The Westminster sex pest scandal is being handled atrociously, both by the political parties and by the media.
One of the worst aspects is the huge disparity in the way different MPs are being treated by their parties, and by the media.
In the cases of Clive Lewis and Kelvin Hopkins of the Labour Party, and Damian Green of the Tories, all three of the politicians firmly deny the allegations made against them by single accusers. Yet Kelvin Hopkins has been suspended and had the party whip removed, while Clive Lewis and Damian Green have not.
It's impossible to explain this kind of double standard. Either MPs should get suspended during investigations, or not. You can't have a completely ad hoc system where some get suspended and some don't.
In contrast to the firm denials from three MPs mentioned above, the Tory MPs Stephen Crabb and Mark Garnier have openly admitted their revolting sexual misdemeanours (Garnier laughing his unacceptable behaviour off as if it was just some kind of joke), but they haven't been suspended by their party.
How can MPs who admit their guilt get off Scot free, while (some of the) MPs who protest their innocence get punished?
Then there's the Tory MP Charlie Elphicke who has been suspended from the Tory party and reported to the police for "serious allegations". He is protesting his innocence but has been suspended from the Tory party.
However the details of the allegations against him have been kept secret, so after a day of the mainstream media fixating on the unsubstantiated and strongly denied allegations against the two Labour MPs who protest their innocence, the media barely covered the Elphicke allegations because there are no "juicy details" for them to fixate upon on.
Then there's Michael Fallon who preemptively resigned as Defence Secretary with an admission about his inappropriate behaviour with women, but he avoided getting suspended from the Tory party despite openly admitting his guilt. Theresa May decided that instead of admonishing him or suspending him, she'd actually send him a glowing love letter to tell him what a wonderful guy he is!
Then there are the two dozen plus Tory MPs who stand accused of sexual misdemeanours by their own party in the Tory Sex Pest Dossier, and the evidence that Theresa May was warned three years ago that the Tory whips collected details of sexual abuse by their MPs in order to blackmail them into compliance.
The existence of the Tory Sex Pest Dossier (which jumbles up allegations of extreme sexual misconduct with basic blackmail material like consensual affairs between Tory MPs, unusual sexual proclivities, and an apparently false claim against the MP Rory Stewart), and the statement from Theresa May's former communications director Kate Perrior explaining how the culture of blackmail was still ongoing under Theresa May's leadership are both absolutely damning, and should be one of the main elements of the scandal.
But somehow, despite the Tory whips office being at the centre of the scandal, Theresa May saw fit to actually promote her two most senior whips. She caused a storm of internal dissent in the Tory party by promoting her Chief Whip and close personal ally Gavin Williamson to replace Michael Fallon as Defence Secretary, and then she promoted his deputy Julian Smith to Chief Whip to replace him.
So not only are the Tories still studiously ignoring allegations that their whips office have used allegations of sex abuse as blackmail material for party political advantage, they've also promoted the two most senior whips at the centre of these allegations!
The Labour MP Rupa Huq is absolutely right that the House of Commons has "no real structure for complaints" and that the rules on sexual harassment are "lax if not non existent".
It's hardly surprising that sexually inappropriate behaviour has been happening in such a large workplace, especially in one with no clear rules and procedures for sexual misconduct, but the way complaints are being dealt with in completely ad hoc manner by the parties is totally unacceptable. It's created a situation where three Tory MPs who have openly admitted sexual misdemeanours have avoided suspension from their party, while one Tory and one Labour MP have been suspended despite firmly denying the accusations against them.
The next thing to note is that the press have focused much more negative attention on MPs when the allegations are made public, than when the party keeps the actual details of the allegations under wraps (as the Tories have done with the Charlie Elphicke case), which obviously gives the political parties a clear incentive to bury the details of the allegations as much as possible in order to avoid negative publicity.
Then there's what I consider to be the core element of the scandal, which is the way a very senior Tory adviser has admitted that the Tory whips office used accusations of sexual misconduct in order to blackmail MPs into compliance, rather than launching investigations and working to ensure the safety of people like journalists and junior staff as a first priority.
