British Politics Thread

The UK Parliament has been hit by a cyber-security attack.

M Ps were reportedly informed about the hack on Friday night and later told of difficulties in accessing their emails away from the Westminster estate.

A Commons spokeswoman said the lack of email access was not a result of the cyber-attack itself but part of the steps being taken to manage the issue.

She said Parliamentary authorities were liaising with the National Cyber Security Centre. The spokeswoman said: "The Houses of Parliament have discovered unauthorised attempts to access parliamentary user accounts.

"We are continuing to investigate this incident and take further measures to secure the computer network..

"We have systems in place to protect member and staff accounts and are taking the necessary steps to protect our systems."

She added: "Parliament has disabled remote access to protect the network." A number of M Ps have confirmed to the BBC they are not able to access their parliamentary email accounts remotely.

It comes just over a month after 48 of England's NHS trusts were hit by a cyber-attack. The latest attack was publicly revealed by Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard on Twitter who had also asked his followers to send any "urgent messages" to him by text.

Henry Smith, Tory MP for Crawley, later tweeted: "Sorry no parliamentary email access today - we're under cyber attack from Kim Jong Un, (Vladimir) Putin or a kid in his mom's basement or something..."

The government's National Security Strategy said in 2015 that the threat from cyber-attacks from both organised crime and foreign intelligence agencies was one of the "most significant risks to UK interests".

The National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of intelligence agency GCHQ, started its operations in October last year.

The National Crime Agency said it was working with the NCSC but the centre was "leading the operational response".

And this was long before Brexit.

Marios Tzannakas, in Nicosia, said that a solution to the problem lies in British law. “Legislation related to consumer protection clearly needs to be amended. It cannot be that 500 people will eat from the same buffet but only the British will get food poisoning and suffer from diarrhoea.”

“Could I negotiate Brexit better than Theresa May and David Davis? Yes,” he said of the suggestion. “Could a slightly mouldy pain au chocolat negotiate Brexit better than Theresa May and David Davis? Yes. So yes I could, but whether I should is another matter.”

“Be sophisticated, the Europeans are a smart bunch. There was a photograph the other day of the negotiating team from Great Britain and the negotiating team from Europe and the team from Europe looked so much smarter, they looked smarter sartorially, intellectually, and they had women, which is something British diplomats seem to have forgotten.

It is a sad day when the politician which makes the most sense is the guy with the silly name and the giant bucket on his head.

A quarter of England’s rivers are at risk of running dry, with devastating consequences for wildlife, according to data obtained by WWF under freedom of information rules.

The rules governing how much water can be taken from rivers have not been updated for more than half a century and take no account of the water needed to sustain the ecological health of rivers. The government published proposed reforms in 2011 and had legislation drawn up early in 2017, but did not find parliamentary time to act.

The driest October-to-March period for 20 years this year was followed by an extremely dry April and below average rainfall in May, and has left much of Britain with low river and groundwater levels and facing the possibility of drought. The information released to WWF by the Environment Agency shows that in such conditions 23% of England’s rivers could run dry. Further data shows that more than 550 rivers and lakes are in a poor ecological state because too much water is being taken from them.

Many rivers also suffer from sewage and agricultural pollution, with most rivers in England failing to meet EU ecological standards. Simon Ffennell, a horticulturalist who has lived on Hampshire’s river Itchen all his life, said: “The most noticeable change is the way that the sunny weather in spring combines with the high levels of phosphate and nitrate that is in the river and creates particular algae that is unfortunately smothering the river bed.”

The problem of over-abstraction of water is exacerbated by the fact that demand for water can double during spells of dry and hot weather, as crops and gardens need more water and people take more showers.

The Guardian revealed in May that, despite 20% of all piped water being lost to leaks, the level of leakage has not fallen for at least four years. In June, Thames Water was fined a maximum £8.5m for missing its leak reduction targets. Water waste rises to a third of all water taken from the natural environment when losses in treatment plants and in homes and businesses are included.

