Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch called for a “full national inquiry” into rape gangs. “The time is long overdue”, she wrote on X, as although trials “have taken place all over the country in recent years…no one in authority has joined the dots”. This “must be the year that the victims start to get justice”.
This follows Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, refusing to launch a public inquiry into historical sexual abuse by rape gangs in Oldham – an inquiry too far for a government that has launched over 60 reviews and consultations and a new quango a week since entering office. Louise Casey has just become the latest patsy tasked with bunting social care into the long grass.
Philips admitted there was a deep desire for an inquiry, but suggested it was for the local council “alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the Government to intervene.” She pointed to similar inquiries in Rotherham and Telford, which she claimed were more legitimate, being local-led. Her majority is 693, apropros of nothing.
To put it mildly, her decision has not received the warmest of receptions. A minister tasked with tackling violence against women and girls to refuse an inquiry into industrial scale sexual abuse is not the best look at the best of times. It is especially not when Elon Musk amplifies every criticism of your decision to his 210 million followers. The BBC has barely noticed, obviously.
I am not an expert on this scandal. Readers should look to my friend Charlie Peters, whose bravery in pursuing these horrors has not only brought to a global audience the sheer magnitude of the rape, abuse, violence, and complicity that occured. As Robert Jenrick puts it, “grooming gangs” euphemism sanitises “the most heinous sexual crimes” perpetrated on an “industrial scale”.
As he writes in the Telegraph, for decades “the plight of thousands of young girls, barely teenaged, was swept under the carpet”. Community relations were prioritised by councils, charities, and policies forces over “protecting vulnerable women from monstrous sexual violence”. Their cowardice led to silence and connivance as this depravity unfolded across over fifty towns and cities.
The pattern of what was going on was predictable: ignored victims, often in social care, targeted by men of disproportionately Pakistani backgrounds, swept under the carpet within communities and across the arms of the state tasked with protecting those girls abused. Local inquiries cannot hope to capture the true scale of what was – and is – a national barbarity.
That is especially if – as Tom Jones highlights – local reports require councils marking their own homework, making it difficult to name individuals at fault who may still be serving. A national inquiry with Home Office backing could surmount these challenges and expose any provincial cover-ups.
But an inquiry can only ever be useful in identifying who needs to be driven in shame from public life, disbarred from public office, jailed, deported, and excommunicated from polite society for the rest of their miserable days. That is only if it bucked the trend of its recent predecessors and delivers on time, on budget, and on spec. Would it be a whitewash? Or simply ignored?
A national moral reckoning is overdue. Jenrick suggests expediting the work of the task force established by Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, which has already made hundreds of arrests. Whole life sentences are required for those found guilty, alongside the deportation of foreign nationals, and an end to our experiment in mass migration that has brought cultures of abuse here.
All common sense. But how likely are they to be under Keir Starmer? Any inquiry would ask about the then Director of Public Prosecutions. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and if Starmer refutes Musk’s charge that he failed to prosecute the gangs, he should welcome any inquiry.
Yet if an inquiry is so obviously needed, why didn’t we launch one when in office? Why has an American billionaire kicked up more of a fuss about these rape gangs this last week than we managed in fourteen years? Badenoch can’t say we didn’t know. Labour have a desire not to piss off their constituents to justify their cowardice. Was the Conservative Party frit, complicit, or just lazy?
My faith in my country is so utterly diminished by this. Growing up in the light of institutional failure after institutional failure – 2008, Brexit, Covid – scandal after scandal – expenses, Savile, the postmasters – and incompetence – so many examples, but the Boriswave stands out – my faith in our political class is not existent. I hope this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
All the wars that were won and lost/Somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore. What does he know of England, who only Rotherham knows? Should we write off Musk and J. D. Vance now seeing Britain as a country of rape gangs and Islamists as the derangement of the American right? Nothing to see here. Move along. Keep rearranging those deckchairs, Captain Smith.
Or should we ask how it has come to this? Who should we blame? How can we put it right? And how can we look ourselves in the eye again? The England that would emerge from this reckoning would be a very different country. I’m not sure it would be an England that would have much use for the Conservative Party.
Then again, what use are we now?