While Steve Reed undertakes a witch-hunt against Green election candidates, his own party has selected someone who admitted distributing 77MB of illegally hacked data – including passing the stolen material to Reed himself.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
One of the Labour candidates standing in next week’s local elections in a neighbouring borough was the recipient of a massive file of data which was hacked from this website in 2021.
Southwark Labour’s election candidates on May 7 in Dulwich Wood ward, which borders Crystal Palace, includes Ruth Bannister.
Modus operandi: MP Steve Reed received files of data he very likely knew had been hacked
Yet five years ago, Bannister implicated herself in a similar act of cybercrime, when she sent hacked emails, messages and other files to senior figures in the Labour Party, including Croydon MP Steve Reed and the party’s general secretary, David Evans.
In February 2021, Bannister admitted publicly that she had received the file of private emails and messages stolen from Inside Croydon, as she passed the material to the highest echelons of the Labour Party.
At the time he received the stolen material, Reed was the shadow justice minister in Keir Starmer’s front bench team.
For her part, Bannister had previously worked for The Campaign Company, the Croydon-based political PR firm owned by Evans.
By failing to hand over stolen documents, those involved in the hack and in receipt of the data may have acted in contravention of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the Data Protection Act 2018. Offences under the former Act can bring a 14-year jail sentence for those found guilty. An organisation found to have broken the Data Protection Act risks a maximum fine of £17.5million, or 4% of annual turnover, whichever is greater, for “infringements”.
In 2022, Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera released a documentary series called The Labour Files, based on legally obtained information leaked from Labour Party HQ. The final episode of the series, The Spying Game, focused on the black arts behind the malicious hacking of Inside Croydon.
Documents leaked to Al Jazeera included an email to Clive “Thirsty” Fraser, then the council Labour group’s chief whip. The email had a 77.9MB attachment file of documents stolen from this website’s email account.
The author of that email was Ruth Bannister.
Checkered past: Ruth Bannister was a leading member of the shadowy Open Our Roads campaign in Crystal Palace, which worked against Labour council policies in Croydon. Now, she’s standing as a Labour candidate in Southwark
Today, Southwark Labour describe Bannister as someone who, “during the pandemic… managed a local mutual aid group”. Bannister is possibly best known in the Crystal Palace area for being a prominent member of the Open Our Roads group, which actively campaigned against the Croydon Labour council’s traffic policy in the area.
Sources within the local Labour Party say that although Bannister did not live in Croydon North, she had been included in a Constituency Labour Party WhatsApp group. Her inclusion may have had approval from Steve Reed.
Bannister today works as a “talent acquisition manager” for L’Oréal. Her qualifications include a law degree.
She might want to brush up on the bits of the law about handling stolen goods, or data.
Documentary evidence: emails from Ruth Bannister, whose association with David Evans goes back at least to 2012, passed on the hacked documents
The Al Jazeera researchers discovered a trail of correspondence from 2021 that linked Bannister to the hacked data, as well as Fraser, Reed and Evans.
None of the Labour officials acted in what data protection officials consider to be the proper course of action, by handing over stolen material to the police and making a statement. Such failure to act could be a contravention of the Computer Misuse Act and the Data Protection Act.
In an email dated February 23, 2021, Bannister informed Reed and others that an unidentified person had approached her with the contents of the hacked emails, which she had started to review.
Bannister explained that she had come into possession of more than 200 files, which she had spent the previous week reading. This strongly suggests that she received the stolen data almost immediately after the hack on February 17.
Bannister uploaded a zip file and shared the link. She claimed that she had identified documents showing that three Labour councillors and one other party official had been sharing information with Inside Croydon.
The councillors were guilty, according to Bannister, of sending “emails providing Inside Croydon with quotes, tips, opinions, and full-blown copy of articles subsequently published.” These three, Bannister claimed, “have been the source of leaks to/authors of articles for Inside Croydon, and… they have been actively and consistently breaching party policy”.
Explosive: Paul Holden devotes an entire chapter of his book to the Inside Croydon hack
In his recent book, The Fraud, investigative journalist Paul Holden writes, “There was no acknowledgment that the councillors could legitimately be seen as whistleblowers about a Labour council that was driving Croydon into financial ruin.
“Nor was there any acknowledgement that the information had been obtained unlawfully, such that reading and sharing it posed ethical as well as legal questions.
“Outsiders may have expected that the Labour Party, its most senior bureaucrats, and Steve Reed himself would have baulked at handling material illegally hacked from an independent media website. Arguably, everybody who came into contact with the material should have contacted the appropriate authorities in the UK, as well as Inside Croydon, to inform them of the situation.
“Instead, party officials decided to spread the hacked information far and wide.”
The Inside Croydon hack was not the first time that Reed has been implicated in allegations of spying on his own party colleagues.
In 2013, this website reported how official Lambeth documents showed how Reed, when leader at Brixton Town Hall, had ordered council staff to trawl through councillor email accounts to track down whistle-blowers. Kingsley Abrams was suspended as a Labour councillor as a result of the Reed-sanctioned spy operation.
Back in 2021, after initial investigations, the Metropolitan Police declined to look further into the hack of Inside Croydon’s email and Twitter accounts, despite Bannister and Fraser having openly boasted on public social media about obtaining the material.
Following the Met’s decision last week to charge Joel Bodmer – another associate of Steve Reed – and three others with cybercrime-related offences connected to the Croydon East selection scandal, some of the victims of Bannister and Reed’s alleged unlawful behaviour are considering pressing Scotland Yard to reopen the Inside Croydon hacking case.
“After all,” said one source, “it’s not as if there isn’t a massive trail of documents available to provide the necessary evidence.”
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: Source of hacked data worked for Evans
Read more: Four face cybercrime charges over Croydon selection scandal
Read more: The Fraud: how Reed’s Labour spied on Croydon councillors
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2026, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for an EIGHTH time in nine years, in Private Eye magazine’s annual round-up of civic cock-ups
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I hope Inside Croydon reported this theft of confidential data to the Information Commissioner’s Office once they become aware of the hack from their files. Since this Office has legal oversight for data protection and personal data safety surely it has reached a determination with regard to this matter over the number of years since these acts occurred.
We did.
The ICO confirmed that Inside Croydon had done nothing wrong, but they opted not to investigate further, they said due to lack of resources.
Did Steve Reed threaten to cut the Information Commissioner’s Office funding if they investigated his criminal activity ?!
When this all happened Labour was in opposition so had zero affect on any government departmental budget.
Besides, the ICO data protection activities are funded by the fee organisations pay to be registered under the Data Protection Act 2018.
I think Jim was joking, Chris. Though admit it is sometimes hard to tell…
Labour isn’t a political party. It’s a crime syndicate