Yet the two men at the very centre of this scandal have actually been handed promotions!
The major problem is the way the parties are currently dealing with the cases in a bizarre "make it up as we go along" manner that punishes people who deny any wrongdoing, lets people off Scot free when they openly admit being creepy sex pests, and then actual hands promotions to two Tory whips who stand accused of having used allegations of sexual misconduct as blackmail material, rather than doing anything whatever to actually deal with the inappropriate behaviour.
The way the whole thing is being handled is an absolute farce.
If our political parties can't even deal with a scandal like this without implementing glaringly obvious double standards, and actually promoting people at the epicentre of the most damning accusations, then how on earth can they be capable of actually running the country in a decent manner?
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Elements of the mainstream media (including the BBC) are working hard to try to whitewash it, but the fact is that Theresa May's handling of the Tory sex pest scandal is outrageously self-serving and inept, even by her own piteous standards.
Theresa May knows that even despite having bribed the DUP extremists into propping up her government, she's in a position of extreme weakness in parliament. The thinness of her government's majority means that she simply can't afford to properly punish her MPs for serious sexual misdemeanours.
Thus we're in the bizarre position of seeing Labour quickly suspend Jared O'Mara for having made a load of vile Internet comments years before he actually became an MP, while Theresa May is far to weak to even ditch Mark Garnier as a government minister after he openly admitted treating a junior female employee in a massively inappropriate manner during his time in parliament, let alone suspend him from the Tory party.
If a guy in pretty much any other job used sexist terms at a junior female colleague, and sent her out to buy sex toys on company time, he'd be in big trouble. But in Theresa May's Tory party this kind of behaviour is apparently so acceptable that there's no punishment for it whatever.
Then there's the married Tory MP Stephen Crabb who hasn't been suspended despite having been caught sending inappropriate sexual texts to young women for a second time! If a young woman applies for a job in your office, you don't then have the right to send her a load of sexual filth after you rejected her job application. The sight of Tories actually defending this behaviour is quite extraordinary, and the fact that Theresa May hasn't suspended Stephen Crabb suggests that she's absolutely fine with it too.
Then there's the case of Michael Fallon, who, according to Robert Peston, resigned as Defence Secretary because he knows that he's sexually harassed numerous other women, and the stress of waiting for them to come forward and expose his behaviour did for him.
Theresa May's response to this preemptive resignation was absolutely extraordinary.
Instead of demanding that Fallon provide a list of women he remembers harassing and groping in order that the party can consider whether he should be permanently expelled or not, she actually sent the guy a bloody love letter detailing how all the things she adores about him.
In her love letter to Fallon she even praises him for having set a good example by resigning, but makes no effort whatever to address the fact that sexual harassment is unacceptable.
The shockingly lax attitude Theresa May has been displaying towards the sex pests in her own party is bad enough, but the Labour MP Lisa Nandy really nailed her to the floor in parliament when she drew attention to Theresa May's abject lack of response in 2014 to her questions about how the Tory whips office use the sexual misdemeanours of Tory MPs in order to blackmail them into unquestioning loyalty to the party.
Amazingly the BBC news team decided that this question was not serious enough to include in their news reports on the sex pest scandal, as if the Prime Minister getting caught out like that isn't noteworthy enough to tell people about.
The way the leaked Tory sex dossier jumbled together extreme cases of sexual harassment with stuff like consensual affairs between Tory MPs and the kinky sexual tastes of others made it absolutely clear that it was more of a blackmail list than an effort to confront sexual harassment/assaults within the Tory party.
Lisa Nandy raised the subject of blackmail by the Tory whips office three years ago and Theresa May did nothing about it. The leaked Tory blackmail list is evidence that this blackmail culture of collecting accusations of sexual harassment/assault (along with stuff like extramarital affairs and unusual sexual proclivities) has still been going on under her watch.
