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.)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What @SionnachRuadh said.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wholly agree, that 'webchat' was the day I got his measure too.

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.

Absolutely agree.

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.

Where is she speaking?

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.

No worries, thanks.

Jason Cowley in the Sunday Times:

"Yet Starmer has no one to blame but himself. I understand he was warned by David Lammy, the then foreign secretary, and Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, not to appoint Mandelson. Lammy favoured Dame Karen Pierce, who was well connected with President Trump’s people, extending her term as ambassador. Starmer listened instead to Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, whose “singular purpose” was to have Mandelson in place in Washington when Trump returned to the White House. But the final decision was Starmer’s alone, and he must now endure the consequences as the government braces for further revelations as the Metropolitan Police continues its investigation into Mandelson."

I've come to expect government clusterfucks, but "the PM is in deep trouble because he failed to take David Lammy's sensible advice" is quite a thing.

I think it's clear that the traditional and the 'New' left really do not give a shit about women. They never have and nothing has changed. Look at Scotland and the SNP - full-on self-identified 🙄 progressive politicians who are willing to sacrifice the rights of women and girls for every other 'vulnerable minority' that they can identify. Women and girls - the female sex - ARE the biggest 'vulnerable minority' across the entire fucking world, you smug tits!

On Peter Mandelson, he was known as the Prince of Darkness, which really should have been a clue. But the end justifies the means, over and over and over.

I've come to expect government clusterfucks, but "the PM is in deep trouble because he failed to take David Lammy's sensible advice" is quite a thing.

I want the laugh emoji back. 😂

Gabriel Pogrund in the Sunday Times on a Labour peer close to Starmer and McSweeney, who is coming under scrutiny for his friendship with a paedophile. Not Mandelson, though:
The other tarnished peer who spells trouble for Keir Starmer

Thanks for the link

"A New Labour veteran is put forward for a plum public role despite his known association with a paedophile. Keir Starmer is warned about it. Morgan McSweeney too. Despite a vetting process that raises red flags, No 10 decides to proceed anyway."

De-ja-Vu - director of communications, a posh version of press secretary, really is unbelievable.