It was a little over a week ago that Steerpike wrote of Labour’s Rother Valley selection. The constituency party there had chosen local councillor Dominic Beck as their parliamentary candidate. He was forced to quit Rotherham Council’s cabinet seven years ago when a report by Dame Louise Casey made damning findings of the authority. A previous report by Professor Alexis Jay found that the council had presided over a regime in which at least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual exploitation in the local town between 1997 and 2013.
Beck’s selection at the beginning of the month was hailed by Labour activists in the surrounding area of Rother Valley, with many queuing up to express their congratulations. But now, after a significant backlash, Beck has been forced to stand down as a parliamentary candidate. In a statement, he wrote that: ‘I would never wish to do anything that causes further upset to Rotherham’s CSE [child sexual exploitation] survivors, and it was never my intention to cause them distress. I am deeply saddened that this is what has happened.’
He added that he had been at school for ‘almost all of the period the Jay Report investigated’ and that ‘I supported the commissioning of the Jay report to find out exactly what had gone wrong… I accepted the findings of this report and the subsequent Casey report in full.’
Beck’s resignation is a first scalp for GB News, thanks to documentary-maker Charlie Peters, who pursued the story as part of his upcoming film about the Rotherham scandal. It’s also yet another blow for Labour high command, which has been watching candidate selections across the country like a hawk. Beck is the second Red Wall Labour candidate who has had to stand down in two days.
On Monday the Times revealed that Bolsover prospective parliamentary candidate Jerry Hague was fined £5,000 over the handling of miners’ compensation in 2010, forcing him to quit. Starmer’s team are desperate to avoid a repeat of the 2019 selections, which saw the likes of Zarah Sultana, Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Sam Tarry enter the House of Commons. But with the Corbynistas now being squeezed out, their replacements seem little better.
Let’s hope Labour can find some candidates which aren’t tainted by scandal…
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