ANYONE calling for a public inquiry into the Pakistani ‘grooming’ gangs and 25 years of industrialised drugging, rape and torture of young white girls across some 50 towns in the UK is, according to our Prime Minister, ‘jumping on a far-right bandwagon’.
In the words of former Labour MP Rosie Duffield, by that Sir Keir Starmer demonstrated ‘lack of basic political instinct’ in response to an issue which now, thanks largely to Elon Musk, has finally and viscerally grabbed the public’s attention.
Replying to Kemi Badenoch’s call last Wednesday for a public inquiry into the scandal, Sir Keir said it wasn’t necessary. I doubt he had to work too hard to make sure his MPs agreed. It was voted down by 364 to 111, a majority of 253. His refusal to grasp the nettle, however, means it is already baked into the next general election campaign. With Reform UK committing to a public inquiry too, whether Sir Keir likes it or not it’s here to stay.
It is easy to see why Starmer dislikes the idea so much. Not only would his own former role as DPP come under scrutiny but a national public inquiry could lead to hundreds if not thousands of prosecutions: of perpetrators who are still walking free, of officials who ignored, minimised or deflected the problem, or were involved in what is being referred to as a ‘cover-up’ – Labour Party officials, social workers, doctors and police working in Labour-run towns where the worst excesses have been committed.
There’s also the question of the sentencing to date. The scale and depravity of the crimes perpetrated by these gangs has no equal in our country’s recent history, crimes which fall at the most severe end of the sentencing scale and in terms of harm and culpability, given the ‘aggravating’ factors reported in many of the cases which have come to court (such as targeting of vulnerable victims, blackmailing and threats to secure the victim’s silence). Five members of the Oxford gang were jailed for life, but none of the 24 rapists, traffickers and torturers sentenced at Leeds Crown Court last April was. Nor did any of the seven men sentenced last September at Sheffield Crown Court. Has the punishment so far fitted the crime?
Responsibility goes right to the top. Former Greater Manchester detective and whistleblower Maggie Oliver believes the current PM himself must bear some responsibility for the widespread failure to bring those responsible properly to justice. She told GB news that as Director of Public Prosecutions Starmer ‘made the decision, alongside the prosecutors, that the man who got a 13-year-old pregnant, didn’t face charges of rape’. He is, she said, as ‘guilty as anyone’ over failures to address grooming gangs.
Given the shocking nature of these crimes, the long years over which girls were trafficked, tortured, drugged and raped, the implications are good for none of the three main political parties. It is a moral stain on their collective conscience. For the Labour Party, in control in so many of the towns involved, it is disastrous.
During the Greater Manchester Mayoral BBC TV debate in April 2024, a question from a concerned father of two girls in Rochdale about the ‘grooming gangs’ was put to the panel of candidates which I was on as the Reform UK candidate. I made my position clear: I would call for a public inquiry. As I was making my statement, the camera cut to show the expression on the incumbent (and since re-elected) Labour Mayor, Andy Burnham. He looked distinctly uncomfortable. It was hardly surprising given the history of the report he commissioned for the Manchester area and local police follow-up failure. Laura Perrins reported in TCW at the time that the word ‘disgrace’ did not do it justice.
Appallingly, Greater Manchester Police dropped an operation which had identified up to 97 potential suspects and at least 57 potential victims. The girls were hooked on drugs, groomed, raped and emotionally broken – one 15-year-old died. Despite police and social workers knowing what was happening the men weren’t stopped. Abusers were freely allowed to pick up and have sex with children from care homes, ‘in plain sight’ of officials.
As recently as August 2018, the Chief Constable refused to reopen the inquiry – while Andy Burnham was Mayor. Burnham would have been fully aware of the very different legal status a full public inquiry has compared to a ‘report’ that has no teeth and can be ignored if that is politically expedient. As turned out to be the case. Yet this is the same man who’s called for public inquiries into almost everything else you could think of: nuclear test veterans, Aberfan, Bloody Sunday, contaminated blood, Post Office, Windrush, Grenfell, but never a mention of the child sexual exploitation gangs on his patch.
Now, under the glare of public attention, he is calling for a ‘limited public inquiry’ (whatever that may mean) while speciously expressing his frustration that Westminster politicians had ‘taken no interest’ in the issue when those reports were published. Yet his problem was a local one: the Greater Manchester Police refusing to do their job.
Instead of giving full-throated support to a vigorous no-stone-left-unturned public inquiry, Labour’s strategy has been to turn attention back on to the Conservatives who could have called such an inquiry at any time in their 14 years in power. They are culpable too. Theresa May’s troubled independent inquiry into historic child abuse, which ended up seven years later as the Alexis Jay Report, didn’t even have the Pakistani rape gangs in its remit till towards the end, and then only tangentially.
Labour’s complicity in the cover-up potentially runs deeper. Town after town in a public inquiry will reveal officials and elected representatives on the council refusing recognise evil when it was staring them in the face, or denying that this was a Muslim problem. No wonder they want to stave off exposures of their complicity, making it far worse for the victims who suffered more and longer because of their denial. No wonder they don’t want the rot from the top to the bottom of the party exposed. It is hard to see how they could survive as a political party under this spotlight. Yet with 76 per cent of the population believing there should be a public inquiry, unless Sir Keir Starmer starts to ‘read the room’ and run this risk no matter the consequences, this surely will be the beginning of the end of his leadership if not the end of the Labour Party.
This issue will not go away.
The public’s mood can be summarised in the words of Dr Martin Luther King’s most famous speech: ‘No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’
