despite having told Watson’s campaign that I don’t want to vote for him and I don’t want to receive his email updates, I received a further email from Watson telling me how brilliant he is and how I should give him my second preference. There is no chance of this: not only will I never vote for Watson, I have always been fond of Ben Bradshaw, because he is Alan Dransfield‘s MP and he looks like he has skinned Hugh Grant and is wearing his face as a trophy. The second preference email was yesterday, and today, I have already received another email from a Watson supporter who has (no doubt spontaneously) written a paean to Watson that happens to include most of the examples the Watson campaign is using elsewhere. I am absolutely thrilled that the Watson campaign has apparently shared my email address with random strangers.
Needless to say, I have emailed Watson to point out his bad practice (and I didn’t use the word ‘hypocrite’, so see how I have matured) and more importantly, I have written a detailed letter of complaint to Iain McNicol, the party’s General Secretary. This is not my first rodeo with McNicol, so I know that all I will get is a reply stating ‘we’re perfectly entitled to do this and if you don’t like it, then opt out’. This reply is useful solely because the ICO understandably expects me to complain to the offending organisation first before going to them, and complaining to them is the only thing I can apart from write this blog for people who probably already agree with me.
Of course, the most the ICO will probably do is tell Labour to stop emailing me, which makes them (at least in this context) the world’s most convoluted unsubscribe button. But nevertheless, rather like voting for Creasy even though she’s going to lose because I honestly think she is the best candidate, I will complain about Labour’s habitual breaches of PECR because they need to be called out on it, even though no enforcement will follow.