by Frank Haviland, The European Conservative
Unlike with previous reports, this time the panic amongst those who branded whistleblowers as ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ is palpable.
Let me declare from the outset that despite the febrile atmosphere created by the Casey audit, I was against a national inquiry into the mass rape of white British girls by Pakistani Muslims (or ‘grooming gangs’ if you still prefer the euphemism). As I wrote at the time it was first proposed:
Here’s where I’m going to shock you—we the people don’t want a public inquiry either. We’ve been here before, don’t forget. The Jay Report took seven years and just shy of £187 million to tell us absolutely nothing. It was a cover-up of cover-ups —a whitewash so sanitised even Dulux couldn’t market it. It followed in the footsteps of similar reports from Rochdale (2013), Rotherham (2014), Telford (2022), and Oldham (2022)—all of which preached apologies and avowed that ‘lessons must be learned.’ In 2022, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) finished with a list of 20 recommendations. Want to bet how many of those have been implemented? That’s right, not a single one.
I still have my reservations. According to Baroness Casey, the report’s author, a national inquiry could take up to five years to complete —which, if past reports are anything to go by, means closer to ten. That’s another decade the victims simply don’t have.
Unsurprisingly, I was not alone in my opposition. So too were a fair proportion of the Labour front-benches, although naturally for different reasons. Foreign Secretary David Lammy argued simply “We’ve had a national inquiry.” Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell, dismissed the issue as “dog-whistle” politics. Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, refused Oldham Council’s request for a government-led public inquiry—which of course had nothing to do with her wafer-thin Birmingham Yardley majority, a seat which is 35% Muslim. Keir Starmer meanwhile recently remarked that those calling for a national inquiry were “jumping on far-Right bandwagon.” In fact, not one of Labour’s 403 MPs could bring themselves to vote for an inquiry.