Kemi Badenoch will have been irritated to miss today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, given it denied her the opportunity to accuse Labour of delaying the inevitable on a national inquiry into grooming gangs. Sadly for those watching, the fact that today’s session was a battle of the deputies did not mean that the rest of us were able to avoid hearing two parties who have both clearly failed to address grooming gangs properly over the years arguing about who cared more about the issue.
That the parties are going round in circles on both topics underlines the failure of Labour and the Tories
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, was standing in for Badenoch, and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, was deputising for Keir Starmer, who is on his way back from the G7 meeting. The two were initially reasonably constructive about the speed of the inquiry and the focus on victims – before bickering over whether Starmer should apologise for claiming it was joining a ‘far right bandwagon’ to call for the full national public inquiry. Rayner did not think he should, saying the Prime Minister had taken real action on grooming gangs, and had been talking ‘specifically about Tory ministers who sat for years in the government and did absolutely nothing about this scandal’. In case you were wondering which ministers she meant specifically, Rayner then spent the next few questions levelling that charge at Philp – not just over grooming gangs but also on small boat crossings.
Philp stuck to his smear accusation for one more question, arguing that Starmer had included victims when he made those comments about the far right. He then moved onto a line from Baroness Casey’s report about some of the offenders being asylum seekers. Casey has since said she does not want that point to be the focus of the debate following the report, as it detracts from the victims themselves. Rayner used this to ridicule Philp’s record. They then traded statistics over the number of people arriving in small boats, with Philp accusing Rayner of ‘brass neck’ by bringing up the Rwanda scheme. He repeatedly insisted that the scheme had never been properly tried (a bit like communism, presumably), and that a similar scheme in Australia had worked within months. Rayner replied that under the Conservatives ‘one million a day was spivved up the wall’ – a play on Boris Johnson’s ‘spaffed up the wall’ comments (about the child sexual abuse inquiry, as it happens).
So a debate about who cared more about grooming gangs moved to an argument about who was worst on Channel crossings. That the parties are going round in circles on both topics underlines the failures on both Labour and Tory sides and explains why Reform, which doesn’t have to deal with inconvenient things like records in government, is doing so well.
If you are bickering like two nursery children over who cares more about something, it’s a fair bet that you haven’t done enough on the issue. It’s worth pointing out that those who actually did take action and speak out – and who suffered considerable opprobrium for doing so – don’t bother with these lengthy lists of ‘I did this and I did that’. There was no better illustration of that than Sarah Champion standing up to ask a question. Despite losing her frontbench job when Labour was in opposition for making what are now considered officially verifiable comments about Asian grooming gangs, Champion didn’t blether on about how much she had done, but instead welcomed the Casey review and the government’s announcements. She then added that she had been ‘floored by the point-scoring going on’, adding darkly – ‘on all sides’.
Still, at least justice is now being served, right? Well, if you had high expectations of that happening ‘at speed’, as politicians like to say, then you will have been reminded of how long the lag is between governments insisting that they are taking something seriously and real action by a question from Labour’s Anneliese Midgley. She pointed out that Hillsborough campaigners were still waiting for the promised changes to the law. Rayner did say the government wanted to introduce the Hillsborough Law as soon as it was confident that the legislation was well-drafted: but that’s been a government line for a while, spanning both parties.
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