Labour's hypocrisy and indifference to female victims

She was on the radio about ten minutes ago but I’ve been skipping around avoiding the pro Starmer McFadden rubbish I’m not sure which programme.

Where is she speaking?

Rosie Duffield speaking well this morning. She knows more than most what bullying male tactics Starmer uses. He should go, she’s right on that.

Absolutely agree.

I've disliked him since he was DPP and stuck his oar into the assisted suicide issue. For someone who travels extremely light ideologically, he's got a weirdly fanatical devotion to that one cause.

But even if I agreed with him on that, it's not the job of the DPP to say, I don't agree with the existing law and since Parliament won't change the law, I'm just going to issue guidelines to make it unenforceable. I believe that is an abuse of power by an unelected bureaucrat. And it makes a nonsense of his claim to be a massive upholder of the rule of law.

What I did get wrong was believing that we might see an end to the chaos of the late Tory years and a government of boring competence. That was influenced by the presence of Sue Gray, who I've encountered professionally and have a lot of time for, and who might have been able to get Whitehall working.

Well, so much for that.

Just incidentally, Sue - as someone who came from a working class background, joined the civil service at the bottom rung in her teens, and worked her way up - always wanted to be a Permanent Secretary running her own department, and always believed there was an old school tie boys' club at the top of the civil service who were blackballing her whenever she applied for one of those jobs. She didn't count on the boys' club in Labour HQ, who are much less impressive than the Whitehall version.

Agree with this.
I disliked Starmer from the time he came on here and refused to engage with women asking him about single sex protections. He seems very much like the type of Labour man who believes absolutely in his own righteousness. That he is on the ‘right’ side and therefore all his actions are good and justifiable. Corbin has this to an enormous degree, the self-righteous smugness, the satisfied glow of apparent goodness, sitting above any criticism while selling women down the river . As pps have said, the danger of being non judgemental, for making that a character trait that one is proud of, is actually losing one’s moral compass, having no solid convictions at all.
So many huge egos, so many men convinced by their own PR.
The sneaky, insidious sexism in modern life, the same old anti- women crap dressed up in sequins and heels as progressive, feels harder to challenge than the overt sexism of my 1980s teenage years. For this reason I actually preferred Boris, with so much on show, to Starmer with his fat packet of smugness and disregard for women hidden in his jacket pocket. I have never voted Tory, but I haven’t voted Labour for over a decade, this weird ‘we are the good men and so you can’t challenge our actions’ thing that so many of them have, the absolute lack of self examination, I don’t trust that at all.

Perhaps Starmer thought MPs would have the same reaction to this as they have to the grooming gangs?

Firstly, I dont think a PM has as much choice as we assume. They have to play political games all the time.

Secondly, when dealing with some people internationally, probably some of our highest ethical and moral specimens would run a mile. I think politics sometimes just is a murky, horsetrading, business.

Thirdly, stories being released are giving more information - stuff that wasnt known before, and you cant act on guesswork, and this ups the ante.

I do think it will be the political end for Starmer but, like most politucal ends, its never really the one it should have been.

I note there aren’t any Starmer apologists on this thread, despite them appearing like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition on every other thread which dares to criticise this government.

What @SionnachRuadh said.

Isn’t it the case that you can tell a person by their friends?

I'm afraid Labour does have a woman problem that goes way beyond them never electing a female leader.

Exhibit A: Mandelson is the main architect of New Labour, more so I'd argue than Blair or Brown who were talent spotted by him when he was working for Kinnock. He's a skilled operator and he knows everyone and he's become the sage who everyone goes to for advice. So Labour can overlook small things like him being big mates with the world's most notorious sex trafficker.

Exhibit B: The grooming gangs scandal is not historic, it is still going on. Labour politicians at local level are heavily implicated in the scandal. Starmer's government massively resisted having an inquiry, and since they've given in, Jess Phillips has been farting about, delaying it, enraging panel members so they resign, trying to widen the scope so it doesn't deal with the specific problem. I don't believe we will get a meaningful inquiry under this government.

Exhibit C: The unions, for reasons that escape me, have outsourced their anti-racism work to the extremely rapey Socialist Workers Party. Every time there's a rally to oppose Tommy Robinson or whatever, it will be funded by the unions, supported by open letters signed by gormless actors and musicians, and Labour MPs will appear on the platform alongside SWP bigwigs, some of whom have been actively involved in rape coverups. This is more the Corbyn wing of Labour than the Starmer wing, but it shows it isn't just the Labour right who have a problem. And I don't believe for a second that MPs from the Labour left are ignorant of the SWP's record.

There are even Labour supporters on FWR who don't like me mentioning that last point.

