Les Huckfield is hardly likely to be famous outside his own household, but 35 years after he was a junior minister in Jim Callaghan’s Labour government he is back in the news again today – because, now living in Scotland, he has backed Scottish independence.
The pro-independence “Yes” campaign are, not surprisingly, doing all they can to milk this endorsement: they desperately need some “Labour” support if they are to have the remotest chance of winning.
Ordinary folk might be inclined to say “Leslie Huckfield [as he now calls himself], who’s he then?” and go to Wikipedia and look him up (click the link to see).
What they get there is a short article that is pretty light on detail and does not do much to impart the flavour of his politics – having once been a strong critic of far left entryism into Labour, Huckfield turned into one of the strongest defenders of the Militant Tendency’s/Revolutionary Socialist League’s presence in the Labour Party and, reports John Rentoul, once proposed banning all car imports into the UK.
But more importantly, it completely leaves out the one thing from his time as an elected politician that Huckfield should be famous for: successfully stopping his attempted prosecution for allegedly dishonestly obtaining expenses of more than £2,500 from the European Parliament by deception.
The story of that – and why it proved important in more recent British political history – is covered in this article in the Law Society Gazette.
There is no sign, that I can see, that someone has deleted this information from the Wikipedia article and certainly no suggestion that Huckfield himself has stopped this from getting out. (Nor, I should add, is there any suggestion that Huckfield did anything improper in seeking to stop his prosecution.)
But this is a warning against relying on Wikipedia as a complete source. And it is also a reminder of why paying someone to do a job thoroughly – such as compiling an encyclopaedia – may still have advantages over relying on crowd sourcing.
I love Wikipedia, it is surely one of the greatest things to come out of the Internet – but it is not something I would rely on when it really mattered.
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