Up The Corridor?

While still drawing an income from renting out her Chester Square mansion worth £25 million, one pound for each of her unusable surgical gowns, Michelle Mone remains a Peer in good standing, and thus free to attend this week, when the House of Lords will consider report stage and Third Reading of the Chagos Bill, thereby completing a 60-year project of the Labour Right. For all the intellectual degeneration from Denis Healey, through even David Miliband, to David Lammy and Yvette Cooper, they have all been of a piece morally.

Of that same piece are Ann Limb, who does not even dispute that she faked her Master’s degree and her PhD, and Matthew Doyle, who somehow managed to retain his Labour Party membership despite having campaigned for an Independent candidate, as it happened Sean Morton, whose offences were par for the course in such circles, whereas breaking with “the Party” is ordinarily absolutely taboo.

For example, Ivor 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.

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.

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by 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 only six years ago. If he were still an MP, then Streeting would certainly become Leader after the defeat of Labour by Reform UK in 2029, and he would do so unopposed because the nomination process now made a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible. Streeting may then be Prime Minister within 18 months, since almost all Reform MPs will be freshers. The only thing stopping this is the high likelihood that Streeting will lose his seat to Leanne Mohamad. But although the Greens came fifth at Ilford North last year, they took well over three times more votes than Streeting’s margin of victory. Meanwhile, the Chief Whip of Caplin, Woolas and Norris has 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. Hers is the first endorsement listed, styling her as a Baroness, and giving her institutional affiliation as the House of Lords.

False allegations of sexual violence are fundamental to the demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF’s Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

On the other side of that Struggle, a leading enforcer within and through the Labour Party is Hope Not Hate, and a leading light of that was a Barnet councillor until last February. He is Liron Woodcock-Velleman, and 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. A peerage awaits. If not, why not?

And then there is the Bishops’ Bench. The safeguarding allegations against Dame Sarah Mullally would have driven out anyone other than a liberal with a liberal background. But she has said that she would table an amendment to deny Third Reading to the Assisted Suicide Bill, and that she would force that amendment to the vote. If she failed to do so, then that failure was the price of her protection. Carbon dioxide is to be banned in the slaughter of pigs, but would be permitted in the slaughter of human beings. Is Dame Sarah hogtied?