Keir Starmer has not seemed in control of the grooming gangs story since it broke, but at Prime Minister’s Questions, he had a rare period of command. This was largely because he is more adept at answering questions than Kemi Badenoch currently is at asking them, and also because the Conservative line on this matter is muddled. The Prime Minister was able to dismiss Badenoch’s focus on grooming gangs as a recent interest, telling the Chamber:
Her recently acquired view that it’s a scandal, having spent a lot of time on social media over Christmas, not once in eight years did she stand here and say what she’s just said.
He also challenged her to tell MPs when she had raised the topic in the Commons in her eight years as a member, including during her time as a children’s minister and women and equalities minister. Badenoch complained in response that he was being ‘very specific’ because she would not have been able to raise the matter as a minister on the floor of the House, but that she had spoken about it in speeches elsewhere.
In (possibly inadvertent) inversion of the Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics about a modern major general, he urged MPs to defy the ‘misleading leadership of the leader of the opposition’ and not to vote to kill the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which they will vote on this afternoon. Weirdly, Badenoch later accused him of ‘making this all about a bill this afternoon’, when the only reason the legislation is being discussed at all is the Conservatives want to amend it.
Starmer had a lot of work to do in this session himself. For one, he had to quietly row back on his suggestion earlier this week that anyone calling for another inquiry was jumping on a ‘far right bandwagon’, because it inadvertently smeared the victims who have also been calling one, along with the tubthumpers on social media. So today, he repeatedly told the Commons that ‘there is no fixed views from victims and survivors about a further national inquiry’, and then set out why he didn’t think another one would be helpful. He used a sympathetic question from Labour backbencher Neil Coyle to clarify that ‘reasonable people’ could have different views.
He also laboured the point that the Conservatives had not implemented the recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, something Badenoch also took issue with, arguing that her party had accepted 18 of the 20 of those findings (accepting and acting on recommendations are of course entirely different words in most spheres other than Westminster, where they are often considered synonymous). Her argument was that ‘no one has joined the dots, no one has the total picture and it is almost certainly still going on’. Her line was that ‘by resisting this [inquiry], people will start to worry about a cover up’. She also pointed out that Labour has adopted the all-party parliamentary group on Islamophobia’s definition of Islamophobia which suggests that talking about grooming can be considered Islamophobic.
The rest of the session was still built around Elon Musk, with Ed Davey using one of his two questions as Lib Dem leader to complain about the tech billionaire’s attempt to influence British politics. He asked specifically whether the government would reform party funding rules, which Starmer said he had, while also joking that he had enjoyed seeing Nigel Farage backing Musk on Sunday, only for Musk to call for him to be replaced. Farage has got into a habit at PMQs of being the butt of jokes, and making a point of enjoying them, too: he was chuckling with Richard Tice as Davey and Starmer sparred.
Comments