This week Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons, did something unusual for a politician: she spoke from the heart. Her dismissal of the rape gangs as a ‘dog whistle’ was no gaffe. It was not a ‘blunder’. It was a brutally honest expression of the government’s exasperation with this pesky scandal. It was savagely candid, pulling back the curtain on Labour’s gross and haughty indifference to this outrage in which thousands of working-class girls suffered the most unspeakable abuse.
Powell has essentially scoffed at thousands of working-class women by calling the scandal that ravaged their girlhoods a ‘little trumpet’
It was on Any Questions that Powell gave voice to her party’s elitist vexation with all the public blather about rape gangs. Tim Montgomerie, the founder of Conservative Home who now aligns himself with Reform, asked her if she had watched Groomed: A National Scandal, the brilliant Channel 4 documentary about five women who endured horrific exploitation at the hands of these gangs. Powell didn’t just say ‘No’ – she said something far worse.
She interrupted Montgomerie. ‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we?’, she said, with naked ill-temper in her voice. ‘There was a real issue’, Montgomerie interjected, but he found himself spoken over once more. ‘Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we, yeah?’, snapped Ms Powell, every word dripping with sarcasm and disdain. I have listened to the clip about 20 times now. On every listen it gets worse. It is staggeringly scornful.
‘Little trumpet’ – that’s how Labour high-ups view public discussion of the rape gangs? If Ms Powell had seen Groomed, she would know what she was dismissing as a ‘little trumpet’, as a ‘dog whistle’. It tells the story of Erin, who was groomed from the age of 12. One day she returned home to her mother with ‘bite marks [from] head to toe’ and her underwear full of semen. And Chantelle, groomed from 11, often kept in a hotel room for days on end to be passed around like a piece of meat between Pakistani men in their 20s and 30s.
‘Dog whistle’? How dare you. How dare you be so dismissive of the agonies endured by vulnerable working-class girls. How dare you sound so snide about the suffering of girls whose only ‘crime’ is that they came from the other side of the tracks to you. Powell is now trying to walk back her comments. She says she regards child exploitation with the ‘utmost seriousness’, adding: ‘Sorry if this was unclear.’ It was unclear, Ms Powell. Very unclear. Because when someone tried to raise child exploitation with you in a public forum this week, you shouted him down.
Not since Gordon Brown called Gillian Duffy a ‘bigoted woman’ has Labour’s contemptuous disinterest in the working classes been on such grim display. In fact, Powell’s comments are worse than Brown’s. He heaped derision on one working-class woman. Powell has essentially scoffed at thousands of working-class women by calling the scandal that ravaged their girlhoods a ‘little trumpet’, a ‘dog whistle’.
Labour will try to spin it as a case of ‘mis-speaking’. Don’t buy it. There was a truthfulness in Powell’s breezy dismissal of the rape gang issue, a candour so often lacking in our spun politics. She said out loud what they all think. The mask of practised concern for the victims was torn off to reveal Labour’s true face, the sneer that lurks behind the liberal head-tilt they normally do when someone bothers them with questions about the rape gangs.
Every now and then, the facade of political performance falls down and we get a rare glimpse of what our rulers really think. We’ve seen Jess Phillips huff and fidget in the Commons as Conservative MPs talked about the rape gangs. We’ve had Keir Starmer accuse the politicians who want an inquiry of jumping on a ‘far-right bandwagon’. And now Powell casually waves away comments about those Muslim misogynists who wrecked so many young lives.
So this is Labour. This is the party that was founded to represent the interests of the working class. It is now a party that rolls its eyes at the merest mention of working-class suffering. A party that looks irritated or plain bored when anyone mentions the working-class girls abused by gangs of Muslim men. A party that thinks it is ‘far right’ to worry about poor girls being insulted, exploited and abused by Pakistani men. A party that can no longer even pretend to give a damn about working-class communities.
I agree Lucy Powell should resign. It is untenable that the House of Commons, no less, should be led by someone who can sound so dismissive about the pain of thousands of Britons. But Powell’s exit will not fix the problem. Classist indifference runs deep in this aloof and technocratic government, and the rape-gang scandal has exposed it like nothing else.
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