The government’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), warned in 2016 that water shortages were one of the most serious impacts of global warming in Britain, with even modest temperature rises leading to “severe” water shortages in England.

Prof Ian Barker, from Water Policy International and an adviser to the OECD, said: “As the climate becomes more uncertain and extreme, and demand for water continues to rise, we need to find a better way to manage scarce water resources. But [UK] proposals to reform water management have been shelved.”

After Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the House of Commons, called for broadcasters to be “a bit patriotic” over their coverage of Brexit, the set of Robert Peston’s ITV show has been jokingly decorated with union jacks.

Peston, who presents ITV’s Peston on Sunday, shared a picture of the studio, making light of Leadsom’s comments, which have come under fire.

Taking to Twitter, Preston wrote: “Shout out to @andrealeadsom: we’ve been listening to you! Look what we’ve done to Croissant Corner on @pestononsunday.”

Peston’s post has received hundreds of likes, retweets and comments. One person wrote: “Can you feel the Twitter-love flooding over you? That is superb.” Another said: “Surely if you were truly patriotic it would be renamed crumpet corner?”

Tests in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster have revealed that 60 high-rise buildings in 25 different areas of England are unsafe, the government has announced.

There are concerns over the cladding used on the buildings after reports that the materials used on the Kensington tower block, in which at least 79 people are believed to have died, caused the fire to get out of control.

The number rose from 34 tower blocks across 17 local authorities. The announcement came after Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, revealed all of the buildings that have so far submitted cladding samples have failed combustibility tests.

More to follow...

“We expect that authorities and landlords are very sensibly giving the highest priority to buildings with which they have most concern. But we should not be in the position where buildings have such cladding on them. How this occurred – and preventing this from happening again – is likely to be a key question for the public inquiry,” Javid said on Saturday.

The towers deemed unsafe so far are in Manchester, Portsmouth and Sunderland, as well as in Norwich, Doncaster, Stockton-on-Tees and Plymouth and in seven London boroughs. They are Barnet, Brent and Camden, as well as Hounslow, Islington, Lambeth and Wandsworth. A further 11 areas, accounting for 27 of the unsafe buildings, have yet to be named.

Sunderland and Camden – where an entire estate housing about 4,000 people was being evacuated over the weekend – share the greatest number, with five towers each.

The effort to clear the estate comes after the government revealed that all of the 34 high-rises that have submitted cladding samples following the Grenfell Tower disaster failed combustibility tests. Hundreds more blocks are yet to be tested.

After the news that cladding samples from every tower block tested so far had failed combustibility tests, the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, urged local authorities and housing associations to continue to submit samples “as a matter of urgency”.

The buildings are located in 17 local authorities across the country, including Manchester, Plymouth, Portsmouth and the London boroughs of Camden, Barnet, Brent and Hounslow.

The Russian government is suspected of being behind a cyber-attack on parliament that breached dozens of email accounts belonging to M Ps and peers.

Although the investigation is at an early stage and the identity of those responsible may prove impossible to establish with absolute certainty, Moscow is deemed the most likely culprit.

The disclosure follows the release of the first details of the “sustained” cyber-attack that began on Friday. Fewer than 90 email accounts belonging to parliamentarians are believed to have been hacked, a parliamentary spokesman said.

The number of states who might mount such an attack on the UK is limited, and, in addition to Russia, includes North Korea, China and Iran.

A security source said: “It was a brute force attack. It appears to have been state-sponsored.”

“The nature of cyber-attacks means it is notoriously difficult to attribute an incident to a specific actor.”

M Ps contacted by the Guardian said the immediate suspicion had fallen upon foreign governments such as Russia and North Korea, both of which have been accused of being behind hacking attempts in the UK before.

A parliamentary spokesman said those whose emails were compromised had used weak passwords despite advice to the contrary. “Investigations are ongoing, but it has become clear that significantly fewer than 1% of the 9,000 accounts on the parliamentary network have been compromised, as a result of the use of weak passwords that did not conform to guidance issued by the Parliamentary Digital Service.