Jess Phillips’s betrayal of grooming-gang victims

After years of being denied justice, England’s grooming-gang victims appear to have been let down once again. Survivors in Oldham, Greater Manchester have had their calls for a government inquiry into the abuse they suffered rejected.

GB News reported this week that the Labour government’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, has refused to initiate a national public inquiry into historical child exploitation in the area. Phillips told Oldham Council last year, after it had voted in favour of a national inquiry, that the government would not heed the call. Instead, she wrote: ‘It is for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally.’

There had already been a local review, but the council and survivors believe this did not go far enough. In 2022, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority led an inquiry that ultimately found that both police and social services failed multiple times to protect children from sexual exploitation between 2011 and 2014. In one case, a 12-year-old girl attempted to report to the police that she had been raped, only to be turned away by officers who thought she was drunk. She was then taken from the police station by her abusers and raped again, multiple times, by five different men.

The report was damning, but Oldham Council feels that a more in-depth government investigation is needed to uncover how and why things went so wrong. What’s more, the grooming-gangs scandal is clearly not just an issue local to Oldham. The refusal to tackle the group-based sexual exploitation committed against mostly white working-class girls by mainly Pakistani-origin Muslim men appears to have been systemic.

As is now abundantly clear, the main reason the victims of grooming gangs have so often been rebuffed is because of the background of the perpetrators, and the supposed, perceived ‘sensitivities’ involved in bringing them to justice. As report after report has shown, police, local councils and social services across the country put political correctness and preserving race relations above these girls’ safety. In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a 2014 report revealed that several members of staff at Rotherham Council had been hesitant to ‘identify the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so’. This was also the case in Telford and Rochdale.

Could political correctness, a fear of tackling the thorny issue of grooming gangs, be a factor in Jess Phillips’s decision to reject the calls for a public inquiry? The safeguarding minister has, at the very least, got a history of remarkably gutless statements where supposedly ‘sensitive’ crimes are concerned.

During the rioting last summer, a mob of hundreds of young, Muslim men – some of them brandishing weapons – gathered in Bordesley Green, in Phillips’s constituency of Birmingham Yardley. They intimidated passersby. In one incident, they attacked a pub and badly beat a man. Phillips placed the blame for this violence and widespread criminal damage on far-right misinformation. She wrote, on X, that ‘rumours have been spread that a far-right group [was] coming and it was done entirely to get Muslim people out on the street to drive this content. It is misinformation being spread to create trouble.’

Worse still, back in 2016, Phillips was ‘criticised for downplaying’, noted the BBC, the mass sexual assault of women in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015. Appearing on BBC Question Time, she compared those depraved attacks to women being ‘baited and heckled’ in Birmingham on a night out. ‘A very similar situation to what happened in Cologne could be described as Broad Street in Birmingham every week’, she said. By this point, it was common knowledge that the majority of the perpetrators were Middle Eastern and African men, many of them recent refugees.

Then, there was last year’s General Election campaign. At her electoral count, Phillips was heckled and booed by Islamists during her acceptance speech. She was interrupted by shouts from the crowd of ‘Free Palestine!’ and ‘Shame on you!’, in reference to Labour’s refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. She revealed that one of her volunteers had the tyres of her car slashed and was screamed at by a ‘much older man’. Phillips was eager to condemn this ‘bullying’ and misogyny, but refused to call out the Islamist sectarianism that was clearly fuelling it.

Jess Phillips’s reluctance to back a full inquiry into Oldham’s grooming gangs is, surely, yet another sign of her and Labour’s profound cowardice. Phillips poses as a straight-talking, no-nonsense feminist – until, it seems, she comes across a case of the wrong kind of victims, and the wrong kind of perpetrators.

What an insult this is to the victims. What an insult it is to the broader public, who are presumed to be too volatile for a full and frank discussion into what has been taking place in some of England’s most troubled towns. And what an insult it is to the law-abiding British Muslim majority, who are unthinkingly conflated with Islamists and rapists every time this kind of ‘sensitivity’ kicks in.

Whether or not a full public inquiry would deliver justice, where so many shocking local inquiries and media exposés have produced little more than a moment of handwringing from politicians, remains to be seen. But you cannot blame grooming-gang survivors for suspecting that the depraved crimes committed against them are being treated as an inconvenience by a political class gripped by moral cowardice.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.