Zarah Sultana’s Your Party membership launch may be ‘criminal’ matter for police, ICO says

Zarah Sultana’s unauthorised launch of a Your Party membership portal may have been “serious criminal activity” and should be referred to the police, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has advised.Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project (PJP), which referred Your Party to the information watchdog last September over a potential data breach, has been advised by the ICO that it should consider “taking further action” regarding the matter, after deciding it was not a matter for them.An extraordinary split opened up between Corbyn and Sultana in September after an email was sent to 800,000 people on Your Party’s mailing list, urging them to become paying members for £55. Sultana revealed the new membership portal on X, urging supporters to “be a part of history”, and reassured her followers that the membership site was “safe and secure”, encouraging them to keep trying to sign up despite “issues due to such high traffic”.Later the same day, Corbyn issued an “urgent message” telling his followers on X to ignore the “unauthorised” site and said “legal advice is being taken”

Reform UK accused of betraying election pledges after council tax rises

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has been accused of betraying election promises to cut council tax after several councils it controls said they planned to increase rates close to the maximum allowed.They include Kent county council – the party’s flagship local authority and one viewed by it as the “shop window” for what a Reform-led government would look like – which has proposed an increase of 3.99%.Four other county councils controlled by the party – Derbyshire, North Northamptonshire, West Northamptonshire and Leicestershire – have also all proposed 5% council tax rises, the maximum permitted by law.Derbyshire county council earlier this week confirmed the rise after predicting a £38m gap in its budget, with overspends in children’s social care and adult social care

It is Labour’s party machine that is out of touch | Letters

To combat rightwing populists, Chris Powell calls for “a local action network, a permanent organising infrastructure … to listen, act and communicate – identifying local problems, launching campaigns to fix them and publicising every small win” (What is Keir Starmer doing to push back the populists? Not nearly enough. We have a plan to take them on, 1 January).An organisation that could fill this role already exists: it’s called the Labour party. And, under Jeremy Corbyn, it had a Community Organising Unit to do just what Powell now asks for.That he overlooks this starkly illustrates how “analysts” and “advisers” such as himself have contributed to the party’s slide to the brink of oblivion

UK politics: Reform UK mayoral candidate apologises for Lammy ‘go home’ tweet – as it happened

Elon Musk’s social media platform X has responded to the sexualised deepfake controversy by turning off the Grok AI image creation function for the vast majority of users. Helena Horton, Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman have the story here.At the Downing Street lobby briefing today, the PM’s spokesperson described this as insulting to victims of misogyny because it was so weak.He said:[Today’s move] simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service. It’s not a solution

Lib Dems call on Reform MPs to donate income from X to charity amid Grok row

The Liberal Democrats have urged Reform UK MPs who receive payment from X for their posts to donate the money to charities working to combat sexual exploitation, after the site was flooded with AI-generated sexualised images of women and children.The Lib Dem spokesperson for science, innovation and technology, Victoria Collins, said Nigel Farage and other MPs paid by the Elon Musk-owned site were receiving “tainted money”.A series of MPs have called for the government to stop posting on X after the site’s inbuilt AI tool Grok started generating huge numbers of images of women and children in bikinis or other minimal attire, often in sexually provocative poses, in response to user prompts.The site has now limited the image creation function to paying subscribers, a move that Downing Street condemned as turning “an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service”.X users who are verified earn money based on the amount of engagement they generate

Home Office tells Gaza academic his bid to bring family to UK not urgent

A Palestinian academic has failed in his latest attempt to be reunited with his family in the UK after the Home Office concluded their case was not urgent and it was more appropriate for his two children to remain with their mother in a tent in Gaza.Bassem Abudagga was also told in a letter from Home Office officials that no reason had been found that was “sufficiently compelling” to defer a requirement that his wife attend a visa application centre (VAC) in Gaza so she could provide fingerprints to satisfy the conditions for evacuation.No such facility remains in Gaza as a result of Israeli bombardments, which have continued despite the fragile ceasefire – a fact that Abudagga says the Home Office is well aware of.Abudagga last saw his wife, Marim, son Karim, six, and daughter Talya, 10, four weeks before the October 7 attack in 2023 when he returned for a visit to Gaza.He had won a scholarship to study for a PhD at York St John University in 2022 and is regarded by his tutors as a model student