Unreal. Do you still have the tracking information to prove it wasn't?
In any case this is really terrible customer service on the side of OCUK. The fact they shirked responsibility for it off to the manufacturer is a bit of an eye opener. I thought we were charged above market rates for most components here because when things went wrong, their CS took care of it.
If it was a gpu, motherboard, cpu - that's exactly what would happen. I've even seen people get big upgrades to current gen cards when something returned was end of life / unavailable. Monitors are just weird though, they have a big thing about dealing direct with the end user and normally for good reason - it works well and is the best option for the customer - but when it doesn't it exposes some big gaps in the process (i.e. the retailer has no way of intervening once the direct return starts). For the record, it may not be the case with LG, but generally any return initiated by the retailer would end up with a b-grade products or worse. If the retailer returns a faulty gpu (which is what happens after you go through the customer rma process) the retailer usually gets either a credit or something that can be sold (but still not always).
If resellers got the same deal with monitors as the end user I'm sure ocuk would prefer to keep themselves in the loop but it just isn't so and they can't afford to take a hit of hundreds of pounds on every return due to the terms they work under.