They Take Without Giving, So Send Them Away

Expulsion from the Labour Party is a badge of honour that I am delighted not to have to share with Peter Mandelson. Considering how he treated material that had been sent to him as a Minister of the Crown, has the King removed him from the Privy Council? And for malfeasance in public office, has he been arrested yet?

Dan Norris has just been arrested again. If charged again, then would he be bailed again? If so, then how? I mean, how the hell? And why? It is not as if he turns up to Parliament. Although he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips.

Well, they are his successors. He and Ivor Caplin were Whips for exactly the same time, a time most notable for the vote on the Iraq War. They were exceptionally close, and with them in the Whips’ Office was Phil Woolas. All three were made Ministers soon after the Iraq vote. 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, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession.

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.”

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 And Burnham out of the way, then the looming fall of Keir Starmer should crown the long-anointed Streeting, whose then employee, Sam Gould, was a sitting councillor when he committed offences startlingly similar to those of Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who sent naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl while asking her to “show me your bra”, whether she was “at home alone”, and whether she was a virgin. Woodcock-Velleman was also a Labour councillor in London, and he was such a cog in the right-wing machine that he gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate at committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act.

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips, that machine’s first choice for Streeting’s stopgap, 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. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession. The conviction for corruption of the Minister for Anti-Corruption may be a Third World cliché, but Tulip Siddiq did not hold that position in Bangladesh. Britain may once have been “a high trust society”, but that probably depended who was asked, and it does not prove that the high trust was deserved, a staggering thing for any Fleet Street veteran to suggest, and appalling thing for any journalist to wish to see “again”.

At and to the United Nations, Siddiq has represented the Awami League of her aunt, Sheikh Hasina. That party is noted for its torture chambers. Right-wing Labourites are normally very particular indeed about having links only to narrowly defined “sister parties” abroad. The Awami League is not one of those. If Siddiq is a member of it, then how is that compatible with membership of the Labour Party? Yet the Awami League has huge influence over the Labour Party in Camden. And the Labour Whip in the House of Commons still extends to Siddiq.

Muhammad Yunus was supposed to have been the Bengal Tiger until he came after Siddiq, who resigned because she had done nothing wrong and who was so obviously innocent that she refused to attend her trial. If Siddiq were anything but a right-wing Labourite, then she would be out. Perhaps unfairly, but life is hard, politics is very hard, and she comes from a political family, so she has known that from the start. As for having an aunt who had been sentenced to death for war crimes, being closely related to a convicted war criminal makes her only as Royal as the King, but not even that old Mitläufer and Minderbelasteter was ever lined up to be another Charles I, Louis XVI or Nicholas II. Siddiq must be the bluest-blooded blueblood in Britain.

To vote for a Labour parliamentary candidate is to vote for someone who positively wanted to keep such company. And while supporters and opponents of the monarchy both argue that no one can vote for or against it, we can vote for the Labour Party. Or against it.