Labour plunge the depths

To date, the election campaign in Northern Ireland and Scotland has been relatively clean; not so in the bigger UK picture:

LABOUR has become embroiled in a row about the use of personal data after sending cancer patients alarmist mailshots saying their lives could be at risk under a Conservative government.

Cards addressed to sufferers by name warn that a Labour guarantee to see a cancer specialist within two weeks would be scrapped by the Tories. Labour claims the Conservatives would also do away with the right to be treated within 18 weeks.

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.

Not only "disgusting and shocking" but obviously a bad, bad mistake from a purely objective PR point of view. There is a certain boundary beyond which political campaigning can only have the opposite effect to that intended and Labour have just gone stomping right over that boundary.