It's absolutely obvious that when the party becomes aware that an MP has an issue (groping women, forming inappropriate relationships with junior staff, perpetual drunkenness, use of drugs and/or prostitutes ...) they should ensure that the MP gets help with their addiction problems, and launch disciplinary procedures/notify the police if the offences are serious enough to warrant it (which stuff like groping, sexual harassment, and assault definitely are).
Not only has Theresa May allowed the Tory whips office to continue collecting dirt on Tory MPs in order to blackmail them into compliance, she's allowed this blackmail culture to continue on her watch despite being explicitly warned about it multiple times three years ago, before she even became Tory leader.
It's obvious that all political parties are going to have problems with inappropriate sexual behaviour. Even smaller parties like the Lib-Dems and the Greens have tens of thousands of members, so just a 0.1% rate would result in dozens of incidents to deal with.
The thing that differentiates the parties is how their leaders react when sexual misdemeanour cases come to light.
If they react quickly to suspend the suspects while investigations are conducted, they're taking the issue seriously.
If they deliberately turn a blind eye to the blackmail culture of the whips office for years, and then allow people who openly admit that they're sex pests to not only remain as Tory MPs, but as members of government too ... well it's obvious that they're prioritising other factors (like desperately maintaining a razor thin parliamentary majority) over dealing with the sex pest scandal.
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We all saw the absolute hysteria that the Tories and their attack dogs in the right wing press whipped up about the Labour MP Clive Lewis using the word "bitch" at a man during an obscure comedy event and then over the unacceptable comments that the new Labour MP Jared O'Mara made long before he became an MP.
The Tory MP Sarah Wollaston was one of the most high profile grandstanders, posting an article from the disgusting right-wing Guido Fawkes blog alongside a demand that Labour sack O'Mara and call a by-election in his constituency.
Wollaston's fellow Tory MP Nus Ghani even tried to trigger an emergency parliamentary debate on Clive Lewis' "bitch" comment. A move that was dismissed by the Speaker John Bercow as "wholly absurd and inappropriate".
Everyone is familiar with the expression about people in glass houses throwing stones, and when it comes to stuff like homophobia and misogyny, the likes of Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani knew perfectly well that the Tory party is absolutely full of bigotry when they were kicking up such a stink about Clive Lawis and Jared O'Mara.
And so it came to pass. Within a week of the Tory hysteria over Jared O'Mara it was revealed that the former Tory minister and leadership candidate Stephen Crabb had been sending sexually explicit text messages to a teenager who had applied for a job in his office (the second time he's been caught out sexting women in the space of a year). Additionally another Tory MP Mark Garnier was exposed for calling his female assistant "sugar tits" and sending her out to buy sex toys.
Not only is Stephen Crabb a sex pest who thinks it's fine to abuse his position as an MP to send sexually explicit text messages to women less than half his age, he's also a brazen hypocrite and a homophobic bigot too.
Crabb is a glaring hypocrite because he loves to pose as if he's a devout Christian and happily married man.
And yes there's no 11th commandment "Thou shalt not send pervy messages to teenage girls on thy work phone", but it should be glaringly obvious to anyone who is serious about their Christian faith (or capable of basic human decency) that sending sexually explicit messages to teenagers is completely incompatible with having respect for your wife.
Despite having been twice caught out proving beyond doubt that he's willing to completely ignore the basic tenets of his professed Christian faith when it conflicts with his personal desire to send sexually explicit messages to women less than half his age, Crabb has repeatedly used Christianity as an excuse for interfering in other people's lives.
In 2007 Crabb voted against legislation to ban discrimination against LGBT people, and in 2014 he voted against gay equality legislation to allow same-sex couples the same right to marriage as heterosexual couples.
Both times he used Christianity as an excuse for his homophobic bigotry, and what's worse is that he's even taken political donations from a bigoted bunch of Christian extremists called CARE that advocate gay conversion "therapy".
Sarah Wollaston and other Tory MPs have every right to criticise the unacceptable comments that Jared O'Mara made. However if they don't speak out with the same fury when it's one of their fellow Tories speaking or acting like a pervert, homophobe, misogynist or bigot, then we can see that their previous complaints were just faux outrage motivated by a tribalistic urge to score political points against their political opponents.
