Elon Musk’s Twitter attack on Jess Phillips is certainly offensive. It may even deserve to be called a ‘disgraceful smear’, as Wes Streeting put it on the Laura Kuenssberg Show this morning. But the trouble is that every time government ministers bring up Musk’s spat with Phillips, the more they remind people of just how close Labour was to the scandal of rape gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford and other places. Much as Streeting and others might like to bat it away and plead that Phillips, Keir Starmer and everyone else in his government are ‘good people’, who have done masses during their careers to help put child abusers behind bars, the fact is that for years gangs of men were allowed to get away with the gang rape of teenage girls even though the criminal activity was known about by police and social services.
Moreover, these were social services departments in mostly Labour-run councils where key figures, it has already been established by Alexis Jay’s report in 2014, were motivated to turn a blind eye for fear of appearing to be racist. Whistleblowers were silenced. Had it not been that the perpetrators were largely men of Pakistani heritage and the victims white girls, it is inconceivable that these crimes would have been allowed to pass for so long.
Why doesn’t Labour, which was in the practice of demanding a public inquiry every time a Conservative minister so much as left a shoelace undone, want one into the scandal? It is not unreasonable to wonder whether it might possibly have something to do with the fact that Starmer was director of public prosecutions for much of the time that the abuse was going on, between 2008 and 2013, and would undoubtedly be invited into the hot seat. As for Phillips’s dismissal of a national inquiry on the grounds she thinks that a local inquiry would be more appropriate, it rather misses the point. We know of half a dozen towns where men were preying upon teenage girls in this way; there is a clear need for an inquiry to establish whether similar mass rapes were happening, and being covered up, elsewhere.
This is a matter which you might think the BBC, which is not normally slow to back demands for public inquiries, would be eager to take up. Yet, once again this morning, the BBC angled the story principally as one about Musk and his relationship with Nigel Farage and Reform.
Yes, of course it is outrageous that Musk demands Jess Phillips be jailed and Tommy Robinson set free. But you don’t have to support Robinson to acknowledge that for years he and the BNP were the only ones prepared to talk about grooming gangs. Indeed, the first time I ever heard about grooming gangs was in a 2004 BBC Panorama investigation into the BNP, where an undercover reporter had infiltrated the party. Like most viewers, I suspect, I assumed that the claim, made in a private BNP meeting, was a load of claptrap dreamed up by a racist party to try to stir up hatred. But I was wrong: what the BNP was talking about really was going on – and after several years of cover-up, we found out the truth.
If you want to encourage extremism, that is exactly how to do it: cover up something like the grooming gangs scandal, and by doing so gift the whole subject to the far-right. Refusing a public inquiry is perpetuating the problem. That is the main story. Musk’s rudeness is a side issue.
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