British prime minister Keir Starmer on Monday accused advocates of an inquiry into so-called grooming gangs of jumping on a “far-Right bandwagon.” Questioned at his own National Health Service press event, Starmer rounded on his critics—including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and tech billionaire Elon Musk—for wanting an investigation into the systematic rape and torture, going back decades, of thousands of girls by hundreds of predominantly Pakistani-heritage men.
Starmer’s defensive reaction shows his inability to ‘read the room’ in British society, where there is widespread outrage that so many girls were denied justice—while their tormentors evaded it—for so long. The PM seems more angered by criticisms of his record as head of the Crown Prosecution Service and of his ‘safeguarding minister’ Jess Phillips than by the scandal itself.
Columnist Samantha Smith commented on the PM’s statements on X, saying,
We are not “far-right.”… Stop using the “far-Right” label to discredit us for exposing your inaction.
GB News presenter Martin Daubney asked,
Wanting justice for 1000s of British girls raped by Pakistani gangs is “Far Right?”
The ‘far-right’ label is ultimately evidence of how the elite views working-class white Britons as a racist mob needing only the slightest provocation before going on a rampage. For Starmer, last summer’s violent protests following the killing of three young girls in Southport are proof of why the ‘grooming gangs’ narrative must be controlled.
The state’s response to this problem led police, local authorities, social workers, and political parties to treat the ethnicity of the perpetrators as a reason to cover up or ignore their widespread criminality, so as not to undermine ‘community relations.’ Girls and their families were threatened with arrest for intervening, while Labour MPs past and present such as Ann Cryer (Keighley) and Sarah Champion (Rotherham) were shunned and menaced for acting on the complaints of their constituents. Brave journalists reporting on the underlying pattern behind these crimes were smeared as racists stoking the fires of a ‘moral panic.’
Eventual police investigations did result in arrests, convictions, and some official reflection on what has gone wrong. Preserving multicultural ideology appears to have played a part in leaving young girls in the hands of their abusers. By the time Elon Musk had stumbled across the issue, and his platform X, formerly Twitter, was sharing horrific courtroom extracts (e.g. from the trial of an Oxford rape gang), concern about the problem was amplified further.
A properly conducted national inquiry would ‘join the dots’ and take account of both the specific form of the abuse, nationwide, and how multicultural ideology facilitated the catastrophe. It could hold the public figures and institutions responsible to account. It would tell the truth about the ethnicity of the doubly misnamed ‘Asian grooming gangs.’ Hence official opposition to holding one.
Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, however, insists an inquiry needs to take place. In an interview with LBC, Farage said,
I honestly believe that through the police, through social services, through the last days of the Labour government, through the entirety of the last conservative government, there has been a concerted attempt to play this down for fear of what it might do; for fear of being called racist. The irony is that attacks themselves were racist. This was anti-white female racism.
If the Labour government does not hold a full public inquiry into the rape gangs scandal, Farage said, “then Reform UK will.”
The establishment media already appears to be closing ranks around Starmer.
The Guardian quotes approvingly the former chair of a child sexual abuse inquiry Professor Alexis Jay, who says another national investigation would only delay action. The BBC has clipped and publicised Jay’s claim that the “time has passed for more inquiries.” Meanwhile, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced in Parliament on Monday, January 7th, that some of Jay’s recommendations from 2022 would now be implemented.
All this misses the point. Ongoing criminal investigations are compatible with a national inquiry, and not an alternative to one. More importantly, the previous national inquiry into child sexual exploitation paid only passing attention to Pakistani-heritage rape gangs, focused instead on abuse in school and church settings, and that carried out by television presenters. Without a reckoning with the institutions and ideology that facilitated this crisis, the problem will continue to fester.
