Politico, which first reported the allegations, said it had spoken to more than 20 people who worked with Mr Davies in Parliament, including serving MPs and current and former Labour Party staff.
The news site said five women had claimed Mr Davies had subjected them to unwanted sexual attention, both physical and verbal.
The allegations, which go back at least five years, include excessive drinking, as well as sexual comments and unwanted touching of younger women, according to the website.
Commentators on the social media have recalled that Davies previously made headlines for referring to a proposal for women-only carriages on trains as “apartheid”:
They have also said that Davies is a supporter of current Labour leader Keir Starmer, and campaigned against former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The question they ask now is simple:
Will Starmer give his supporter equal treatment to that he gave Mr Corbyn and those who have supported him?
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Who is the Tory MP who woke up in a brothel at 4am on (presumably) Sunday, unable to find his clothes but with access to a phone so he could ring a senior colleague for help?
And who is the colleague? Presumably this is the one who told the story to the press, so it may not have been a wise choice.
The Conservative Party machine has apparently swung into action to protect both these characters, but the evidence remains – that Tory MPs are immoral degenerates who spend their time chasing vacuous pleasures of the flesh rather than serving the nation.
Some may say everybody needs to take some time off, but I wonder what this person’s spouse would say about it, if they have one.
And let’s remember that 70 complaints of inappropriate behaviour were lodged against 56 MPs last year.
Is it more proof that power corrupts? Or simply evidence that being a Tory is corrosive to good character?
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This BBC Question Time audience member didn’t mince her words on the Conservative government approach to anti-social behaviour – she turned the Tories into mincemeat instead.
Watch as she describes how it is the Conservatives’ own choices that have increased the risk of crime while failing to do anything to counter it.
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Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner ripped Dominic Raab a new one in a punitive masterclass on how to take apart a political opponent, using his government’s failures and his own record against him.
During a Prime Minister’s Questions that was led by the government and opposition’s deputy leaders, due to the funeral of former Speaker Betty Boothroyd, Rayner began by focusing on the government’s new anti-social behaviour strategy that she said had taken 13 years to arrive and could best be applied to Raab himself (referring to charges of bullying against him).
His best response was that he had never called anybody “scum” (a reference to her use of the word to describe members of his party).
Moving on to attack the Tory record on crime in general, Rayner quoted shocking figures that show 300 rapes take place every day but women brave enough to report them have just a 1.6 per cent chance of ever seeing their attacker face justice in court.
Raab’s response that 69 per cent of such cases result in conviction was pathetically weak; he was saying only one in every 100 rapes ever results in a conviction.
The figure supports Baroness Casey’s damning report on the “institutionally sexist” Metropolitan Police, which stated that rape might as well be legal in London.
And worse was to follow, with the revelation that the average wait for a rape case to reach court is now three years, and 175 have been abandoned because the victim was so brutalised by the experience that she felt unable to go on.
These are damning figures for which Raab had no coherent response.
And that’s the most damning part of it, because Dominic Raab is also the UK’s Secretary of State for Justice.
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There was something fractious in the air on the BBC’s Politics Live TV show.
Panellists Kit Malthouse, Jim McMahan, Jacqui Smith and (especially?) Isabel Oakeshott went at each other, hammer and tongs (or the genteel BBC equivalent) on subjects ranging from Rishi Sunak’s new ‘Windsor Framework’ for Northern Ireland, migrant Channel crossings, the salad shortage and – ironically – standards of behaviour in public life:
The words were strong but if you watch the video clip through, you’ll actually hear some worthwhile comments on the issues of the day.
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A Tory minister was unceremoniously sacked from his government job and suspended as a Conservative MP amid claims of misconduct that have yet to be entirely clarified – two days later.
Conor Burns, who was a friend of the late Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher in her later years, was dumped by the party on Friday.
It has since been suggested that the claims concern Burns touching another man’s thigh in a Birmingham hotel bar during the Conservative Party conference last week:
Allies of the MP claim he had injured his ribs the weekend before the party conference and was on heavy medication to manage the pain.
They suggested the prescribed medicine made the effect of the alcohol worse.
It is not disputed by the former minister’s friends that he had been drinking or that he flirted with the young man who had joined him, who, we understand, was not known to Mr Burns.
The MP was sufficiently drunk that he had to later be taken back to his hotel by a friend.
We understand that Mr Burns is strongly of the view that the flirting was consensual, but the BBC has not yet spoken to the man the former minister was with to hear his account of events.
