Keir Starmer’s Questionable Child Protection History

We are told that the UK government is led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and that he is a “decent man”. After more than 82% of the electorate did not vote for either Starmer or the Labour party, his government secured a whopping 170+ seat majority. It can do pretty much anything it likes while it keeps its backbenchers in line.

The current Labour government, under Starmer, has not only failed to protect children when it could, but it has actively opposed others’ attempts to do so. Such morally repugnant behaviour is nothing new for the Labour Party.

Labour grandees Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman and Jack Dromey were all prominent in the National Council for Civil Liberties while it was affiliated to the child-rape advocacy group the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). At the time, Harmen’s activities included arguing against a proposed ban on child pornography, and Hewitt’s public conduct included suggestions that objective morality couldn’t either be defined or established. After their links were exposed, these Labour heavyweights all denied that they were influenced by or connected in any way to PIE.

In 1984, Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens handed a dossier, reportedly containing evidence suggesting a Westminster VIP paedophile ring and other child-rape allegations, to then Tory Home Secretary Leon Brittan, in whose custody it promptly vanished. Nothing happened, and the whole muddled fudge ping-ponged around the denial sphere until, in 2014, it was resurrected. Labour MP Simon Danczuk and Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson used the dossier as a political football to score goals against the Tories.

During the subsequent party political shenanigans, it was conceded that at least 114 files contained in the original dossier had disappeared. The head of the Civil Service, Mark Sedwill, said there was nothing “sinister” about the destruction of evidence.

Having reportedly read what remained of the dossier, Watson told parliament:

[There is] clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No. 10.

The Tory government responded by announcing a future official “independent public inquiry”, no less. In reality, UK independent public inquiries ceased to exist a decade earlier when Tony Blair’s Labour government enacted the 2005 Inquiries Act. Under the Act, inquiry “independence” effectively means the government has total control. Unsurprisingly, the resultant IICSA inquiry ensured that the “clear intelligence” evaporated again as any meaningful investigation was avoided like the plague.

For example, in a 1995 interview for the BBC, the former Tory chief whip Tim Fortescue—who served in Edward Heath’s government—explained how the party leadership would cover up MPs’ paedophile crimes in order to blackmail them.

In 2017, Wiltshire Constabulary concluded Operation Conifer. Had he been alive, investigating officers found there would have been “reasonable grounds” to interview Sir Edward Heath “under caution” for his suspected sexual crimes against children. The 2022 IICSA “investigation” report considered these claims, investigated none of them, stressed that political concerns should not outweigh the need to stop paedophiles sexually abusing children, and ultimately concluded there was insufficient evidence to actually hold any child rapists to account.

In retrospect, when the third chair of the IICSA inquiry, Dame Lowell Goddard, exited in 2016 saying she couldn’t resolve the inquiry’s “legacy of failure”, the IICSA omens were plainly discernible. Panel members resigned or were suspended; witnesses withdrew, and leading Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) survivor advocacy groups refused to participate. It is not without good reason that survivor groups described the IICSA inquiry as “not fit for purpose.” Though that does rather depend on what you consider the purpose to have been. There is no reason to consider the IICSA inquiry anything other than an extremely expensive, long-winded cover-up.

* * *

As the Labour leader and prime minister, Keir Starmer routinely portrays himself as a powerful leader. For example, when the government announced its spending plans, Starmer said, “I’m investing in the future of Britain.” He often uses the possessive “my” when he refers to the government, i.e., “my government is turning promises into change.”

Starmer clearly likes to be seen as the man in charge. Having adopted this style of supreme leadership, he should also accept responsibility for the decisions and policies that his government issues. Yet, he is often far less enthusiastic about accepting any of the culpability that comes with leadership.

In April this year, at least three, and potentially four, seemingly aggrieved men are set to stand trial for allegedly firebombing Keir Starmer’s car and private residence. Two of the men are reportedly male prostitutes, and a third apparently describes himself as a male model.

Starmer said that the firebombings were “an attack on democracy”. So Starmer not only leads the government, but presumably he also personifies the representative democratic system. That said, before we consider Starmer the embodiment of Britannia, as former MP George Galloway highlighted, perhaps we should consider if Starmer was embroiled in “some personal imbroglio”. Who knows, if the trial ever comes to court, these possible issues might be resolved.

