What connects this month’s revelations to the sex trafficking crimes of Jeffrey Epstein is our decades-long collective failure to root out the worldwide networks of powerful men with wealth and influence who have raped, exploited and violated girls and women; treated them as less than human – and done so with almost complete impunity.
In the past week, I have delved deep into the Epstein files to discover the extent of Mandelson and Epstein’s betrayal of Britain during the global financial crisis. What I discovered about the abuse of women by male predators and their enablers – and Britain’s as yet unacknowledged role – has shocked me to the core. It demands an in-depth police investigation, and is by far the biggest scandal of all.
It is time to listen to the proposals long argued for by the UK special envoy for women and girls, Harriet Harman, the minister for safeguarding, Jess Phillips, and the back-bench champion of change, Natalie Fleet. They have for decades led the fight to address inequality, exploitation and gender-based violence and they rightly feel that a male culture has for too long failed to accord the priority these realities require.
The Epstein files open our eyes to the sheer scale of the sex trafficking industry: the suffering of at least six million girls and women living in sexual slavery, whose plight has never been adequately addressed. I now see clearly that, despite all the warnings by women, there has been a monumental failure worldwide to execute the law even after the power to do so was set out in the Palermo Protocol 25 years ago, and given effect by Theresa May’s Modern Slavery Act of 2015.
The Epstein emails, which record the visas issued, payments made and transport organised for girls and women trafficked across the world, suggest a number of British girls were on 90 Epstein flights organised from UK airports on what was called his “Lolita Express”. Among the many aspects that should sicken anyone looking at the emails is that 15 of these flights were given the go-ahead after his 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor. How the flights were allowed to continue should have been fully investigated.
Epstein’s trafficking was a three-decades-long criminal enterprise, a far greater scandal than the Profumo affair. Because of the scale of lawbreaking and the use of dirty money, these revelations far exceed those in various sleaze scandals throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Because of the harm done to trust in the public realm, the ramifications for public life are far more damaging than those in the MPs’ expenses scandal of the 2000s. And because of the systematic failure of authorities to act over years, the impact on public opinion could be as devastating as that of the Boris Johnson excesses of the early 2020s.
The emails tell us in graphic detail how Epstein was able to use Stansted Airport – he boasted how cheap the airport charges were compared to Paris – to fly in girls from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. His messages link at least one to Britain and the former Prince Andrew. One email, headed “the girl”, described her as “just turned 18, 179cm, very cute, speaks English, I saw her in real 3 years ago… i will send you the video in next email”.
Stansted was also where women were transferred from one Epstein plane to another; women arriving on private planes into Britain would not need British visas. It seems the authorities never knew what was happening: evidence the BBC has uncovered shows incomplete flight logs, with unnamed passengers simply labelled as “female”. To this day, the names of many of the male passengers are unknown because their names were withheld. In short, British authorities had little or no idea who was being trafficked through our country, and for whom other than Epstein.
The American lawyer Brad Edwards has spoken about representing at least three female British citizens who were abused on British soil by Epstein and his fellow predators. Trial testimony from one of the British victims, Kate – whose abuse started in London when she was 17 – helped convict Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, of child sex trafficking in the US. Kate is listed as having been on more than ten flights paid for by Epstein.
A UK police investigation into Kate’s plight could reveal Epstein’s enablers in Britain, and might also discover whether his friends protected him from a UK investigation. The Metropolitan Police stated it is “clear that any investigation into human trafficking would be largely focused on activities and relationships outside the UK”, suggesting this was a US problem, not a British one. Had an investigation been conducted into the flights, the scale of the trafficking would have become apparent.
Rape and sexual abuse in the UK should never become a second-order issue – and never on the pretext of an investigation in another jurisdiction. The evidence suggests some in the UK were complicit in trafficking. This demands a full inquiry. I have asked the Met urgently to re-examine their decision-making in their investigation and the subsequent reviews. Even women who have been mentioned in the Epstein files, whose names should have been requested months ago from the US Department of Justice, do not appear to have been contacted by British investigators. I have been told privately that the investigations related to the former Prince Andrew did not properly check vital evidence of flights. I have asked the police to look at this as part of the new inquiry. The Stansted revelations alone require them to interview Andrew. Separately, a line of emails concerns the logistics of registering trafficked girls for English-as-a-foreign-language courses, as a route to obtaining US visas. We need to know if and to what extent this was also happening in the UK.
Britain cannot escape its role in enabling this web of exploitation. According to the latest global estimates (from the International Labour Organisation and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime), 35.2 million of the 50 million people subject to modern slavery worldwide are women and girls. Sex trafficking represents around 23 per cent of these, which suggests 6.4 million women and girls are living in sexual slavery.
