Starmer accepted a special job for Labour in 2013 to chair a party taskforce on how to change the rights of sexual abuse victims so the victim is always believed. Despite this we are meant to believe he asked zero probing questions to Mandelson and took the man for his word despite it being publicly known he had maintained a close friendship with a convicted paedophile sex offender…
Michael Ashcroft’s biography of Starmer, Red Flag, has the details of Starmer’s “acceptance of an invitation [from Ed Miliband] in December 2013 to chair a taskforce advising the Labour Party on trans- forming the rights of victims in the criminal justice system. The proposals it eventually produced were to have been introduced by then Labour leader Ed Miliband had he won the 2015 election; but as Miliband never became Prime Minister, this work resulted in Starmer sponsoring the Victims of Crime Bill instead, a Private Member’s Bill which he introduced to Parliament in October 2015.” Starmer did a huge amount of campaigning on this as DPP too…
Starmer told the Guardian at the time:
“Our criminal justice system is riddled with assumptions about how victims behave and most of them are misplaced. My main concern is that the more vulnerable you are as a victim or a witness the less able the criminal law is to protect you. We saw this as we unpicked the child sexual abuse cases – both the Rochdale grooming cases but also the [Jimmy] Savile cases. Victims did not have the confidence to come forward; when they did come forward they had all sorts of assumptions made about how they were going to behave. Then there was the journey through the courtroom itself.”
Ashcroft’s book goes on to say “Scotland Yard’s policy of immediately believing every allegation of sexual abuse made by victims” was inspired by Starmer. How could Starmer have been so uncurious with Mandelson’s Epstein connection…
Mandelson’s defence as told to Politico‘s Ann McElvoy by his friends is that nothing more substantial was asked of him than the most perfunctory questions, and he told the truth in the vetting process. So what was publicly available and raised in official vetting documents was enough to satisfy Starmer…
Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey are now calling for a vote of no confidence in the PM. Whose stated beliefs and values are crumbling in the face of the mega-scandal…
Speaking at his press conference on the Pride in Place programme which was obviously all about Mandelson, Starmer said:
“Tomorrow’s front pages are unlikely to be about the Pride in Place programme.”