Labour members have been emailed by the party this afternoon with the worrying news that they have been “the victim of a sophisticated ransomware attack, which occurred earlier this year.” Cybercriminals successfully stole data on Labour members and donors from software company and Labour Party supplier Blackbaud. The party today confirmed that the stolen data included:
- Names
- Email addresses
- Telephone numbers
- Amounts donated to the Labour Party
Blackbaud has told the Labour Party that they have paid a ransom demanded by the hackers, and “have received assurances that the data was destroyed as a result.” The Tories did warn Labour were a threat to the nation’s security…
Read the email in full below:
The LibDem returning officer has once again found Ed Davey’s campaign to have broken data rules in his run to become LibDem leader. Just a fortnight after the last…
This time, Ed’s campaign has been found guilty of instructing “canvassers not to disclose the identity of the campaign they were actually calling on behalf” of. The returning officer, after taking representations from the campaign, found that in doing so they “acted in a way that was likely to mislead members.” He has been forced to delete the data collected from those calls. To be caught out once may be regarded as a misfortune, twice looks like carelessness…
Keir might be making progress with the public, his party is not. This will encourage those calling for Keir to make a decisive break with the left of his party…
UPDATE: Labour’s left is getting restless demanding to know where’s that centrist leader 20 point poll Tony Blair said they would get if Corbyn was ousted. Hardly surprising when the Tories are 3 points higher than the result they got in the general election last December…
Keir Starmer will take satisfaction from this animation by Ipsos MORI, showing the performance of every opposition leader since the 1980s. It shows that opposition leaders that keep their approval ratings positive come the general election, win. Something the current occupants of Downing Street will be determined to figure out how to avoid…
Labour has gone from having an opposition leader with the worst ever ratings to one with ratings as good as they ever had. Doing little and letting popular anger with the lockdown be directed at the government is working for Sir Keir. Kinnock started out with positive approval ratings that dissipated within 2 years. Early days yet, will Starmer’s positive rating last until 2024?
Newsnight made a lot out of an incredible statistic: that the UK had more deaths yesterday than the entire EU. The problem is the numbers are nonsense. The FT has exposed reporting on the continent to be littered with “flawed data”…
In fact some of the data in foreign countries is so dodgy that, according to the FT’s data guru John Burn-Murdoch, if England had adopted Spain’s new ‘method’, it would have reported just 20 new deaths yesterday. England is equivalent to 13% of the population of the EU, and yet would appear to have just 6% of the death rate, if it adopted Spain’s manipulated reporting…
Newsnight is supposed to provide analysis that goes behind the headlines, did no one at Newsnight not think the data was suspect? Was it just “too good to check” and they just preferred the Twitter buzz…
UPDATE: Newsnight sourced the dodgy data from controversial website ‘Worldometer‘, a website that even Wikipedia editors have decided to avoid. The data manager for independent statistics website Our World In Data told CNN that “We think people should be wary, especially media, policy-makers and decision-makers. This data is not as accurate as they think it is.” Take note, Newsnight…
The headline figures for last night’s YouGov poll show a narrowing of the gap between the Tory and Labour vote shares. Whilst the Tories are lower than their polling peak in April, at 44% they are holding at the 2019 election result level. Diving into the tables, specifically looking at 2019 Tory voters, the drop in current support for the party from last week to this week shows their hold dropping from 94% to 91%. Not that significant a drop by any stretch…
Beyond that the rise in Labour support from last week (and over the last few weeks) is almost exclusively due to them pulling back their 2019 vote and pulling across a chunk of the LD 2019 vote. Not quite the collapse that some bed wetting Tory MPs fear…