The push toward the IICSA exercise was triggered when the world started to come to terms with the appalling crimes of Jimmy Savile (1926 – 2011). Many, many people believe that Starmer should provide some sort of cogent explanation regarding why he failed to act to prosecute Savile when he evidently could. He certainly hasn’t come up with one yet.

Keir Starmer was appointed the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)—head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for England and Wales—in November 2008 and stepped down from the position in April 2013. Despite police investigations into Savile’s crimes between 2007 and 2009, then CPS boss Starmer did not expedite Savile’s prosecution.

Though the CPS has apologised for its “shortcomings” in not prosecuting Savile—Britain’s worst ever necrophiliac, pederast, paedophile, and child pimp—apparently none of these “failures” had anything to do with Starmer.

Jimmy Savile demonstrating who’s in charge of whom.

In 2007 and 2008, Surrey police investigated four specific allegations against Savile. In 2009, while Starmer was DPP, Savile was interviewed under caution in relation to the four allegations. Surrey police composed a prosecution file, but the CPS decided “there was insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction” because “none of the alleged victims would support a prosecution.”

It later emerged that the likely surviving witnesses who accused Savile were not informed that others were making the same allegations against the twisted deviant. Had they been, perhaps each would have been encouraged to testify against one of the most powerful men in Britain. Investigators later admitted not telling them was another “mistake”.

In 2012, following the Savile revelations, DPP Starmer said that the case “never came close to crossing my desk”. In a supposed effort to discover the truth, Starmer said he had instructed CPS prosecutor Roger Coe-Salazar to “consider the files” and that Coe-Salazar had “assured” him, based on his review of “the files”, that the CPS decision was appropriate. Starmer then dispatched his own principal legal adviser, Alison Levitt, to look into the matter further.

In her eventual January 2013 report, Levitt said that an “extremely experienced” CPS lawyer had liaised with the police throughout the 2008 – 2009 formal investigation of Savile. Apparently, this CPS lawyer conducted his work and advised investigating officers in splendid isolation. It seems that the CPS hierarchy knew nothing about his activities.

Levitt did not disclose the name of the mysterious lawyer—who apparently retired in anonymity in 2013. If, as Levitt claimed, the CPS ghost was advising the police, it rather begs the question of why the police would then proceed to submit a Savile prosecution file to the CPS that had no chance of success.

Stranger still, Levitt reported that the relevant case files were destroyed by the CPS in October 2010, so quite what files Coe-Salazar reviewed in 2012 is another enduring mystery. Levitt also said that the unknown CPS lawyer she quizzed “struggled to remember the details” of his work with the police during their investigation into the potential sickening crimes of one of the most famous celebrities in Britain.

To recap: Starmer’s claim that he knew nothing about the dropped Savile prosecutions is based solely upon internal CPS reviews conducted by CPS lawyers whom Starmer appointed and who then exonerated him. Further, these CPS reviews reportedly included examinations of evidence that was destroyed before the reviews commenced and interviews with anonymous witnesses who couldn’t clearly remember investigating Jimmy Savile and never told anyone else in the CPS what they were doing at the time.

This implausible yarn is enough for the entire mainstream legacy media to have ever since maintained that Starmer is entirely blameless. Unquestioningly accepting the farcical narrative offered, the government’s leading propaganda outlet, the BBC, reliably informs us that Keir Starmer “wasn’t aware” of the numerous police investigations into Savile.

Any suggestion that Keir Starmer should have known and should have facilitated the prosecution of Savile is a “conspiracy theory” which, according to The Times, has been “found to be baseless.” The notion that the head of the CPS is ultimately responsible for CPS conduct is a baseless conspiracy theory because, in this specific instance, the great leader Starmer didn’t have a clue what the organisation he was in charge of was doing. This bizarre argument is squarely at odds with pretty much everything else Starmer claims about his time as DPP.

Starmer has made great political capital out of his hands-on decision to appoint Nazir Afzal as chief prosecutor for north-west England in 2011. Consequently, Starmer said he instigated the prosecution of the Rochdale child grooming gang. Starmer took full credit, asserting, on this occasion, that he did have a firm grip on the CPS. He said he tackled the issue “head on” and that he “brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang” in the UK. Though, technically speaking, it was Afzal, not Starmer, and the Rochdale case was not the first major prosecution of the grooming gangs.

