Earlier this month, the Rother Valley Labour party made its pick for the next election, selecting Dominic Beck as its candidate for the Tory-held seat. Who he, you might ask? Well thanks to the work of GB News’ documentary-maker Charlie Peters, we now know.
Beck is a local politician who has served on Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council (RMBC) since May 2011. In August 2014, Professor Alexis Jay published her report which found that at least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. The RMBC cabinet resigned: Beck was appointed in the subsequent reshuffle with responsibility for business growth and regeneration in September 2014.
Beck subsequently served in the new cabinet until February 2015 when he, along with the rest of the team, subsequently resigned following the publication of a second report by Dame Louise Casey. He featured on the frontpage of the Times newspaper the following day. Casey’s report was damning of the council, even after the 2014 reshuffle when Beck joined.
Her report found that ‘despite Professor Jay’s findings… RMBC demonstrates a resolute denial of what has happened in the borough. This took several forms – notable in their recurrence…. when asked 70 per cent of the current Rotherham councillors we spoke to (including those in the cabinet) disputed Professor Jay’s findings.’
Now though, seven years on, all that seems to have be forgotten. Beck subsequently rejoined the council cabinet a year after his resignation: his biography on the RMBC website makes no reference to his first spell which ended in disgrace, stating simply: ‘in May 2016 Dominic was first appointed to the Cabinet and currently serves as cabinet member for transport and environment.’
Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham, appears to have forgotten that Beck was even a councillor during the time when the scandal broke. She tweeted last week that ‘I don’t think he was a councillor at the time’ that the child sexual exploitation revelations came to light. Indeed, he had been a councillor for almost four years before the Casey report found that RMBC was not fit for purpose.
The question must surely be asked: if Beck was forced to quit the council cabinet in 2015, is it right that he should sit in parliament just seven years on? In a letter to the local paper, one resident described the selection as a ‘betrayal’ of victims, adding ‘it is an insult to the electorate and puts the Labour party even deeper into the sewers’.
There is a further Westminster angle to all this too. As Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Keir Starmer admitted in 2012 that the justice system had betrayed a generation of girls, thanks to a flawed approach to sexual exploitation.
He blamed ‘a number of assumptions, myths and stereotypes’ about sexual assaults that proved deeply misleading when assessments were made about the credibility of victims. Starmer also praised the work of the Times in highlighting the plight of these vulnerable girls.
It was a very different approach than that offered by Rotherham Council: the Casey report into RMBC noted how councillors dismissed the Times reporting as a ‘Murdoch press’ smear story.
Peters tells Steerpike that: ‘My first documentary for GB News on the grooming gangs scandal is coming out in January and it makes for sorry watching if you’re Labour. Everyone from local councillors right up to central government and the home office has ignored and failed victims of the rape gangs for decades. Beck’s selection as a Labour candidate is yet another insult to all those who have suffered at the hands of the gangs and the evil incompetence of the authorities.’
So what exactly does Labour high command – which has been keeping a close eye on candidate selections – make of all this? Hopefully they will make that clear pretty sharpish.
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