Sadiq Khan’s outrageous denial of London’s grooming gangs

The Metropolitan Police are set to reopen 9,000 cases of child sexual exploitation at the hands of what look like grooming gangs. This comes after a London Standard investigation uncovered cases involving vulnerable young girls from across London. These girls reported allegations of rape by multiple men, but were largely met by police indifference and inaction.

The Met’s decision raises serious questions of London mayor Sadiq Khan. He has repeatedly batted away suggestions that there are any predatory male ‘grooming gang’ networks victimising under-age girls in London. Back in January, Susan Hall, the leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly, asked Khan how many rape gangs were operating in London. In a remarkable feat of obfuscation, Khan repeatedly responded by asking Hall to clarify what she meant. He insisted that ‘the situation in London in relation to young people being groomed is different to other parts of the country’. Former Met officer Jon Wedger accused Khan of ‘making a mockery out of semantics, when the real issue should be vulnerable kids at risk’.

It is highly unlikely that London has been left untouched by Britain’s grooming-gangs crisis. Perpetrators elsewhere have tended to work on taxi networks and in fast-food outlets, and have been able to take advantage of a crumbling children’s care system. These key factors are all certainly at play in London.

Khan’s tendency to downplay, if not completely overlook grooming-gang activity in the capital, only reinforces the perception that Labour is reluctant to confront this nationwide scourge. After all, a year ago, UK prime minister Keir Starmer accused those demanding a national grooming-gangs inquiry of jumping on a ‘far-right bandwagon’. Indeed, the government only committed to holding a national inquiry after Baroness Louise Casey recommended one, following her national audit into group-based child sexual exploitation, published earlier this year.

Since then, the national inquiry has come close to falling apart. The government has struggled to appoint a suitable chair and several grooming-gang victims have resigned from the survivors’ panel. They warn that the inquiry’s focus on grooming gangs is being diluted by an expansion of its remit to include other forms of child sexual exploitation.

The sorry truth is that Labour has neither the motivation nor the will to investigate grooming-gang activity and associated institutional failures – and that goes for the Labour mayor in London, too. It’s not hard to fathom why. Firstly, these heinous sex crimes took place in areas under Labour control. And secondly, given its perpetrators have been disproportionately men of Pakistani Muslim origin, grooming-gang activity undermines Labour’s pro-multiculturalism narrative. Much of the political left more broadly has been left paralysed by fears of being accused of racism and Islamophobia.

It seems that too many in Labour – including Khan – are ultimately more interested in protecting their personal reputations and pro-diversity beliefs, than in prioritising the safety and wellbeing of the most vulnerable in their midst. It is an ongoing scandal that will ultimately cost them dear.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.