Labour's hypocrisy and indifference to female victims

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I need a rant.

I can't quite understand why Starmer’s appalling decision to appoint Mandelson is only now coming back to bite him.

The FT reported on Mandelson’s continued relationship with Epstein back in 2023 - to a resounding silence from the British establishment and media ecosystem, which says nothing good about the indifference of the powerful. An FT journalist asked Starmer about the relationship back then: “I said, you’ve got a very senior Labour peer who was staying at Epstein’s house while the paedophile was in jail. Aren’t you a bit worried about this? And Starmer just batted it away and he said, oh I know as much about this as you do.”

The developed vetting report on Mandelson prior to his appointment as ambassador raised red flags on both security and financial grounds. Starmer made a political decision to ignore the security service advice. His decision, not McSweeney's (McSweeney shouldn't have seen the DV report). I can see only two ways to interpret this.

One, Starmer thought someone who had been flagged as a security risk and had maintained his ties to a convicted paedophile was a fit person to represent the UK - he facilitated a situation in which the UK ambassador to the US was effectively providing reputation laundering to a convicted US paedophile.

Two, he’s stupid enough to have believed the excuses offered by a man who had already been sacked from government twice. That strikes me as unlikely, so it makes my blood boil when I hear Starmer doing his best moral outrage voice and excusing himself on the grounds that Mandelson lied to him.

What is making me truly angry, all over again, is that information about the depth and extent of Mandelson's ongoing links with Epstein and that Starmer knew that Mandelson continued the relationship post-conviction when he appointed him ambassador was widely reported in September. I couldn't understand why he wasn't forced out then. Kudos to Badenoch and her team for - belatedly - realising the killer question that needed to be put to the PM (the man who regards himself as some sort of moral true north and promised us the highest standards in public life), but why the fuck has it taken so long?

If Lab MPs genuinely didn't realise before this week that their supposedly whiter than white leader knowingly appointed the close friend of a convicted paedophile as US ambassador they aren't doing their job properly, if they did then they’re as morally culpable as Starmer.

I cannot stomach the hypocrisy and the hand-wringing from people whose inaction and lack of curiosity simply betrays the low priority they give to the victims of Epstein.

(The FT podcast on the September wave of this scandal is here, transcript also available. Worth a read/listen if you think I'm overreacting.)

He is a very intelligent man, he was Kinnock's press secretary, the term spin doctor was coined to describe him, which says it all. From the very beginning he was a sly, manipulative liar, it was his intelligence that allowed him to created New Labour so they became electable, he used all of the methods above to spin Labour and Blair into a position of power, which he then used to his own advantage. Brown wasn't particularly a fan of his because Mandelson thought Blair made a better face for New Labour, and pushed for Blair to be elected leader of the party not Brown. That didn't stop Brown bringing Mandelson back in from the cold when he was PM though, because thanks to Mandelson's success in selling himself as indispensable, Brown was convinced no one could do what Mandelson could do.

That probably translates as had dirt on a lot of people involved and thus had some leverage.

I think Starmer can be too reliant on the rules. He convinced himself that putting Mandelson in position is not illegal, therefore can be justified. And then balanced the chance of anything backfiring with a better US/UK relationship.

Which is a bold calculation given what prince andrew was experiencing at the exact time of this appointment.

I also think he didnt think this would ever turn against him in parliament. The worse thing would be the right wing press, that could be managed.

I think Starmer can compartmentalise. He can be both outraged about abuse, saying its his top priority to stop it, and also take risks with this appointment because trade is his top priority and will do anything to get the deal.

Agree - I am getting so depressed by columns on this claiming that the ‘real issue’ here is the failure of capitalist liberalism. No, the real issue is that so many of the men at the top of this hierarchy see half the world’s population as subhuman. What they did to those women and girls - there are no words - and their vile worldview filters down into every aspect of our lives.

So Starmer was prepared to appoint Mandelson despite his being adjacent to sexual abuse of women and girls; he was prepared to allow Russel-Moyle to get away with some outrageous threatening behaviour towards women in the HoC; the way he treated Rosie Duffield; his assertion that some women have a penis; his permission for Phillipson to delay and delay the EHRC guidelines following the Supreme Court decision; his willingness to allow children to be given puberty blockers without any evidence that it will be beneficial for them……

Why does anyone imagine that this man puts any value on the safety of women and children?

I would like to see how many MPs now pushing for Starmer to go on the back of the Mandleson/Epstein issue are also pushing for action on the men who systematically raped and abused vulnerable children in the Northern Mill towns (and elsewhere in UK) for decades.

@FigRollsAlly Starmer probably justified it by telling himself that he was putting the national interest above his own moral scruples.

Only in a patriarchal society could it be construed to be ‘in the national interest’ to launder tacitly the reputation of a convicted paedophile and known sex trafficker by appointing as the ambassador to your most powerful (if not necessarily most reliable) ally someone widely known to have remained friends with him despite his abuse of women. That sends a pretty clear message - to an international audience - that abuse of women carries no weight in the political realm, that it's irrelevant to the games of power, which are played on male terms, mostly by men. A 'national interest' that takes no account of the abuse of women isn't really national at all.

