If All Else Fails ... Terrify

Iain Dale is making a big deal out of the Sunday Times article on leaflets Labour have sent to cancer sufferers, and rightly so.

Cancer patients who received the personalised cards, sent with a message from a breast cancer survivor praising her treatment under Labour, said they were “disgusted and shocked”, and feared that the party may have had access to confidential health data.

Labour sources deny that the party has used any confidential information.

Well, that's all right then ...

... actually, no it damn well isn't. Sorry, Labour, but I'm all out of trust in you.

I don't know why that could be, perhaps it is the refusal to honour 2005 manifesto promises (or the court case undertaken to fight against honouring them), maybe it's the ritual denial of what we all know to be true, or it could be the ignorance shown towards its people by a party which values only its own survival.

Labour's claim that they haven't targeted cancer sufferers is hollow. I simply don't believe it.

In the Labour constituency of Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, two of a group of eight women friends received the breast cancer card. They are the only two to have undergone cancer treatment.

In the marginal east London constituency of Poplar and Limehouse, the card was sent to a 44-year-old television producer who had a potentially cancerous lump that turned out to be a cyst. She appeared to be the only person who received the mailshot among 50 neighbours.

Dizzy explains the supposed method used, but as he implies, it just doesn't wash.

[...] it was done by using anonymous data mashup from Experian to work out roughly where someone with cancer lives. They hold anonymous hospital data with postcodes and medical diagnosis. Think of it like a shotgun being targeted at a door but the pellets spread out and hit many targets in a specific area.

Unless, of course, the shotgun contains cancer-seeking pellets.

In fact, the only way that Labour can possibly be telling the truth is if they are merely naive recipients of an almost 'perfect' list of targets.

The cards are being distributed by Ravensworth, part of Tangent Communications, which has won accounts sending out mail for the Department of Health and Cancer Research UK.

[Damian Bentley, managing director of Tangent] failed to respond to a list of questions on how the addresses of the cancer victims were obtained.

Christ! I think he should bloody well start answering questions sharpish, don't you? Time to get someone like, I dunno, the Information Commissioner, to ask them.

And all this without mentioning what a quite sick electoral tactic it is to use cancer as a political tool.

Labour have bullied the public into submission on a wide array of issues under the veiled threat of harm, paedohysteria, cancer and death before ... but this is a whole new level of evil, self-centred arrogance.

And there was me believing that torching a fat boy effigy in the town square was as low as these maggots could go.

UPDATE: NickM describes it perfectly - "Politics as a protection racket"