So has Sarah Wollaston posted a hatchet job article about Stephen Crabb, slammed his misogynistic attitudes towards young women and his wife, attacked his bigoted attitudes towards LGBT people, and called for him to be sacked from the Tory party, and a by-election to be called in his constituency (where his majority over Labour is just 314)?
Of course she hasn't.
And has Nus Ghani decided to try to call an emergency parliamentary debate over Stephen Crabb's abuse of his position as an MP to send sexually explicit messages to a teenager?
Of course she hasn't.
This abject hypocrisy makes them part of the problem. If they're only willing to speak out when there are political points to be scored for their party, but they keep their lips tightly sealed when criticism of abuse, misogyny, homophobia or bigotry would damage the Tories, it's beyond obvious that they've got no real interest in confronting bigotry, and any criticism they aim at opposition politicians over bigoted words and actions is just artificial outrage expressed purely for party political advantage.
Nobody has a problem with people calling out bigotry. The issue here is consistency.
It shouldn't really matter whether you think politicians should be harshly punished for the things they wrote on the Internet long before they became parliamentary candidates, or the fact they got caught abusing their position as an MP to send sexually explicit texts to much younger women for a second time. Or whether you think they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they express regret and state that their views have changed and they won't behave like that in future.
What matters is consistency. If you're going to howl outrage over bigotry, then be consistent. Howl just as much outrage even when the bigot is a member of your own political party. And if you're going to give your political allies the benefit of the doubt, then you absolutely must give the benefit of the doubt to your political foes too.
In a way the double standards of Tories like Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani are perhaps even worse than Stephen Crabb's bigotry. Being a creepy pervert, homophobe and hypocrite just seems to be part of his personality. It's who he is.
Wollaston and Ghani on the other hand have displayed extreme double standards. Calling out bigotry on the opposition benches, but saying nothing about the bigots in their own party trivialises the issue by piggybacking their own party political agenda onto it.
They want to turn bigotry into a frenzied media circus when it's to their party's advantage, but just days later they won't even issue simple statements of condemnation when the bigot is one of their fellow Tories.
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It struck me when reading yet another comment stating that Jeremy Corbyn is not a good enough leader that listed all of the ideal qualities that a Labour Party leader should have (charisma, nicely presented, a good orator, experienced, engaging, no baggage like Iraqi blood on their hands, not too left, not too right ... ).
People who still support the cynically premeditated coup against Jeremy Corbyn are a lot like Brexiters.
I opposed Brexit on the grounds that bailing out of the European Union under a hard-right Tory government would likely be a classic "out of the fire, into the frying pan" scenario. However I understand the concerns people had about the EU, after all, I've probably written more critical analysis of the EU than 99% of the people who actually voted for Brexit.
What I couldn't understand was the naive optimism that things would somehow get better without any kind of plan of action for what comes next. I confronted right-Brexiters and left-Brexiters about this alarming lack of anything resembling a coherent plan of action. right-Brexiters tended to howl that they do have a plan (not that they ever got around to explaining it in any detail, and whatever it was seems to have crumbled into dust now) and left-Brexiters tended to answer the query with stony silence.
Now that the Brexit vote has happened it's clear that neither side did actually have a plan. The deceitful Vote Leave mob rowed back on their pledges lies within days and the Tory government was paralysed with inaction as David Cameron decided to leave the pressing of the self-destruct button to whoever picks up the poisoned chalice of succeeding him (mightily pissing off the other 27 EU member states in the process). The lack of an Article 50 notification and the power vacuum in government has left the country in a bizarre state of limbo.
The Labour Party reaction to Brexit was even more bizarre. Instead of laying out their plans for what a Labour Brexit would look like, high profile Labour Party Brexiters like Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart jumped on the lynch Corbyn bandwagon. There's something awfully distasteful about Labour MPs who actively campaigned for Brexit jumping on the idiotic "sack Corbyn because of Brexit" bandwagon, but that's what they did.
