Liberal Democrat peer takes dictation from BPI

Here's some murky behaviour from the Liberal Democrats: it turns out that Lord Clement-Jones has added a clause to the Digital Economy Bill that's virtually word-for-word a BPI proposal.

That's right: a bloke who's never been elected sticking clauses into a bill written by a lobbying group representing international businesses. Don't you love democracy?

From MediaGuardian:

Today a spokesman for the BPI insisted that the organisation was not embarrassed at the disclosure of the source of the amendment.

"This was a suggestion that we made to the government in 2009, with this wording. This version of the proposal was sent to the government and also to the opposition parties. The government decided it wanted to go a different way. The opposition parties, while not fully agreeing with it, saw it as a good framework for what they wanted to put down," the spokesman said. "We have consistently said that the digital economy bill should have sensible measures to deal with peer-to-peer file sharing."

Clement-Jones had added a few extra words, but effectively, he's just got the BPI to do his homework for him. And ended up handing in work that's fundamentally flawed.