All aboard the ‘far-right bandwagon’

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.

We know all this because report after report after report has painted the same, stomach-turning picture. Groups of predominantly Pakistani-heritage men, working as taxi drivers and in takeaways, picking up young girls from troubled backgrounds, posing as their boyfriends, plying them with drugs and booze, before passing them around their friends and family members like meat. Crucially, the background of the perpetrators paralysed police and local authorities. In Telford, the council’s leadership said it feared a ‘race riot’ if these horrors ever came to light.

All of this has long been obvious to anyone who has looked at the evidence, who has read the courageous reporting of Andrew Norfolk, Julie Bindel and latterly Charlie Peters, or who has simply been paying a bit of attention. And yet somehow the truth never managed to intrude on high-status opinion. First the grooming gangs were dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory. Then they were downplayed as one form of child abuse among many – even though what we are talking about here is a specific kind of abuse that was covered up for specific reasons. Then they said it was maybe true, and bad and everything, but was being ‘weaponised’ by horrible Tories and Reformers for sinister, racist purposes.

The Labour Party has been at the forefront of this grand displacement activity for 25 years now. When Ann Cryer, the then Labour MP for Keighley, began raising the alarm in the early 2000s, she was slammed as ‘dangerous and irresponsible’ by Shahid Malik, a member of Labour’s National Executive and a veteran of the Commission for Racial Equality. When Rotherham MP Sarah Champion spoke up in 2017, years after the horrific abuse in her constituency had first been uncovered by Norfolk in The Times, she was drummed out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Only a few weeks ago, Labour frontbencher Lucy Powell was on Radio 4 blithely dismissing the rape gangs as a ‘dog whistle’. This is who Labour is now. The so-called party of the people threw working-class communities under the bus because it didn’t want to be called racist, or have to rethink its liberal-elite orthodoxies.

No political party comes out of this scandal well. The Tories had 14 years to instigate the national inquiry they are now trying to take credit for. But the grooming-gangs scandal has certainly revealed the particular depths of Labour’s neglect of, and contempt for, ordinary Brits, white British and Pakistani alike. They treated the white working class as a pogrom in waiting. They presumed Pakistani Brits to be paedophile apologists who couldn’t possibly be expected to help root out this cancer at the margins of their communities. They went out of their way to pretend it was – at the very least – being blown out of proportion by closet racists or politicking opponents – until this shameful lie simply could not hold anymore.

We can only hope this inquiry isn’t the stitch-up that so many inquiries turn out to be. The victims, their families and the nation deserve to know just how deep the cowardice, the cover-up and the contempt runs.

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