We are all betrayed by our body language eventually. It’s our inner quisling, itching to expose to the world the feelings our more sentient side would prefer to keep hidden. Yesterday it was Jess Phillips’s turn to be snitched on by her own mannerisms. The surliness with which she listened to MPs speak about the ‘grooming gang’ scandal was a true mask-off moment. Without words it told us all we need to know about this government.
Ms Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, came to the chamber to tell MPs that the government might not proceed with the five inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ promised by the Home Secretary. Instead there’ll be a ‘more flexible’ approach, possibly including the setting up of victim-led local ‘panels’. It was a lot of words to say Labour is reneging on its pledge to dig for the truth of our nation’s decades-long treachery against white working-class girls.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, what came next was almost unbelievable. If Ms Phillips’s spoken words confirmed her government’s fundamental lack of interest in grappling with the ‘grooming gangs’ scourge, her noiseless irritation upon hearing other MPs speak candidly about those gangs exposed something darker. It spoke, silently, to the sniffy exasperation of a cut-off political class that can’t believe people are still droning on about this issue.
It was during Conservative MP Katie Lam’s intervention that Phillips’s quiet aggravation was writ largest. Ms Lam was superbly castigating. She slammed the government for its institutional insouciance on grooming gangs. She reminded the chamber what this sick scandal entailed. The girls who were subjected to such heinous assaults and exploitation were, she said, ‘predominantly white’, and their assaulters and exploiters ‘predominantly Muslim’.
These were ‘racially and religiously aggravated’ crimes, she said. She recounted the experience of one poor girl in Dewsbury who was told by her rapist: ‘We’re here to f**k all the white girls and f**k the government.’ Surely, she said, we need a national inquiry, a proper, state-led investigation, to find out how such a racially fuelled, industrial-scale degradation of white working-class girls could take place in modern Britain.
Most people who heard Ms Lam will have felt like cheering. Here, at last, was a politician giving voice to the public anger over the state’s betrayal of white working-class girls. Ms Phillips, though, seemed to have a wholly different reaction. She seemed irked, put out, like someone discovering their soya milk latte has real milk in it. She wriggled and huffed, less, it seemed to me, over the horrors Ms Lam was talking about than the fact she was talking about them at all.
Even as a small cog in the media machine, I understand the importance of body language. If you’re giving a talk or appearing on TV, you take even more care than normal to suppress your vexations. You don’t roll your eyes or sigh dramatically; you don’t give away that you would rather be anywhere else than here, talking about this, with you people. You certainly don’t do any of that when people are talking about the ruthless exploitation of working-class girls by gangs of predatory men.
Ms Phillips’s visible ill-humour as Katie Lam spoke was a moment of great if unwitting clarity. It dragged into the open the kingly exhaustion of our political betters over this cursed ‘grooming gang’ issue. These people have convinced themselves that everyone who speaks on these gangs must have nefarious intentions. Maybe they’re far right. Maybe they’re ‘weaponising’ working-class suffering to get one over on Labour.
Phillips’s irritability suggests some government ministers have come to see the ‘grooming gang’ issue as little more than a gotcha, a cudgel wielded by ‘bad people’ on the right against ‘good people’ on the left. They’re so vain they think this scandal is about them. If the government cannot see how awful these optics are, how infuriating the sight of huffing ministers will be to the vast majority of Brits, then it must be even more lost than I thought.
Finally Phillips responded to Lam. ‘I think it’s a shame that [Lam] only referred to one sort of child-abuse victim’, she said. Because when it comes to this vile crime, there ‘should be no hierarchy’ of victims. What incalculable gall. Jess, that is precisely the point Lam and others are making: that white working-class girls were not only savagely abused by gangs of men but also ruthlessly demoted down the ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ by a political class that cares virtually nothing for them. Don’t huff – it’s the truth.
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