The grooming gangs are Labour’s final betrayal of the people

So the grooming-gangs inquiry that the government never wanted to hold is already falling apart. Colour me surprised. Another betrayal of the victims, to put with all the others.

First, thousands of poor and working-class girls were subjected to rape, torture, sometimes murder, by gangs of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men. Then, their plight was covered up or ignored by police and councils who feared ‘race riots’ if word ever got out. Now, some of those same victims are effectively being called liars all over again, this time by central government.

This week, five victims from the liaison panel, charged with advising the fledgling national inquiry, resigned. This came after safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said claims the inquiry was being broadened to include other forms of abuse, so as to crowd out questions of ethnicity and religion, were ‘categorically untrue’. These claims came from those victims, who are now refusing to re-engage with the inquiry unless Phillips resigns.

Leaked emails have since vindicated the victims’ account. Keir Starmer, naturally, has expressed his ‘confidence’ in Phillips.

The pattern repeats itself. The story of the grooming gangs weaves through Labour areas, through many of the party’s old heartlands. Many of the victims were in care. Yet these Labour-run councils were either wilfully blind or actively complicit. Meanwhile, police dismissed the girls as ‘child prostitutes’ and swept their cases into a cupboard for the sake of maintaining ‘community relations’. They were abandoned to their tormentors to protect the reputation of multiculturalism.

This is why the attempts to dilute this inquiry before it has even begun are so despicable. For decades, the liberal-left elites have struggled to digest what is distinct about the rape-gangs scandal – namely, the disproportion of Pakistani Muslims among the perpetrators and the state’s refusal to investigate as a consequence. To double down on that cowardly strategy now adds insult to decades-old injury.

The great and good can no longer – credibly – dismiss these crimes as some racist fever dream. (Although some are still giving it the old college try.) So they generalise. They treat them as one form of child abuse among many, refusing to interrogate the cultural factors that seem to have driven this abuse, and the moral cowardice this inspired on the part of the authorities.

A wildeyed Jess Phillips slammed her critics in parliament this week, accusing Reform’s Lee Anderson of chasing ‘clicks’. The liberal-left routinely accuses the right of only caring about grooming gangs because it involves brown men preying on white girls. They miss the beam in their own eye. They have ignored these horrific crimes because the racial optics discomfort them.

Phillips is a repeat offender on this score. In 2016, she likened the Cologne New Year’s Eve sex attacks, in which migrants of Arab and North African background sexually assaulted literally hundreds of women, to women being ‘heckled’ in Birmingham city centre on a Friday evening.

It was one of the more egregious examples of a broader tendency – to downplay abuse, crimes, even terrorism, committed by migrants or Muslims, for fear of a racist backlash. So low is their view of white Brits they see them as a pogrom in waiting. So low is their view of minorities they presume they will be offended by too zealous a pursuit of rapists or jihadists.

The Conservatives can hardly pose as stalwart allies of the victims. They were in power when the late Andrew Norfolk brought the horrors in Rotherham to national attention, in The Times in 2011. They had the best part of 14 years to launch the national inquiry they are now crowing over.

(Rishi Sunak’s government, to its credit, did do more than its predecessors, setting up a specialist taskforce in 2023 that has resulted in thousands of grooming-gang arrests.)

But let’s not pretend the blame can be shared out evenly. This abuse predominantly scarred Labour areas, under Labour control, while Labour politicians turned a blind eye.

Those who did break ranks were punished. Ann Cryer, then Labour MP for Keighley, first spoke up in 2003. She was dismissed as a racist for her trouble. Sarah Champion was ejected from the shadow cabinet in 2017 for an article in the Sun, in which she said ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’. Telling the truth, and standing up for rape victims in your constituency, was a sackable offence under Jeremy Corbyn, it seemed.

Old habits die hard. How telling that the week the Labour Party’s grooming-gang inquiry has unravelled it has elected Lucy Powell as its deputy leader – the Manchester Central MP who just a few months ago dismissed talk of rape gangs as a ‘dog whistle’ on the BBC. Greater Manchester Police are currently investigating more than a thousand grooming suspects in the city. I suppose they are just ‘dog-whistling’ too, Lucy?

This scandal shames the entire multicultural state. But for Labour, it is perhaps the final and most depraved stab in the back to the British poor and working classes – to those Labourites claim to represent. After Brexit, Labour tried to rob them of their vote. With the grooming gangs, Labour left their kids to suffer evil.

Were there any justice, the Labour Party would never have survived this. But as the grooming-gang victims know all too well, justice so often eludes those most deserving of it.

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