Gordon Brown’s latest campaign slogan — ‘Vote Labour or Die of Cancer’ — has a certain apocalyptic vigour about it, don’t you think, even if it was implied rather than directly stated? The party sent out 250,000 ‘postcards’ to women, although they were not the sort of postcards you get when your Aunt Jemima’s been on holiday in Lyme Regis for the week. The gist was: if the Tories get in they’ll stop your chemo, you mug. Or you won’t get treated at all, in time, and you’ll probably die. This caused a small furore — we’ll come to why the furore was a muted furore, rather than a howl of complaint, in time. Most of the people who admitted receiving this missive were outraged, disgusted and so on, and said so. The suggestion seems to be that a good few who received the card would — au contraire, Mr Brown — rather die of cancer than vote Labour, or at least it would be a very close call.
The story originated in the Sunday Times but one crucial question remains: how were the 250,000 women targeted? Almost, but not quite all, of those who have reported receiving the leaflet have been diagnosed as suffering from cancer, in most cases breast cancer. The leaflet was about breast cancer care on the NHS under Labour and the letters, or postcards, were addressed to specific individuals. The implication is that Labour had somehow targeted women who were thus stricken, which everybody — including, in public, Labour — agrees is a sick and repulsive means of political campaigning. Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, denied that the party had made use of medical records or health profiles for its mailshot, and there have been similar denials from the party’s press office. But they have been very cautious denials, denials which lack explanation — and I am not sure that I believe them. Certainly, one way or another, Labour has done something that is egregiously wrong and which it knows the public will take offence at, otherwise it would not be so cagey in its denials.
Let me give you an example of just how cagey. I rang the Labour press office and spoke to a man called ‘Pete’, who refused to tell me anything at all ‘on the record’. I think when press officers insist that the stuff they’re telling you is off the record, this injunction should be ignored — they’re press officers, for God’s sake. If I wanted something off the record I’d ring Mandelson, not his pet monkeys. As the stuff ‘Pete’ told me off the record didn’t amount to a hill of beans, I have therefore ignored his injunction entirely.
He again reiterated the point that medical records were not used in targeting these women. However, he would not explain the means by which these women were targeted. Not only that, but when I asked him — six times — if the reason he would not tell me how the women were targeted was because a) he didn’t know himself or b) knew full well but was disinclined to tell me, perhaps because it was none of my business, he refused to answer and, with consummate bureaucratic pomposity, like a Cyberman making his first appearance on Question Time, referred me to his earlier ‘statement’.
Now, call me a cynic — but my guess (only a guess, PCC, only a guess) is that the extraordinary lack of explanation and manifest sensitivity suggests that Labour knows it has done something deeply disgusting about which we would be not merely disapproving, but outraged. I cannot think of another reason.
That’s not all. The main marketing and mailshot firm mentioned in the Sunday Times report as being used by Labour was the Nottingham-based Experian, which flogs its ‘Mosaic’ database to parties (and commercial organisations) for acutely targeted leafleting. Mosaic offers access to hospital episode statistics, and you can buy this information yourself from Experian for maybe forty thousand quid. But a chap at Experian denied outright that Mosaic had been used in this particular mailshot by Labour, and that the information Labour had was much more specific than that which Mosaic would have been able to provide. ‘It’s very, very strange indeed,’ the Experian chap told me. ‘the information they had seems far more targeted and I don’t understand how they got it.’
The other organisation mentioned in the Sunday Times report as being used by Labour was Tangent Communications (London) and its subsidiary Ravensbourne (based in Northumberland). All calls to their press office were referred back to ‘Pete’. Tangent would answer no questions.
So we are left with this. At the very least, Labour targeted a tranche of the population which demographically was at risk of breast cancer, including people which it must have known were already suffering from the disease, and implied that they would be at more risk of dying from a Tory government. I think that’s pretty foul — but given the information above, it seems the less likely explanation. The number of women at risk from breast cancer (through age and demographics) is far, far greater than 250,000. Of the women who have come forward to report that they received the leaflet, almost every one has been diagnosed as suffering from cancer. Is that because they are more likely to come forward and complain than those who are not suffering from the disease?
Maybe, but, you have to say, it is a bit of a coincidence. When placed alongside Labour’s evasiveness over the specifics of the mailshot and the puzzlement at Experian, it leads me to suspect that Labour — illegally or lawfully, but either way immorally — used confidential medical information with which to harass the most vulnerable and frightened people in the country, to increase their levels of stress, to make them fearful for their very lives, and are now telling fibs about it. Or it used information which it had gleaned through canvassing to do precisely the same thing (which, incidentally, is what the Conservatives think).
Why has not more been made of this? Perhaps because, quite wrongly, all parties make use of our confidential personal information from the growing list of sinister databases — hundreds of them — which detail our every ailment, spending records, foibles and so on, and include subjective judgments from local councils, police, social workers and so on, and which you can access only if you pay vast amounts of money. Right now, we need an explanation of precisely how these women were targeted by Labour. In the longer term, we should tell inquisitive bureaucrats nothing at all, or simply lie to them.
Offer ends in:
