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.
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