Starmer’s shameful deflections on grooming gangs

People saying mean things about politicians on the internet. There is no scandal or atrocity that the British political classes cannot make about them and their trolls, effortlessly pivoting away from the thorny issue at hand to inveigh against unpleasant chatter on social media. An MP is murdered by an Islamist terrorist? We must ban online anonymity! MPs try to overturn the biggest democratic mandate in British history? How dare you call Anna Soubry names! Still, the attempt to pull this trick over the grotesque, decades-long grooming-gangs scandal must be the most despicable example yet.

Today, the nation’s media gathered in Epsom to hear prime minister Keir Starmer give a speech about the NHS. But really, most of them were only hanging on for the Q&A, in which Starmer was set to address lurid allegations lobbed his and his government’s way on X by its billionaire owner, Elon Musk. Musk – having just found out about Britain’s notorious grooming gangs and already nursing a bitter feud with the PM – has called for both Starmer and safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed, accusing them of being ‘complicit’ in the grooming-gangs scandal, in light of the government’s refusal to hold a national inquiry into the abuse.

In response to a question about Musk by Sky News’ Beth Rigby, Starmer began his obviously pre-prepared burble. He at least had the good sense to start with the actual issue – the industrial-scale rape of poor and working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani Muslim men, covered up because the authorities were terrified of being called racist. Even if it was rather limp, he did say victims were ‘let down’ due to ‘perverse ideas about community relations’. Still, he devoted far more time and passion to defending his record as chief prosecutor, between 2008 and 2013, and the reputation of alleged feminist Phillips, who he said has been the target of ‘far right… lies and misinformation’. He also accused the Tories of ‘amplifying’ the far right, for good measure.

I’m sorry, but if the debate raging in society is about why the authorities turned a blind eye to vulnerable girls, many of them in care, being drugged and raped over decades; if ordinary people are once again reading these accounts and wondering why police and councils decided to prize ‘managing race relations’ over keeping children safe; and yet your primary concern is polishing your and your colleagues’ halo, then you have taken leave of morality, common decency and humanity. The combination of narcissism and cowardice is staggering.

No doubt, Elon Musk has said some wild things in recent days. Given he’s the richest man in the world, and a key ally of the incoming US president, those comments bear mentioning. But the desperation of Starmer to defend his and Phillips’s reputation – over and above expressing a clear sense of contrition, compassion and resolve in relation to the biggest and most depraved sexual-abuse scandal of modern British history – reminds us of the crippling self-regard and inability to speak hard truths that got Britain into this mess in the first place: a climate in which people in power preferred to allow children to be raped than risk being called names in the media.

The media would also do well to focus on holding Starmer to account on this issue, rather than just – with some noble exceptions – inviting the PM to answer his more harebrained critics. You do not have to believe that Starmer was engaged in some vast conspiracy, as some clearly do, to recognise that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) he led presided over some unforgivable failings, such as initially refusing to prosecute the tormentors of 15-year-old ‘Girl A’, in Heywood, because CPS lawyers said she would not come across as a ‘credible’ witness. While Starmer addressed some of his organisation’s failures in 2012, saying ‘there’s clearly an issue of ethnicity’ where grooming gangs are concerned, he responded by issuing guidance tackling the ‘myths’ about abuse victims in general – rather than tackling the specific ‘sensitivities’ about going after Pakistani perpetrators, which is at the core of this never-ending scandal. Indeed, Starmer’s focus today on his and Phillips’s record on tackling sexual violence more broadly is, in itself, telling. He still doesn’t seem to get, or perhaps want to admit, that it was this one form of abuse – ie, largely Pakistani grooming gangs – that was ignored by so many for so long.

Keir Starmer needn’t be personally implicated in the grooming-gangs scandal to be part of the problem. He belongs to a generation of politicians and officials who could not compute these crimes when they were first brought to their attention, because they didn’t fit their simplistic, multiculturalist script; who have failed to tackle this scourge since then out of a mix of cowardice and self-preservation; and who even now seem more concerned about how some people on the internet are talking about the rape, torture and murder of poor and working-class girls, rather than the rape, torture and murder itself. Today, surely, the phoney moral superiority of our elites is smashed beyond repair. Those who would prefer to look good, rather than do good, should never be allowed near power again.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater