A few weeks ago I wrote about how the Rother Valley Labour Party made a bizarre and strange choice of candidate to fight the seat in the next General Election. The local party chose a man called Dominic Beck, a person mired in scandal. Now the main interest in Beck is that when the initial reports from the Jay Inquiry into Rotherham’s Islamic Rape Gang scandal came out in 2014, Beck, who was then a councillor, rejected it. In other words by rejecting the report he and the other councillors who did so implied that the contents of the report were wrong. But in fact the report was correct in its assessments of Rotherham Council’s failures to protect children from predators. However Beck was forced to resign from the council a year later when the later Casey Inspection of Rotherham Council found further failures by the council to protect vulnerable people, mostly children and young people, from the Rape Gangs.

It’s difficult to think of a less suitable candidate for Parliament than a man who could have done the right thing and accepted that Rotherham had failed to protect children and other vulnerable people from Islamic Rape Gangs, but who chose not to do so. Normal people, those with a functioning moral compass, might have thought that this man was unsuitable for Parliament, but the local Rother Valley Labour Party branch thought otherwise. They believed that he would be a fine candidate and eminently suitable to represent the constituency, which should tell us a lot about the local Labour Party’s lack of moral compass and vanishingly small amount of shame.

However there has recently been some good news. Beck has decided to stand down as candidate for Rother Valley. He blamed recent ‘press coverage’ for his decision to resign and ‘concerns about the events of the past’. By press coverage he probably means that his candidature has sparked some digging into how he managed to get the job as candidate. He was propelled into the position as candidate partly by the actions of another Labour Party member who is also a councillor who was forced to resign in 2015 after the Casey Report. Emma Hoddinott resigned when Beck did after the Casey Report found further problems with a council that the Communities Secretary at the time, Eric Pickles, said had a Cabinet that was ‘wholly dysfunctional’. This is really looking like a situation of the appalling, in the form of Emma Hoddinott helping to choose the equally appalling Dominic Beck.

Also, to say that there are ‘concerns about the past’ with regards Dominic Beck is to be quite frank a considerable understatement. It’s much more than a ‘concern about the past’ when you have a man who decided to play the role of a committed party loyalist by rejecting the Jay Report rather than act like a damned human being and either concur with the findings of the report or resign.

Dominic Beck, in his resignation statement, also tries to excuse his behaviour back when he rejected the Jay Report on his youthfulness. He said that he joined the council when he was 19 and was still quite young when was one of the councillors who supported the commissioning of the Jay Report. However Beck then went on to reject the Jay Report, a report that he said he had supported commissioning, when it exposed the utter and complete incompetence and malfeasance of the local authority that he was a key part of. Personally I don’t really accept Beck’s reasoning that he made the decisions he made and took the positions that he did re the Jay Report on his youth and inexperience. We’ve all been young, many of us have had political views that we now reject or have made bad decisions about relationships or whatever, making errors when in your early twenties sort of goes with the territory. But what Beck did was much worse than an error. He actively chose, as did other Labour councillors at the time, to reject the Jay Report and act as if there was nothing untoward going on the rotten Labour state of Rotherham. ‘Nothing to see here’ seemed to me as I recall it as being the reaction of Labour’s ‘worthies’ in Rotherham. It’s not youth that makes people make such terrible decisions, it’s a lack of a moral compass and undiluted party tribalism.

Not enough time has passed and not enough proper contrition has come from the mouth of Beck for him, in my view, to return to politics. I don’t believe that he is properly redeemed yet for his piss poor decisions and should not at this time been considered for the position of Parliamentary candidate. The fact that the local Rother Valley Labour Party thought that this man with such a troublesome reputation and public image should represent the constituency in Parliament may well tell us that something might not be right when it comes to the nature of the Rother Valley Labour party and its membership.