So people on both sides of the political spectrum campaigned for Brexit with nothing but rose tinted optimism about what was to come next. They threw the country into turmoil to achieve a situation they didn't even know how to handle.
The premeditated coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn displayed the exact same kind of thinking. The objective was to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. The "blitz" of negative news items fed to the media by dodgy Blairite PR companies, the furious condemnations, the carefully stage managed sequence of resignations, the crocodile tears.
Just like the Vote Leave shit-show, it was all designed to get an outcome, but the exact details of the outcome are unclear, not least because Corbyn was weakened, but not destroyed by the operation. He still has a small band of loyal MPs and he still has the backing of the party membership, which actually counts for a lot in a political party with a democratic constitution. Corbyn's refusal to resign and his determination to re-fight and re-win his democratic mandate to lead the party has thrown a big spanner in the works.
The Labour MPs who conducted this coup operation clearly value their membership of the Westminster Establishment club above the interests of the Labour Party, the party membership and the country in general (which could have benefited from a unified opposition rounding on the Tories who created this mess, instead of their own leader who clearly didn't), but their ruse failed to work out as they planned meaning that they now have to find a candidate they think can beat Corbyn in a democratic election.
They're now looking for this mystical political superhero within their ranks who can oust Corbyn in a fair fight, when they surely know as well as anyone that they're a very limited bunch. If an insincere, gaffe-prone, Iraq war approving, political water carrier with virtually no public or social media profile like Angela Eagle is anywhere near the top of the list they're in very serious trouble indeed.
The same goes for the country. Unless Jeremy Corbyn somehow manages one of the greatest political resurrections of all time, the next Prime Minister is going to be one from a rag-tag bunch of five universally unappealing Tory leadership candidates:
- Angela Leadsom: Serial tax-dodger, but probably the pick of the bunch because she's not as smeared in shit as the other four.
So there we have it: The Labour coup plotters are left to pick a patsy from an uninspiring bunch of MPs to face almost certain defeat to Jeremy Corbyn in a re-run of the leadership election he won so handsomely just 10 months ago. And the UK will be left in the even more precarious situation of almost certainly being led by whichever one of the five woeful candidates the Tory party choose to select.
The conclusion "be careful what you wish for" seems apt, but it's too cliched and not quite right. Brexiters were on the whole wishing for a better Britain (well maybe a few just wanted to watch the world burn?) and the Labour coup plotters were wishing for a better Labour party leader (even though they had a pretty decent one anyway in my opinion).
The problem isn't that people wish for things, but that life is never as simple as wishing for things and having your dreams immediately come true. Life just doesn't work like that. Making improvements takes a lot of time, and effort, and planning, so it's no good tearing your unsatisfactory house down when you don't actually have anything resembling a decent plan for building a better one.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In the wake of George Osborne's March 2016 Budget of Failure the Tory party endured the worst week they've had had since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010.
A bad week for the Tories
Here are just a few things that went wrong for them:
- Labour immediately condemned the Tory budget as having "unfairness at its very core" because it planned to impoverish hundreds of thousands of disabled people whilst handing out lavish tax cuts to corporations, the asset rich and high earners.
Attack Corbyn
Given this catalogue of failures, it might have been fair to assume that the mainstream press might actually begin to question David Cameron's leadership, but the mainstream media narrative was quickly set that Jeremy Corbyn was the real failure of the week for apparently not attacking the Tories effectively enough!
Pretty soon online discussion threads were filled with people spouting this feeble narrative as if the thoughts were their own, rather than some absolute drivel they'd rote learned from the right-wing press and mindlessly regurgitated as if it was their own opinion. However, if people actually listened to some of the responses from Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Angela Eagle this week they'd have heard strong criticisms of the Tories that the likes of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls never managed to deliver.
Spurned Blairites
The biggest problem for Jeremy Corbyn remains the pathetic crowd of spurned Blairites who, even this week, have been feeding anti-Corbyn stories to the mainstream press. Even when the Tory party is visibly imploding, the spurned Blairites are far more interested in attacking Corbyn than they are in attacking the Tories!