Burns has protested his innocence – but this produced an unexpected knock-on effect:
Really?? Your shocked about this complaint??? Let me remind you what you said me in lift….. https://t.co/IaFuUrzzqL
Professor Tim Wilson has vlogged about this, and raises an interesting question: is this just a ‘dead cat’ to distract attention from Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng?
He provides further analysis here:
I think we can all agree with his final sentiment.
We should all be truly ashamed of the Conservative Party.
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Wearing the dunce’s cap yet again: Gavin Williamson was happy to deliberately endanger your children by reopening schools at the height of the Covid crisis (he was forced to close them again when the demand for him to do so became overwhelming. Now he’s happy to falsely criminalise them – in order to satisfy a new profit-making market he is creating?
The Tory Education Secretary’s unevidenced claim that discipline in English schools has “inevitably” worsened after a year of lockdowns has been dismissed as nonsense by people who actually work with school pupils.
Gavin Williamson intends to impose a national network of “behaviour hubs” to spread “best practice” among schools and teachers.
But it seems there is absolutely no need for them. Why is the Tory minister so keen to force them on our schools, and on our children?
Is it anything to do with his new network of “secure schools” – prisons for youngsters – to be run by private firms as “charitable” enterprises?
But Mark Russell, the chief executive of the Children’s Society, told The Guardian:
“We are not aware of any evidence that their behaviour is worse, and our practitioners report that on the whole young people have been relieved to get back inside the classroom.”
Mary Bousted, a joint leader of the National Education Union, said:
“With all the challenges currently facing schools, playing to the gallery by talking tough on behaviour is the least useful approach the education secretary can take.”
Wes Streeting, Labour’s Shadow Schools Minister, also said something – but we are already aware that he is an extremely suspect character himself so it is best to pass him by.
Stuart Lock is chief executive of the Advantage Schools trust, which includes one of the 22 schools named as hubs. Even he disagreed with Williamson’s claims:
“I don’t believe classroom behaviour has got worse than it was before the pandemic. It is probably a bit better.”
Even the man leading the new project – Tom Bennett, the DfE’s lead adviser on behaviour – has said there is no evidence of worsened behaviour:
“To be honest, the picture on behaviour we’re seeing is reasonably consistent with the behaviour we were seeing before the pandemic.”
So why has Williamson suddenly falsified a claim that our kids have all gone feral, and started wasting our money on a project to correct behaviour that hasn’t gone bad?
Well, there is this new “secure schools” aspect of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill:
Secure schools are essentially a re-branding of Young Offenders Institutions that allows private organisations to run them.
The government says it is building “schools with security, not prisons with education” but as Zahra Bei wrote in 2019, “the policy of rebranding youth jails as ‘secure schools’ provides a thinly-veiled disguise for what in essence marks the start of the biggest children’s prison expansion programme in Britain”.
Members of the British Association of Social Workers have called the plans “a penal approach rooted in the past”.
The contract for the first secure school was awarded to academy chain Oasis, which has one of the highest rates of personal exclusions in the UK.
It will be on the site of the former Medway Secure Training Centre in Kent, which was described as “a site of violence and abuse that prevented the young people who were held there from accessing learning and freedom”.
After a dispute arose over whether running a child prison could be considered a suitable activity for a charity, the government wrote clauses into its new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill to ensure that running a child prison can be considered a charitable activity in law.
The change will encourage more academy chains to be providers, creating what the Tories no doubt hope will be a profitable market. And the use of charities will put distance between the Tory government and anything that happens there.
You can read further information on the “secure schools” project here.
With a new market opening up for the detention (and mistreatment?) of children, it seems clear that the organisations running it will want a supply of children.
And suddenly Gavin Williamson is talking about poor behaviour in schools. Convenient?
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Chuka Umunna must have been giggling behind his hand when Theresa May came out with the following at Prime Minister’s Questions. But who will have the last laugh?
It is clear that Mrs May was using Mr Umunna’s entirely false claim that the Labour Party is “institutionally racist” to attack Labour – at a time when she had no other defence against Jeremy Corbyn’s criticisms of her policies (in this case, Universal Credit).
We all know he’s responsible – and he deserves to be punished.
The Tories must be thanking @ChukaUmunna for his absurd attack on the Labour Party last week as Theresa May used it as a blatant deflection tactic at #PMQs.
She actually deported black British citizens to their deaths & now she's using Umunna's words to call Labour racist!
Well done to @ChukaUmunna for supplying Theresa May with false ammunition. You will never lead our party all the time I have air in my lungs. Shame on you. #PMQs
But Mr Umunna probably thinks he’s free as a bird; as a Labour MP, he gets to say anything he likes and get away with it – it is only Labour members who are censured according to the party rules.
