What Hope?

Yesterday, the convicted paedophile Liron Woodcock-Velleman was given eight months, suspended for 15 months. His past “service” as a councillor, and the ruination of his “promising” political career, were accepted in mitigation. No wonder he and his parents were celebrating. Like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe. Last May, the supposedly hard-as-nails Shabana Mahmood tried to give nonces “chemical castration” instead of prison, where that proposal was received, not only by the inmates, as well as one might have expected. As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not, or they are given the cushiest jobs inside, they are housed in the newest or the most recently refurbished wings, they have gym when ours has been cancelled, and so on. Why?

At committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, Woodcock-Velleman gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate. When Labour returned to office in 2024, then Anna Turley was both a Director and a Trustee of Hope Not Hate. As an ultimately successful parliamentary candidate in 2015, the then Ruth Smeeth described herself as “the Deputy Director of Hope Not Hate”. The American Embassy classified her as “strictly protect”. As Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, she was recently made a Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office while remaining a Whip. Not bad for having lost her Commons seat to Jonathan Gullis. Even with the departure of Josh Simons, there are now four Parliamentary Secretaries under Darren Jones, and three Ministers of State. That amounts to a Prime Minister’s Department with, including Keir Starmer, nine Ministers, the most of any Department. They must do something. What is it?

Woodcock-Velleman’s offences were strikingly similar to those of another Labour councillor in London, Sam Gould, who offended while on the staff Wes Streeting. Streeting 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 not much more than six years ago. But in 2015, Streeting had chaired the Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. On Tuesday 2 September last year, 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 had been supported for Leader by Hilary Armstrong and by Armstrong’s erstwhile staffer, Peter Kyle. Both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle were introduced to the House of Lords by Armstrong, whose Whips’ Office in the Commons had included all three of Phil Woolas, Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote for the Iraq War. Norris does not turn up to Parliament, but 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; there was a blip on 10 March, but normal service was restored from the next day. Armstrong was the political patroness, both of Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Kyle. Armstrong remains an active Labour member of the 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. Every accusation is a confession.