Protest, app glitch mark start of UK Tory conference

The UK Conservative Party is launching its annual conference in Birmingham with reports of a serious security flaw that exposed the privacy of senior party members while thousands take to the streets to protest the ruling party’s commitment to austerity policies.

Reports in the British media said Saturday that phone numbers and other personal information of senior Tory lawmakers were accessible to the public through an official mobile application that contained serious security bugs.

Images sent on the social media showed users could easily access phone numbers of senior Conservative politicians like former foreign minister Boris Johnson and incumbent environment secretary Michael Gove, according to a report on the website of the Guardian newspaper.

The report said everyone who registered in the app to attend the Birmingham conference, which is to open on Sunday, could access the personal data of the Tory lawmakers.

It added that members of the public had allegedly made prank phone calls to senior members of the government whose security clearance had been designated as top-ranking,

Tory lawmakers criticized party chairman Brandon Lewis for the security flaw, saying it was his role as the organizer of the conference to prevent such breaches.

“Brandon Lewis is telling everyone who will listen that he could be the man to run the country – yet this conference fiasco shows he couldn’t run a bath,” said a senior Tory member.

The app was due to be unveiled at the opening of the Birmingham conference as a sign that “the oldest and most successful political party in the world” was undergoing overhauls and structural reforms.

The Conservative Party said in a statement on Saturday that the security glitch had been overcome and the app could be used without any problem. It said an investigation was ongoing to determine what caused the breach.

The annual Tory conference comes amid some deepening divisions between senior party members about how Britain should leave the European Union in March and whether the policy adopted by Prime Minster Theresa May could serve the country best.

The preparations for the conference were further overshadowed by report on Saturday that thousands of trade unionists and campaigners were staging demonstrations outside the meeting’s venue in Birmingham to protest the Tory-led government’s austerity policies, which many say has led to more poverty in Britain.

The Birmingham Live, a website covering local news of the second most populous city in the UK, said hundreds of police officers had been deployed to the site of the conference where demonstrators were seeking to reach.

It said heavy police presence could be seen in central parts of Birmingham as protesters were due to descend on Victoria Square and around the Centenary Square area.

“This summer we’ve seen how austerity has hobbled the economy while doing significant damage to public services and those who rely on them,” said Lee Barron, a regional secretary of the TUC Midlands, a key workers union, adding, “... it is clear that austerity cannot deliver economic or social progress.”

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