Grooming gangs

I can see one possible benefit of having a full inquiry into the almost exclusively Muslim grooming gangs who raped and assaulted and in some cases murdered young white girls and are perhaps still doing so in a selection of Britain’s ghastliest towns. The number of lawyers it would employ and the enormous salaries they received might just about tilt us out of a recession next quarter. I can’t see much other benefit. Anyone who thinks it might provide justice for the thousands of girls and their families is living under a grave delusion. We do not need a public inquiry to inform us that we have been consistently lied to

Whitehall is being swept by moral outrage. Ministers, in full This Is Spinal Tap mode, have turned their pious horror up to 11 and Keir Starmer has accused the opposition of a ‘shocking tactic’, preferring ‘the elevation of the desire for retweets over any real interest in the safeguarding of children’. What dark perfidy has been done? What cynical political stunt have the Conservatives pulled, staining their hands with such baseness? Kemi Badenoch has tabled a reasoned amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is being debated at second reading today. Let me explain briefly. Second reading is – slightly counterintuitively – the first opportunity for the House of Commons to discuss

The Home Office’s report into the characteristics of group-based child sexual exploitation was keenly awaited by victims of grooming gangs. Sadly, for many of these people, it has left them disappointed.  When Sajid Javid commissioned the review he promised there would be ‘no no-go areas of inquiry’. His successor as Home Secretary, Priti Patel, says in the report itself that ‘victims and survivors of these abhorrent crimes have told me how they were let down by the state in the name of political correctness. What happened to these children remains one of the biggest stains on our country’s conscience.’  But victims I’ve spoken to suggest political correctness remains an issue. The report, they say, obfuscates