Hypocritically, the main focus of their foolish self-destructive attacks on Jeremy Corbyn are that he's apparently "not good enough at attacking the Tories". Well, even if you don't think Jeremy Corbyn has done as well as he could have done - at least he was actually attacking the Tories, unlike the spurned Blairite crowd who are still clearly far more intent on tearing the Labour Party apart, even in the worst week this Tory government has ever endured, than actually criticising the Tories.
Conclusion
The UK has the most right-wing press in Europe, so it's no surprise whatever that they've once again jumped in to try to save their golden boy George Osborne from the absolute mauling he so clearly deserves with pathetically contrived attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
What is more worrying is that even during the most catastrophic week the Tories have endured in years, there are still crowds of pathetic spurned Blairites willing to feed anti-Corbyn stories to the press rather than concentrate of attacking the Tories. With a party full of self-defeating backstabbers like that, it seems pretty unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn will ever be able to defeat the Tories, even if he continues to up his game.
Another worrying factor is the sheer number of mindless rote-learners out there who are ever so happy to soak up the latest feeble "blame Corbyn" narrative, and repeat it as if it's their own opinion. It just goes to show what a shocking level public discourse has declined to that people would not only allow themselves to be convinced that it was Jeremy Corbyn who had a bad week, not David Cameron, but also to go around trying to convince other people to believe in such transparent gibberish too.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The more we find out about Iain Duncan Smith's replacement as the head of the DWP Stephen Crabb, the worse it gets.
- Stephen Crabb's voting record shows that he's the very worst kind of Tory "yes man" who has never once rebelled against the Tory whip since they came to power in 2010, and the only time he has voted against the majority of his Tory peers was a 2011 effort to interfere in women's reproductive rights.
- The DWP are currently wasting £250,000 to battle seven families in the Supreme Court over "Bedroom Tax" (a woman with spina bifida, a victim of rape and domestic violence, a disabled widower, an RAF veteran and three families of severely disabled teenagers). One of these families are a couple who care for their severely disabled grandson in a three bedroom home that was specially converted for them by the council in Stephen Crabb's constituency. He's never met them, let alone spoken up for them in parliament. Now he's heading the department that is wasting a vast amount of taxpayers' money trying reverse the high court decision to exempt them from paying "Bedroom Tax".
Now it's become absolutely clear that Crabb had absolutely no idea whatever about the actual details of the £1,500 per year ESA cuts he mindlessly voted in favour of (along with 308 of his Tory colleagues) just a few weeks before being appointed as head of the DWP.
After voting to impoverish disabled people who have been declared too unfit to work by £1,500 per year, he made up some desperately spurious post hoc justification for having done so.
Stephen Crabb's spurious claims that when it comes to the £1,500 per year cuts he voted in favour of, people who have been found unfit to work are "wholly unaffected" prove beyond doubt that he didn't even understand the absolute basics of what he had voted in favour of.
Had the new head of the DWP bothered to do any research at all, or listened to any of the countless objections from disability charities, opposition MPs, the House of Lords or members of the public, he would have known that the intended victims of the £1,500 per year cuts that he explicitly endorsed with his parliamentary votes are sick and disabled people who have been found to be too unfit to work.
It's clear that Crabb voted in favour of economically sanctioning people who have been declared too unwell to work for no reason other than the fact that he never ever rebels against his party.
When Iain Duncan Smith resigned I predicted that his replacement would be an ultra-loyal self-serving careerist, and Stephen Crabb fits that description perfectly. What I didn't suspect was that David Cameron and George Osborne would end up finding someone who knows so little about the welfare system (the department he now heads) that he was making desperately misleading comments about the harsh welfare cuts he was voting in favour of just a few days before he was appointed as head of the DWP.
Still, if the Prime Minister is a guy whose only real world job before becoming a professional Tory politician was begged for him by his mother-in-law, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has only ever worked as a data entry clerk and a towel re-folder in the real world, it's hardly a surprise that they'd pick someone who is hopelessly unqualified for the role as their favoured "yes man" to head the DWP.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
