Yvette Cooper had come to the House of Commons to shut, as loudly and with as much gusto as she could manage, a stable door long after the horse had bolted. The government was finally doing what it had long derided as ‘a far-right bandwagon’ and agreed to a national inquiry into the Pakistani rape gangs which blighted small-town England for decades.
On the bench next to her were Bridget Philistine – who branded Tory calls for an inquiry ‘political opportunism’, Big Ange, whose new rules on Islamophobia would probably have made any of the journalism which exposed the gangs illegal, and Lucy Powell – the tin-eared, suet-brained embodiment of Blob-think who claimed that mentioning the gangs was a ‘dog whistle’. To have this cavalcade of guilty women lined up as the inquiry was announced was almost insulting.
Mrs Badenoch, by contrast, had turned up in the House of Commons. She was angry
The detail was repugnant. Gangs had targeted children as young as ten, specifically grooming those with learning difficulties and those in care. ‘Perpetrators’ Cooper told us, ‘walked free because no one joined the dots’. Or rather, they did join the dots, but the prevailing orthodoxy told them to ignore what they saw for fear of being branded racist? That sounds more accurate.
Cooper admitted that the report had ‘identified over-representation of Asian and Pakistani heritage men’ in the gangs. This was like someone earnestly telling the house that they had needed a lengthy and costly investigation to tell them that the sky was blue.
Don’t worry though: having finally realised what was wrong, Ol’ Sherlock Cooper assured the house that she had a plan of action. Inevitably this looked like mashing the same buttons again and again, like an impatient pedestrian at a zebra crossing. They would be ‘new laws’ and ‘new police operations’. If only someone had tried these things before?
Keir Starmer was on his way to Canada for the G7; exactly the sort of self-congratulatory environment he prefers to dealing with the country’s problems. Mrs Badenoch, by contrast, had turned up in the House of Commons. She was angry. ‘Three times Labour MPs voted against an inquiry’, she yelled as the members opposite squealed and squirmed.
In parliamentary terms this was probably the best the Leader of the Opposition has been: passionate, coruscating and unambiguously in the right. It’s just a shame it took such shameful behaviour from the government to bring it out.
The depths had not yet been plumbed, however, until an intervention by Labour MP for Telford, Shaun Davies, who condemned Rishi Sunak for ‘refusing to provide a statutory inquiry into’ grooming gangs in Telford – before promptly scuttling away. As leader of Telford and Wrekin Council in 2016, Davies himself signed a letter calling for the then-prime minister and home secretary to reject calls for an inquiry into child sexual abuse in the town.
There are many things we could say about Mr Davies, a typical Labour 2024 backbencher: so lightweight and ridiculous he might as well be made of helium. We might suggest that his weaselling self-preservation efforts imply a lack of conscience. We might say that his own track record in local government suggests, at best, a lack of competence. We might observe that his attempt today to smear his opponents while simultaneously claiming to ‘take this out of the party-political field’ suggests that he has no spine.
However, one thing we cannot suggest that he lacks, in turning up and daring to speak at a moment like this, is a brass neck.
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