Leading Britain’s Conversation?

ITV and LBC are funded only by their giant corporate advertisers, whose mind may therefore be discerned from their output. Unsurprisingly, they are Centrism Central, from Ed Balls interviewing his own wife, to Lewis Goodall, well, just to Lewis Goodall, frankly. And today, to defend the exclusion of Andy Burnham from the Labour candidacy at Gorton and Denton, LBC interviewed Ivor Caplin. Know the clique that is being wafted from dominance into hegemony.

The newly enobled Matthew Doyle somehow managed to retain his Labour Party membership despite having campaigned for Sean Morton as an Independent candidate, while Caplin was a Whip at the time of the Iraq War, as was Phil Woolas, and as was Dan Norris, who was close to Caplin and whose proxy vote is still cast by the Whips. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote on Iraq. The then Chief Whip was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. That Chief Whip remains an active Labour member of the House of Lords, even giving it as her institutional affiliation when she had the gall to endorse a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

For example, Liron Woodcock-Velleman was a Barnet councillor until last February, and he gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate at committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, yet he is scandalously out on bail while awaiting sentence for offences including sending naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl. He asked her to “show me your bra”, whether she was “at home alone”, and whether she was a virgin. His crimes were startlingly similar to those of his fellow London Labour councillor and right-wing stalwart, Sam Gould.

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Gould’s then employer, Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was barely six years ago. The nomination process now makes a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible, and with Burnham out of the way, then the looming fall of Keir Starmer should crown the long-anointed Streeting. Streeting has a majority of only 528 over Leanne Mohamad, just as Phillips has a majority of only 693 over McIntyre, but huge damage could be done in three years of a Streeting Government, in which Phillips would certainly be a senior Cabinet Minister. In the meantime, to be the next Member of Parliament for Gorton and Denton, the Workers Party is fielding Councillor Shahbaz Sarwar of Longsight, a ward of the constituency.