I'm certain other parties also have sexism issues, but Labour seems to have a particular problem, and can't even address it because they identify as the party for women - which in practice seems to mean they think they're entitled to women's votes.

Maybe some people are mistaking Starmer’s lack of charisma and charm for decency, I don’t know. A safe pair of hands etc. He sort of reminds me of John Major who was famously seen as grey and boring. Or maybe he’s seen by his supporters as decent purely by virtue of being left wing.

His press conference was pathetic and angered even more women including MPs in his own party. I listened to Kim Johnson this morning who is raging at his fucking blockheaded male arrogance and said many were crying due to just frustration and being silenced. She warned him about Mandelson and nothing.

I believe them. He was firmly on the side of McSweeney and Mandelson because it’s why he is even in power. He said as much at PMQs in rare honest blurting.

I see old New Labour stalwart Gordon Brown has been wheeled out, despite being called smelly, to say he’s decent, trust me. He should clean up the processes.

Fuck off. Men patting other men on the back whilst saying trust me is why Epstein has gov information and Mandelson got paid by him.

I think Starmer very strongly identifies as a decent and moral man. All that indignant harrumphing he did whenever Boris broke a rule, no matter how trivial the offence? By all accounts he genuinely was furious when he went out to PMQs and slammed Boris as a corrupt liar who was unfit to hold office.

And I'm not saying he was wrong about Boris's bad character, far from it, but as soon as he became PM, Labour were being caught up in scandals, like Lord Alli having this weird sugar daddy relationship with multiple ministers including the PM, and his only response was to bleat that everything was within the letter of the rules.

His squirming is quite something. Saying "I am shocked and outraged that Peter Mandelson would lie to me. How could I have predicted that?" is really pathetic. If he tells the truth and says "I didn't really want Mandelson as ambassador, but Morgan told me to do it and I don't really understand politics so I let Morgan do my thinking for me" - that's even more pathetic.

Your right, the evidence that he's the complete opposite is starting to mount up.

Yep and you know he’ll brief anything against his own to stay unchallenged.

I see absolutely no evidence to back up the relentless claim that Starmer is a decent and moral man; not a single thing.

You forgot option 3 OP - that Starmer is up to his neck in it with shadowy people himself. We should assume nothing is impossible.

"Starmer is a decent man" is code for "he is articulate, wears a suit, went to the right university to study the right subject and has a knighthood". It's pure classism and male privilege where participating in all the correct rituals of behaviour is more important than actually doing good things.

Where is the evidence he is a decent man? The actual evidence?

Group therapy is all about supporting one another, it seems like a warped and perverted version is at play in all of these groups, which leads to group think and mob rule.

This bleeding heart, hug a hoody, #BeKind crap will lead to our own destruction, myself I hung on to my judgy self and I judge them all wanting.

Yes, the 'sin' of 'being judgemental' has grown to create an unreasonable situation; presumably because of the mental illness industry. Everyone is by now indoctrinated to believe they all require counselling: Apparently, the first task and promise of counselling is to give a guarantee to be non-judgemental.

Here's news: If nobody questions, recoils, or challenges, a person who is detailing with relish all the unspeakable, unacceptable things they have done, then that person will be relieved, then reinforced and reassured to continue, with tacit approval that the actions are accepted by the listener, and therefore not really bad at all. Which is why abusers form 'rings', and why criminals form gangs, and why online groups specialise in whatever fetish they share.

Apparently in prison, groups of terrorists approve one another, and groups of wife-abusers or paedophiles sit together in organised 're-education therapy' sessions, ostensibly to learn to stop wanting to do what they have always done.

But naturally, the outcome is that each validates the other, each is 'not judged', and they pick up hints and tips for when they get out of prison, with the result their re-offending rates are worse than if they had not been 'counselled' and 're-educated' :

Notoriously, the London Bridge attacker was a poster boy for having been supposedly rehabilitated in prison, and to have been de-brainwashed into abandoning all his terrorist leanings. He was actually being produced in triumph and had been taken to the event by the 'rehabilitation experts' and 'new best friends' he was planning to kill.

He's uninterested in the groomed girls because he is a technocrat, only interested in managing the scandal and making sure due process is followed. He is not in the least bit worried about the moral and ethical dimension of the grooming scandal, first, because that would mean making a judgement and being 'judgemental' is a sin in the technocratic world, and second, because the people involved mostly vote Labour.
This attitude covers his view of Mandelson, who was probably sent to the US because of his networking ability, as others have said, but also because he had dirt on major players. That he was immoral is irrelevant. That he gave away state secrets seems not to have turned up on the radar - which is surprising. That would have disqualified him but being involved in trafficking young, white girls for prostitution? No.

My God I agree with this so much!!! Just beyond cringemaking to have such a slimy venal amoral snake as our representative on any foreign soil.