It’s not known to me at present whether the decision to step down as a candidate was Dominic Beck’s alone, or whether elements in the local or central Labour Party realised that they could no longer get away with putting up such a disgraceful candidate, put pressure on Beck to resign. I don’t recall hearing any public criticism of this selection from Sir Keir Starmer, but it’s quite possible that Sir Keir has managed to grow the tiniest amount of bollocks, something he’s not exactly known to do very often, and used his influence behind the scenes to get Beck to resign.

If it is the case that the Leader of the Opposition’s Office has had involvement in getting Beck to step down then why is this not being shouted from the rooftops by Sir Keir? It would most certainly be in the interest of the Labour Party’s image amongst the electorate to be be the person who said ‘no’ to people like Beck. It should be a positive boon for a Labour leadership to be seen to be stopping those individuals who are connected to scandals of Labour councils who have incompetently mismanaged the Islamic Rape Gang issue and in some cases allowed the abuse to continue for fear of disturbing the groups who make up much of Labour’s core vote in some places, or endangering councillors seats on the political gravy train.

If Starmer is serious about rooting out those in his party who sat by doing nothing whilst children got raped then being seen to put pressure on those local parties who select for Parliament those who are tainted by their association with such scandals would do both him and his party some good. But as has become usual, we’ve often got little more than mealy mouthed platitudes from Starmer on this issue, such as his statement when Director of Public Prosecutions, following the revelations of Islamic Rape Gangs which had operated for years in Rochdale, that the authorities ‘failed’ the victims of Islamic Rape Gangs. The party tries to make it seem as if they are doing something about those connected to the scandal but they don’t seem to have done much if what they said recently to the Sun newspaper is any guide:

A Labour Party spokesman told The Sun: “The Labour Party takes the findings of the Jay and Casey reports incredibly seriously. The NEC took the necessary action at the time against officials implicated. Beck was one of the cabinet members reappointed in May 2016 to take forward the new governance of the council alongside commissioners.”

The Labour NEC didn’t exactly impose draconian punishments on those councillors who are alleged to have done nothing about the rape gangs for reasons of political correctness. These councillors were, in 2014, merely suspended from the party pending investigation. Beck as far as I can tell was not one of those four councillors suspended. But he resigned a year later when the Casey Report came out.

Beck’s selection as Parliamentary candidate for Rother Valley could and should have been stopped earlier and stopped by the central party if it was the case that the local party was still in the hands of those tainted by the Islamic Rape Gang scandal. The fact that Sir Keir and the rest of the Labour Party did not do so doesn’t exactly leave a good impression of the party on me. It looks to me as if rather than properly deal with those individuals who have connection to either the Rotherham scandal itself or who have attempted to minimise the scale of it, the leadership has decided to take a hands off approach and taking this approach is why morally compromised branches of the Labour Party seem able to pick people like Beck as Parliamentary candidates.

When it comes to the issue of grooming gangs, little seems to have changed in the Labour Party. It’s still a brush it under the carpet and hope people don’t remember policy. The problem for Labour is that a lot of us do remember what Labour local authorities have done, or rather failed to do, with regards to the rape gang issue and the area under the carpet is now so full that Labour’s hidden dirt, such as Dominic Beck and his rejection of inconvenient evidence of rape gang activity, is starting to escape out.

There are many reasons to not vote Labour but for many of us Labour’s elected representatives failure to stop hundreds and hundreds of girls and young women being raped when it was in the power of councillors in Rotherham to do so, is high on that list of reasons. Dominic Beck should never have been allowed to be considered as a Parliamentary candidate at this time and with so little record of contrition for his actions. The fact that Rother Valley Labour Party chose Beck despite the background of scandal, shows to me that some branches and maybe even the Labour Party at Westminster really don’t give a toss about those who are most vulnerable in British society.

Labour realised belatedly that Dominic Beck was a candidate so bad that even the party felt some shame about picking him. It’s really worrying that Labour hadn’t discovered a sense of shame prior to the selection of Beck and only did so after he’d been put up as the local party’s candidate.