We can only assume that following the initial police grooming gang investigations in 2001, the Channel 4 grooming gang documentary in 2004, Starmer’s appointment in 2008, and the first related convictions in 2010, as the DPP, Starmer only leaped into child protection action in 2011 because the previous three years were one of his hands-off periods.

Former Greater Manchester Police Detective Constable Maggie Oliver resigned in 2012. She couldn’t get anyone from her senior command structure, the prosecutors (CPS), or the Home Office to pay any attention to the evidence she gathered during her years of investigation into the Rochdale grooming gangs. She felt compelled to blow the whistle.

Reportedly, one of her frustrations was that, having uncovered a network of child rapists, child slavers, and child traffickers, instead of her work leading to prosecutions, the suspects were merely given child abduction warning notices (CAWNs). Investigative journalist Zak Garner-Purkis reports that Starmer was “drafting and agreeing” CAWNs rather than prosecuting suspected child rapists.

Apparently, the CAWNs were deemed to be “early intervention tools”, but there was no attempt to ascertain if they worked as such, nor if any of the suspected child abusers cared about being issued hurty words. It seems Starmer wasn’t tackling paedophile criminal networks “head on”, as he claims. On the contrary, he appears to have overseen a system dishing out stern letters to paedophile child traffickers instead of prosecuting them.

The grooming gangs and the Epstein revelations are now common knowledge. At last, it is no longer acceptable for Establishment figures and their propagandists to marginalise, dismiss and accuse people who investigate, research and expose paedophile networks as nothing more than conspiracy theorists spreading misinformation or disinformation. This tired propaganda technique is wearing very thin, and an increasing number of people know it. Though that doesn’t appear to have deterred Starmer from using it himself.

Thanks, first and foremost to the bravery and resilience of the survivors, but also to the uncompromising determination of women like Maggie Oliver and Whitney Webb, we can at least talk seriously about the widespread sexual abuse and rape of children and the criminal networks that profit from evil. Let’s hope, as a society, we are edging closer to actually doing something to protect children. We have a long way to go. It is a global problem.

Of course, we must not jump to conclusions, and we should base our suspicions solely on the evidence, but it is no longer credible for evidence to be arbitrarily denied by Establishment decree. We must be free to examine all the evidence. When we do, Starmer’s self-exculpatory argument that he appointed Peter Mandelson as the UK’s US ambassador in February 2025 because Mandelson supposedly “lied repeatedly” about his relationship with Epstein is absurd.

In 2008, Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. Though it should be noted that there is no such thing as a “child prostitute”. All children sold for sex are raped.

Mandelson with his best pal Epstein.

Peter Mandelson, who described Epstein as his “best pal”, had known him since 2002 at the latest. Epstein pleaded guilty and struck a plea deal—avoiding even worse charges—brokered by his lawyers with Miami prosecutor Alexander Acosta. Mandelson supported Epstein’s fight against child abuse charges, sending him emails offering his encouragement and advice.

Remarkably, despite the minimum eighteen-month state prison tariff for his offence, Epstein spent his supposed “sentence” in a private “special wing” of the Palm Beach County Stockade. He was barely inconvenienced at all, and it is not really clear if he served any kind of sentence. During Epstein’s so-called incarceration, Mandelson stayed in Epstein’s luxurious Manhattan apartment.

Over many years, Mandelson received payments from Epstein and was seemingly providing Epstein with sensitive British government internal communications. Mandelson was in regular contact with Epstein’s network for decades.

Mandelson was also good friends with Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2022 of what US Attorney Damian Williams described as “heinous crimes against children”. Evidently, there are numerous reasons to suspect that Mandelson may also be a risk to children.

Prior to Starmer appointing Peter Mandelson the UK’s ambassador to the US, UK Security Vetting (UKSV) would have investigated Mandelson’s Epstein ties. UKSV works closely with the intelligence agencies who would have known about everything we have just discussed and much more. UKSV would definitely have been aware, for instance, that Mandelson was a prominent name listed in Epstein’s “little black book” of contacts—alongside Tony Blair and others.

