If I was the leader of a major political party, a party that needs to convince the majority of the British people that they will run the nation properly, and a branch of my party decided to select to stand for Parliament a man with a significant perceived moral taint, then I’d be concerned and would be publicly showing my concern. I’d want to be distancing both myself and my party from the morally tainted individual in order to show the broad mass of the electorate that I was tough enough to deal with wrong’uns selected by rogue party branches. My reasoning for this course of action would be to prevent giving the impression to the public that the allegedly morally tainted individual either represented the bulk of party members or that the moral failings of the person selected to fight for a Commons seat, chimed with party policy.

Unfortunately the scenario of a person with a moral taint being selected to fight a Parliamentary seat and the proper response to it, is not merely part of the speculative paragraph above. It is something that has actually happened in the Labour Party but unfortunately the Party Leader, Sir Keir Starmer seems to be notably and worryingly silent over the matter.

What has happened is that the local Labour Party branch in the Rotherham area, Rother Valley, has selected to fight a Parliamentary seat a man called Dominick Beck. Beck was a Rotherham councillor who failed to grasp the seriousness of the local Islamic Rape Gang problems and who, along with other Labour local Cabinet members, rejected the 2014 report into child sexual exploitation in the town. Beck was forced to resign from the local Cabinet a year after his rejection of the report when, according to Guido Fawkes, ‘after an independent report uncovered yet more incompetence’.

I find it astonishing that a senior councillor, a person who rejected a report into some of the most horrendous child sexual exploitation that had up to then been seen and who was ignominiously forced to resign after yet more deficiencies in Rotherham Council’s child protection services were found, should be picked to fight for a seat in the Rotherham area.

It’s even more astonishing that the various organs of the Labour Party, including the Leader of the Opposition’s Office, did not see what a massive insult to the survivors of the Rotherham rape gangs this selection was and attempt to quietly or not so quietly step into prevent this selection. Whilst I accept that Beck might not have been instrumental in any cover ups of Islamic CSE undertaken by the council and might only have been adhering to a form of cabinet collective responsibility when he rejected the 2014 report into abuse, the fact that he chose to reject the report rather than resign from the cabinet, speaks volumes about the morality of this candidate. Beck could have chosen to step aside and let others make this ill timed and inaccurate condemnation of the 2014 report but instead he decided to side with his council colleagues and not those who were victimised for years by the members of various Islamic Rape Gangs operating in the Rotherham area.

Surely there are mechanisms that the Labour Party leadership could have employed to persuade the local branch who made this deleterious selection to make a different choice? After all Labour is pretty damned good at parachuting the central party’s favoured candidates into safe or relatively safe seats. If the party can impose central rule or enhance central influence on local parties to choose candidates of the leadership’s liking, then why not can the leadership of the Labour Party step in to stop a candidate who to many will appear to be morally tainted?

As I said earlier. If I was in Sir Keir Starmer’ s position I would, for the good of the party’s image coming up to a General Election, be taking ever step to divorce the party from the stuff that makes people despise the party. One of those things are the way that Labour when in local government in places like Rotherham had had an equivocal and ambiguous attitude towards the rape gangs, they didn’t seem to care about the survivors and potential victims of these rape gangs and due to political correctness and appallingly awful management allowed the gang rape problems to fester for decades. Labour did not act in the necessary proactive manner that was needed to stop the Islamic Rape Gangs from harming, in Rotherham alone over 1500 people, often young ones, by subjecting them to degrading sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Labour failed to protect those who were vulnerable to abuse, ignored warnings about it and ran scared of being called ‘racist’ if the problem of Islamic Rape Gangs was brought up.

This is the sort of Labour Party misbehaviour and mismanagement that the leadership of Labour should be doing their utmost to distance the party from. The party should be making it clear that in places like Rotherham the Labour Party failed to protect the very class it was damned well set up to serve and that such horrors as are contained in the independent reports into the Rotherham Scandal and the council’s abandonment of the vulnerable to predators, would no longer be tolerated by Labour. One way that the Labour leadership could have done this would be to keep at arms length or even expel from the party those individuals who have played significant roles in ignoring or downplaying the gang rape problem in Rotherham. Unfortunately Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has not done this. It has sat by and allowed a local branch of the Labour Party to select for the General Election a man who rejected a report into some of the worst child sexual exploitation that up till then Britain had seen.

I believe in redemption, that people can reform and come back but in the case of Beck, not only has not enough time elapsed for a political come back not to appear ‘icky’ but there is alleged to have been no contrition about his role in rejecting the report in order to keep the Rotherham Labour political show on the road. Charlie Peters who has been investigating the story of Beck and the Rover Valley Labour Party and was the source for the Guido article linked above said on Twitter: “ 6. Beck has never spoken about the scandal. He has never apologised. No contrition, just silence. When South Yorkshire PCC Shaun Wright was pressured to resign after the scandal broke, Beck was accused of trying to move the agenda away from the situation in council meetings.” Mr Peters also linked to footage of Beck setting police onto a pensioner at a public meeting when angry locals tried to question senior councillors including Beck. I don’t think that Beck has done nearly enough to be considered as redeemed. He’s had plenty of time to be contrite over his previous behaviour but Mr Peters has said that from Beck has come only silence.

The Labour leadership could have intervened to keep this disgraceful character off of any candidate or potential candidate list. That they did not see any reason to do so tells us a lot about how morally vacuous the Labour Party has become. The late Labour MP Tessa Jowell once said that ‘the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing’. Well, having seen how the leadership has not taken the moral stance and prevented Beck from becoming a Labour parliamentary candidate, I’d say that the Labour Party is now ‘nothing’. I know from watching Labour in local government that the Labour Party has nothing that I want to buy, nothing that the country needs and has a nothing at its centre where its moral compass should be. Rather than a crusade to make the lives of working class Britons better. It has certainly shown by Rother Valley Labour Party’s choice of Dominic Beck as parliamentary candidate that it cares nothing for the most vulnerable and most victimised in British society.