Reports also show why perpetrators act with little fear of being caught. It is estimated that fewer than 0.2 per cent of victims a year are identified by the authorities. When we count all prosecutions for modern slavery in 2024, there were only 7,500 convictions worldwide – one conviction for every 6,700 victims. The Human Trafficking Legal Center revealed in 2018 that even when a prosecution occurred in trafficking cases, restitution was ordered in just 27 per cent. A measure of how far Britain falls short is contained in last year’s London Human Trafficking report. While thousands of trafficking cases were reported in the capital, only 16 people were charged.
Britain is finally having to come to terms with the scale of grooming within its cities and towns. A review is now taking place. Here, too, violations that have gone unpunished for too long are a stain on the soul of our country. The Epstein papers show Britain also shares responsibility for an endemic global failure to identify, arrest, prosecute and imprison abusers, and compensate victims of trafficking. We have failed to disrupt or recognise these crimes for the impact they have on individuals, communities and national security. Trafficking, one of the world’s most evil businesses, is estimated to be worth $236bn a year. Only a pittance of this is recovered.
Phillips, Harman and others have consistently set out the reforms that must be made. First, the government must fast-track a claim on the Epstein estate for compensation to the Britons trafficked by Epstein. Article 6 of the Palermo Protocol requires states to create access to compensation for survivors. The Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program has paid more than $121m to more than 130 claimants in the US. While the assets from Epstein’s estate are dwindling, sales of his infamous New York house (worth $51m) and his island, ranch and apartment leave $166m that could be requisitioned for British and other victims, with new lawsuits now made possible using the previously hidden evidence now released. The payoff awarded to Mandelson after he left the US ambassadorship – reportedly more than £40,000 – should also be transferred to the existing fund for victims of crime, or a new facility that can provide help with trauma, and offer other support such as safe housing.
Second, the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has the resources and now the platform to use Britain’s forthcoming chairmanship of the G20 to lead concerted global action for countries to use their investigatory and prosecutorial powers to break networks of trafficking. Given Keir Starmer’s championing of women’s rights as director of public prosecutions and his 2027 role as president of the G20, he is in a strong position to secure action.
Third, we need to promote a culture change if we are to restore trust in the way we tackle abuses of power. In recent days I have called for a commissioned chair for an anti-corruption taskforce, with the legal authority to search and seize assets where misconduct in public office is alleged, and for a statutory ethics body with the powers to search bank accounts, for example, to vet those nominated to powerful positions. Such agencies could have exposed Mandelson and Epstein.
Mandelson spent far more years as a lobbyist than as a minister, yet our laws register only 4 per cent of lobbyists. Many members of the House of Lords have combined being lawmakers and lobbyists, and benefit from an opaque system of conflict-of-interest declarations. This has to change. A Mandelson ambassadorship might have been stopped in its tracks if we had more in-depth vetting. The better way forward is to combine in-house vetting with public hearings. If this had happened, Mandelson could have been questioned directly about his associations with a known sex offender and criminal.
We have an even greater mountain to climb if we are to end the perversities of a macho culture that tolerates the explosion of pornography on the internet, punishes women rather than men for prostitution, and is seen to gloss over sexual abuse. It is telling that, as yet, no man has been convicted for participating in Epstein’s circle of depravity. It is also telling that in the recent release of files, male predators had their names blanked out while many female victims’ names were published, to be redacted days later. There has been no rebalancing of power against those men of wealth and influence. Leaks of market-sensitive financial information have incurred far more coverage than the victims.
We owe it to survivors of abuse, without whose moving accounts the current investigations would not be possible, to provide the resources to bring the guilty to justice. Those in authority must ensure the spotlight will never again turn away from the sorrow and pain of victims – and that we judge everything we do by the ways we enable once-powerless women to hold the powerful to account.
[Further reading: Morgan McSweeney’s political obituary]
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This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
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Subscribe here to commentThis article made me feel uncomfortable. Gordon Brown was Prime Minister for several years, and therefore uniquely well placed at the time to do something about this. He has said he “regrets” giving Peter Mandelson a peerage and bringing him back into government, and Keir Starmer has apologised to Epstein’s victims for appointing Mandelson as US ambassador and for “believing his lies”. But in reality, didn’t both of them make a conscious moral compromise in elevating and empowering him, knowing his history? It’s hard not to worry that, consciously or not, this intervention also serves to protect Brown’s own reputation. Until that is owned clearly and directly, this could be read like another elite, powerful man trying to set the agenda in a rather convenient way.