Labour under fire after ruling out MP harassment inquiry
A LABOUR MP who allegedly pestered a young female official to “come back to my hotel” after blocking her from getting into a taxi is not facing an investigation after the party said the incident was not sexual harassment.
Labour’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee, failed to interview the woman after she submitted an official complaint, or take evidence from another male MP who witnessed the incident. The NEC subsequently claimed that there was “not sufficient prima facie evidence” to suggest that the event she described “was motivated by a protected characteristic”.
The MP who witnessed the incident said he was “baffled” that he had not been asked to make a statement before a decision was made on whether to take the complaint forward.
The woman said the decision not to investigate the incident had made her feel like “a victim all over again”. It will add to further scrutiny of Labour’s handling of complaints of harassment and abuse in the wake of a series of highprofile cases. The woman said: “This has left me worse than I felt before. There is no right to appeal a decision that is ambiguous, it isn’t clear and they use legal jargon that means nothing.
“The other MP would remember the incident better than I do because I was in shock, but he wasn’t asked to give a statement and they didn’t even contact him.” The woman said she had gone to the media because there was no formal mechanism to appeal against the party’s decision. The alleged incident took place when the woman was in her mid20s, after she left a political event in 2005. She made the official complaint in November. She said: “I left to go home and he came down after me. He was trying to get me back to his hotel room and I kept saying no, I was trying to get in the taxi and I couldn’t get in. He was constantly saying, ‘come back to my hotel room’.
“I wasn’t able to get into the taxi until the other MP came down and forcibly removed him from me. With his words ‘come back to my hotel room’, it was very, very clear what was implied.”
Labour’s response will raise questions over how the party is dealing with complaints of inappropriate behaviour.
Jess Phillips, MP for Birmingham and Yardley, said the system had “been improved, but it is still being tested and it feels like in this case the witness should have been investigated”.
In a statement to the woman, the NEC panel said: “The panel agreed that the incident(s) described by the complainant, on the balance of probability, do not meet the definition of sexual harassment as there is not sufficient prima facie evidence to suggest that the event in 2005 described by the complainant was motivated by a protected characteristic.”
The MP accused by the woman of sexual harassment did not respond to The Telegraph’s request for comment.
A Labour spokesman said: “The party takes all complaints extremely seriously, which are treated confidentially in line with Labour’s rule book and procedures.”