It was blatantly obvious that Mandelson was an unacceptable, incredibly high security risk and a terrible choice for US ambassador. Yet, for some reason, Keir Starmer simply ignored all of Mandelson’s conspicuously suspicious behaviour—and probably UKSV warnings—and appointed him regardless.

Supposedly, to help him make the right decision, Keir Starmer asked Mandelson three specific questions about his unmistakably close friendship with the convicted paedophile Epstein. Mandelson reportedly lied in response. It appears that Starmer overlooked everything else and believed Mandelson.

Keir Starmer is a trained barrister, the former Director of Public Prosecutions and, now, the Prime Minister. Are we supposed to believe he is also a naive idiot? Something stinks about Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson.

Perhaps we will get answers from the ongoing police investigation into Mandelson’s apparent misconduct in public office. That said, the circling rumours that critical information will be withheld until after the next election hardly inspire public confidence. Let’s hope another IICSA-style cover-up isn’t on the cards and that we may see something more persuasive than Starmer’s Savile prosecution flimflam.

To be honest, there has never been any parliamentary appetite to actually investigate suspected paedophile rings, especially when there is evidence suggesting that members of the Establishment are involved. Occasionally, Establishment figures are exposed for their crimes against children, but the revelations commonly appear after they have left office or postmortem. Such disclosures are the exception rather than the rule.

What we usually get is the obscene spectacle of politicians using child rape allegations—that they have no intention of addressing—to score party political points. A clear example is the January 2025 amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill tabled by the Tories. The amendment appeared to call for a new “independent inquiry” into the child grooming gangs. Labour used its enormous whipped majority to easily defeat the bill.

In the aftermath, Tory-aligned propagandists used the amendment defeat to accuse Labour of opposing an investigation of grooming gangs, as if a public inquiry would investigate anything. In reality, neither Labour nor the Tories were in the least bit interested in protecting children.

For a start, facing Labour’s huge majority, the Conservatives knew they would lose the vote. It was a tactic deployed by the Conservatives to suggest further constraints on the reach of public inquiries. Labour voted against it simply because they wanted to retain their exclusive power to instigate inquiries during their stint in government. There was no intention, on either side of the house, to actually tackle the problem of the systematic rape of British children. Children’s destroyed lives were reduced to an irrelevance.

Leaving aside Starmer’s Labour government complicity in the slaughter of children, governments in general present more of a risk to children than they do protections. Just like its predecessors, today’s Labour government treats child protection with contempt. The government is part of the child protection problem and not remotely part of the solution.

Among the many anti-democratic diktats that Starmer’s government is attempting to enforce upon us—such as removing our constitutional right to trial by jury, imposing a digital identity panopticon, and restricting our freedom of movement—we are supposed to believe that Starmer and his government need to censor the internet and restrict our access to it in order to keep children safe. This is a preposterous claim.

Systematic and institutionalised child abuse has only been uncovered because whistleblowers and journalists have fought against the Establishment’s staunch resistance. The venal system has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light, and now, with Starmer’s notable assistance, the Establishment wants to shut down the avenues available to us to share vital evidence. The government’s attack on our anonymous use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) is not just an assault on our right to privacy, it threatens to expose whistleblowers and journalists seeking to report crimes against children.

The evidence clearly indicates that the Labour government and Starmer personally have consistently failed to protect children and have persistently legislated and regulated to make investigating paedophile networks as hazardous and onerous as possible. We simply have no reason to believe that either Starmer or his Labour government give a damn about our children.

The Epstein emails demonstrate, once again, that senior Establishment figures are manipulated by intelligence agencies and criminal organisations that use kompromat to control them. It should surprise no one that Labour’s proposed judicial reforms effectively included the enforced destruction of court archives containing evidence of paedophile crimes. Thus reducing the chance of any potential future revelations.

Encountering mounting public pressure, Labour’s Justice Secretary David Lammy backed down on the planned evidence burning. But government guarantees that this evidence is safe in their hands shouldn’t reassure anyone. It’s pretty clear what Starmer and his government have in mind.

Iain Davis is an independent journalist a researcher from the UK. You can read more of Iain’s work at his blog IainDavis.com (Formerly InThisTogether) or follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his SubStack. His book Pseudopandemic, is now available, in both in kindle and paperback, from Amazon and other sellers. You can claim a free copy of his new book “The Manchester Attack” by subscribing to his newsletter.

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