Well, that’s changing.
The whole point of Theresa May’s comment about Labour MPs facing ‘no confidence’ votes is that the party’s members can now censure their MPs (and clearly she thinks this is a bad idea. Conservative Party members should note that this means she favours the ‘top-down’ view of party organisation in which the leaders decide everything and the members show blind obedience at all times).
It is well past time the MP for Streatham was reminded that he represents the Labour Party, and is bound by Labour Party rules.
Rule 2.1.8 clearly states: “No member of the Party shall engage in conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the Party.”
I would say lying that the party is “institutionally racist” is prejudicial. I would say helping the Conservative prime minister to attack the Labour Party is grossly detrimental.
If you are a member of Streatham Constituency Labour Party, I would strongly urge you to call for a motion of “no confidence” in Mr Umunna, with a vote to take place at the earliest opportunity. I would suggest you call for the Labour whip to be removed from him and for him to be deselected, so that he may no longer stand as a Parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party.
If you are a Labour Party member who is not in Streatham CLP, I would urge you to email [email protected] and call for Mr Umunna’s suspension pending a full and rigorous investigation of his conduct, past and present, with a view to his possible expulsion under the rule listed above.
Be polite, but remind party officers that behaviour of the kind shown by Mr Umunna has no place in the Labour Party – or in politics.
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Health Warning: Government! is now available in either print ohttps://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/09/10/labours-institutional-problem-isnt-racism-its-right-wing-authoritarian-mps/r eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times, is still available in either print or eBook format here:
Theresa May said ‘a line should be drawn under the issue’ after utterly failing to oversee a proper investigation [Image: AFP/Getty].
It is not appropriate for the UK’s prime minister to say that Mark Garnier has been cleared of inappropriate behaviour.
Theresa May ordered that the Cabinet Office should investigate whether Mr Garnier breached the Ministerial Code.
But it is known that his behaviour towards Caroline Edmondson took place before he became a minister – the Ministerial Code was not relevant to it and therefore the result of the investigation is pointless.
This is key point (applies in part to Green investigation). Brings both Ministerial Code and Cabinet Office into disrepute to abuse the process in this way. https://t.co/zjnrOatOjz
The result speaks volumes about Mrs May’s attitude to sexual inappropriateness (let’s call it) by members of her government: She doesn’t care.
In fact, where it does happen, all she wants to do is hide it.
At a time when sexual indiscretions by the powerful against those over whom they have power are being brought into the open – such as the claims against powerful men in Hollywood by the women whose careers they controlled – this is a shocking way for Theresa May to behave.
Remember, she is alleged to have done her best to squash inquiries into historical child sex abuses, especially by members of Parliament.
Looking at her behaviour in this case, can anyone doubt that her actions deserve closer scrutiny?
A Conservative minister who admitted asking his secretary to buy sex toys has been cleared after a Cabinet Office investigation and will keep his job.
There was no evidence that Mark Garnier, the International Trade minister, had “breached the expected standards of behaviour”, the inquiry decided.
Mr Garnier faced the probe after his former secretary, Caroline Edmondson, told the Mail on Sunday he had given her money to buy two vibrators at a Soho sex shop.
On another occasion, he was alleged to have told her – in a bar, in front of witnesses – “You are going nowhere, sugar tits.”
Confusingly, Mr Garnier was investigated for a possible breach of the Ministerial Code of Conduct – although the incidents took place in 2010, before he became a government minister.
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Here’s one from our friend Martin Odoni at The Critique Archives, tailor-made for commenters who like to split hairs about the difference between racism and sectarianism/hate speech against religion:
One of the most irritating refrains from the anti-immigrant/anti-Islam crowd over the last few years has been the attempt to justify hostility to Muslims by insisting it cannot be racism. The grounds for this claim is that “Islam is not a race”. Even the likes of Richard Dawkins was tweeting it a few years ago.
The sentence is technically true, but if you think about it, the distinction it draws is entirely a quibble. The hostility towards Muslims is still a form of ‘othering’ of a foreign culture. Furthermore, on hearing the word Muslim, the average white Anglo-Saxon Briton will picture something roughly along the lines of this; –
The image is offensive, as it conflates Muslims with militant Islamists, but also because it is both sectarian and highly racial. In particular, it makes the classic mistake of assuming that Muslim is a synonym for Arab. In the real world, the proportion of Muslims worldwide who are Arabs is under fifteen per cent.
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