It should have been inconceivable that Mandelson would ever hold public office again when the FT published its investigation. Starmer should have been forced out of office in September when it became widely known that he knew about Mandelson’s post-conviction relationship with Epstein. But not enough people cared and the news cycle moved on swiftly to the non-prosecution of Chinese spies.

I don't think I take a particularly moralistic approach to politics but as far as I'm concerned, regardless of whatever extraordinary talents Mandelson may have had, he simply was not a fit person to represent this nation (my nation). I'm not hearing that said, hence the original rant.

@guinnessguzzler
It's unusual for the ambassador to the US to be a political appointment - the role usually goes to an experienced diplomat. The argument for Mandelson was apparently along these lines:

Trump's unique qualities meant that someone with Mandelson's highly developed skills as a 'political operator' was required. Don't ask me why a political operator was thought better able to handle the Trump administration than a diplomat.

Mandelson's experience as a trade envoy would be helpful in securing a big, beautiful trade deal with the US. Didn't happen.

Never trust someone appointed by the Cons. There's a lot of this in UK politics. We waste a lot of time and money because neither the Reds nor the Blues are capable of admitting that any initiative started by The Other Side has merit. So they rip up perfectly good schemes, have a review, then (if we're lucky) eventually introduce something similar, but with the appropriate political badge.

Mandelson's predecessor, who was a career diplomat, was widely agreed to have done a brilliant job - she had made a point of maintaining links with Trump's people during the Biden administration and had built an excellent relationship with the new Trump administration. Trump liked her so much that she was apparently added to the guest list for the state banquet at Windsor at his request. On the other hand he was apparently rather disobliging about Mandelson personally. My guess would be that the Mandelsonian 'charm' was mainly that he had (or appeared to have) power and influence; Trump didn't need Mandelson's power, so he saw the same oleaginous ‘prince of darkness' that those of us outside the political world see.

My guess would be that Mandelson was a networker sans pareil. In anodyne terms, he collected relationships and knowledge that would be useful and made a point of trading those connections and knowledge to extend his network of power and influence. Do that systematically, ruthlessly, over a long period and you become a formidable ally or opponent.

Not like the Tories then who ......... wait a minute.

Thanks, everyone, all your explanations and insights are really helpful.

Geoffrey Epstein called the girls he trafficked ‘goyim’ i.e non-Jews used disparagingly and he only trafficked white girls, this has echoes of the grooming gangs who called the girls they abused as ‘kaffir’.

So much this - it is the enormous elephant in the room. The racial element - if the girls were not white - would be writ large.

This should not be an ignored element of both the grooming gangs and Epstein.

Labour campaigned on the basis of being a less corrupt, more honest and ethical government than the shambles the Tories offered.
Yet from the freebies revelations at the outset, they're proving to be just as corrupt as the last lot. They self identify as ethical and responsible while ignoring rape gangs, paedophile associations, child safeguarding and women's rights.

I was sceptical about labour given the extreme levels of misogyny that run through the party unchallenged but I genuinely thought that Starmer would be a sober and responsible PM. A good man.

Instead he's proved to be completely disinterested in the abuse of girls and women which the Mandelson debacle clearly evidences.

I keep hearing commentators saying Starmer is a “decent” man and I think he really believes his own PR. Wasn’t it Sue Gray who described No 10 as a boys’ club?

This.

The sheer amount of hypocrisy is astonishing. Tens of thousands of British women abused horrifically by rape gangs, and nothing.

The Supreme Court ruling upholding women's sex based rights, being ignored.

This ^

Starmer is no friend to women. I've absolutely despised the man since the Southport massacre of children and his reaction to it. This and his lack of interest in the child rape gangs in Rotherham.

Looking the other way at Peter Mandleson's friendship with the worst paedo on the planet is no surprise to me.

It astounds me that women on here are still sticking up for Starmer. Just wait a few weeks till we see emails and WhatsApp's showing us just how virtue signalling Starmer knew exactly what sleaze bag Mandelson was about and how he did nothing.

Starmer will go. The fact that he is still trying to cling on to power says all you need to know about him. He is, and has always been deluded by his own grandeur. He is a champagne socialist, trying to put the world to rights in his 2 million pound London pad and despite being the son of a toolmaker, doesn't have a clue about what real life is actually about in the UK. He is a fraud.

Agreed @MrsOvertonsWindow Starmer has been one of the greatest disappointments of my life.

Agree. It's going to be disappointing, isn't it?

Starmer is no friend to women. I've absolutely despised the man since the Southport massacre of children and his reaction to it. This and his lack of interest in the child rape gangs in Rotherham

100% Agree.

On Times Radio, Thangam Debonnaire is wheeled out to vouch for the PM's incredibly high ethical standards, and say how terrible it is for Epstein's victims that this psychodrama about Mandelson has to play out.

I don't want to be nasty about Thangam, but she'd have done well in the SWP.

To me, it's not any political party that astonished me about Epstein.

It's the media seeming to focus on what Epstein files have done to the careers of powerful men. Instead of giving equal focus to the emotional pain suffered by the young women.

All the press talking about how this might bring Starmer down, but very little about what affect the whole thing has on the (then) young girls. And why influential men think they can use young women in this way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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?

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