by Tom Slater, spiked
Labour spent decades denying the grooming gangs, now it dares to pose as on the side of victims.
So Keir Starmer has finally boarded the ‘far-right bandwagon’. Less than six months after the prime minister used that phrase to describe those clamouring for a national inquiry into the grooming-gangs scandal, he has made his most humiliating and revealing u-turn yet. Which, for a man as partial to a humiliating and revealing u-turn as Starmer, is really saying something. Hopefully, now we are starting to see justice for the thousands of girls raped, tortured, some even killed, at the hands of predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs, while a politically correct state stared at its shoelaces.
We will now have that national inquiry after all, following the recommendation of Baroness Casey, who was charged by Starmer in January with producing an audit of the available evidence on grooming gangs. With statutory powers, the inquiry will be able to compel witnesses to appear before it and will impose more localised investigations on to local authorities, even those that would rather not be investigated. This closes another glaring loophole in Labour’s rather paltry, previous offer to the victims – a handful of watered-down local inquiries, but only if the council asked for one.
We can only hope we are beginning to turn the page on the elite’s shameful betrayal of grooming-gang victims, of which Labour bears more guilt than most. From Rotherham to Rochdale to Telford to Oldham to Huddersfield to Newcastle, most of the places scarred by these depraved, evil crimes were Labour-run. It allowed the most genuinely vulnerable people in our society – young girls, many of them in care – to be raped, pimped, hooked on heroin and crack, all on an industrial scale. Then, when the girls went to the police, they were either dismissed as wayward, drug-addled slags – as white trash, essentially – or they were ignored, for fear of what pursuing their tormentors might mean for ‘race relations’. In a choice between locking up child rapists and polishing the reputation of multiculturalism, the latter won out. Every time.
Read also: Why was it left so long to look for the full grooming gangs data? by Tali Fraser, Conservative Home
Asylum seekers behind new grooming gang cases, Telegraph
Starmer has known about the appalling abuse for a decade. Yet he opposed a national rape inquiry because he knew it would damage Labour by Dan Hodges, Daily Mail
Will Starmer’s grooming gangs inquiry hear from silenced whistleblowers? by Kathy Gyngell, TCW
Allowing Sectarian Groups of Civil Servants to Shape Government Policy is an Affront to Democracy by David Shipley, The Daily Sceptic