The questions this grooming gangs inquiry must finally answer
The response by the Government, however, leaves many important questions unanswered. Labour says it's launching a national inquiry, yet its official document says it will only 'coordinate a series of targeted local investigations', with the Home Secretary yet to confirm whether it will cover every affected town and city. And we do not yet know how independent the inquiry chair will be. Yvette Cooper once again refused to instruct the National Crime Agency to investigate police officers, social workers and councillors who were complicit in these appalling crimes.
The long refusal to accept a national inquiry – and the furious response of some Labour MPs towards scrutiny of the role of their councils in this scandal – is part of a wider showdown between those who govern and the governed. Because liberal authoritarianism remains a huge problem in our politics.
Opinions and motives disliked by the Government are increasingly dismissed – and delegitimised – as 'far Right'. The Prevent programme, established to counter the radicalisation of those who might be drawn to terrorism, says concern about mass immigration is a 'terrorist ideology'.
The riots that followed the Southport murders – later said to have been caused partly by the lack of Government transparency – were dismissed by the Prime Minister as 'far-Right thuggery'. But the idea that the riots were in any way planned or coordinated by far-Right agitators – and not a spontaneous reaction of fury – has been discredited by the police inspectorate, which suggested most offenders were local, often young, and had no connections to extremists.
But the most notorious example of the far right smear has been the Government's dismissal of concerns about the rape gangs of mainly Pakistani, Muslim men who systematically abused vulnerable, white working class girls. When the Conservatives pressed for a national inquiry earlier this year, Starmer accused the Party of 'spreading lies and misinformation' and 'amplifying what the far-Right is saying.' In an attempt to avoid an inquiry, Starmer commissioned Louise Casey to conduct an 'audit' of the crimes and their investigation. But Casey concluded an inquiry was necessary and Starmer has folded.
This demonstrates the limits of the campaign to delegitimise public opinion. For not even a Prime Minister can withstand sustained public pressure of the kind we have seen over the last six months, and Labour MPs were likely to be asked to vote on the need for an inquiry when the Commons considers the Crime and Policing Bill this week.
But does this mean we are finally going to get to the truth of the rape gangs? Given the deliberate refusal of large parts of the state over so many years to prevent the abuse and prosecute the observers, the refusal by some Labour ministers to even acknowledge that these crimes were racially and religiously aggravated, and the alleged complicity of some Labour councillors in these horrific crimes, we should be wary.
So we will need clear answers to important questions about the inquiry. Following the death of Dr David Kelly, one of Tony Blair's senior advisers reassured colleagues about the subsequent inquiry, saying, 'don't worry, we appointed the right judge'. The identity of the person who chairs this inquiry will be vital, and it may need to be a judge from another Commonwealth jurisdiction, to avoid conflicts of interest or social or political beliefs that prejudice the work.
The inquiry will need to be unsparing about the most sensitive subjects: about ethnicity, religious identity, family structures and social attitudes among members of the Muslim population in Britain. What role did clan identities play? Why did social workers make choices that made them complicit in abuse, instead of confronting it? How many police officers were corrupt or complicit? What role did local councillors play in keeping the scandals a secret? What about other public services, like schools, GP surgeries and hospitals?
One of the reasons our politics is so crisis-ridden is the gulf in values and expectations between the governed and the government. The campaign to delegitimise public opinion – about the rape gangs and many other things – shows just how authoritarian our liberal leaders are. The reason they are afraid of the public is that they know they will, soon, be smashed. But it is time now for the truth, and time, too, for justice.
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6 minutes ago
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Man, 76, charged over poisoning of children at summer camp
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8 minutes ago
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Who asked for population of Greater Manchester to flood UK in just 4 years? Politicians are so out of touch with public
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Because what they understood is what far too many of our politicians in Westminster today fail to understand — that once this sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled breaks, there is no going back. Once leaders become so out of touch, so adrift from the people they claim to represent, then their civilisation will plunge into chaos, carnage and darkness. And is this not what is happening in Britain today? A political class, a ruling class, that increasingly looks utterly adrift from the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding majority? Take another issue some of those ancient philosophers alluded to: The influx of outsiders and foreigners through the deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration. Who voted for this? Only this week, shockingly, we learned that the population of England and Wales is growing at the fastest rate in history, with some 707,000 people added last year and some 2.5million since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Who voted for this? Seriously? Who voted for this population explosion, for a pace and scale of change that is now leaving many of our communities and our country unrecognisable? Who asked for their leaders to add the equivalent of the entire Greater Manchester area in only four years? And just look at how dramatic and historically unprecedented this is. Between the election of Margaret Thatcher, in 1979, and Tony Blair, in 1997, the annual rate of population increase in England and Wales never surpassed a peak of 188,000 people in a single year, and averaged roughly 111,000 people over each 12-month period. 11 But since Covid? Well, thanks to policies introduced by the hapless 'Uniparty', by politicians on both the Left and Right who are now openly ignoring what the people want, if not treating them with total contempt, these numbers have rocketed. Some 618,000 people were added to our population in the year to June 2022. Another 821,000 in the following 12 months. And now, in the year to June 2024, as we learned this week, another 707,000. What is the main reason for this? Well, it's definitely not what's called 'natural growth' among the native English and Welsh people — the kind of growth that ensures a country grows and evolves at a natural pace, where change is manageable. No. Far from it. Almost all of our population growth today is because of mass immigration, with 1.1million people migrating into England and Wales in the 12 months to June 2024, and 452,200 leaving. Think about that. Around 1.1million people in just one year — equivalent to adding a city the size of Liverpool, comprised entirely of migrants, in just 12 months. This is insane. Claims are nonsense And on top of that we can add another fact we discovered this week, which is that the number of small boat crossings this year alone has now surged above 25,000, up 51 per cent on the same point last year, and taking the total to more than 170,000 illegal migrants since 2018. The foreign-born and their descendants will emerge as a majority by the early 2070s. And roughly one in every four people on these islands will be following Islam by the end of the current century. What would those ancient thinkers have made of this, too, I wonder? A nation-state that cannot even control its own borders, where mainly young men of fighting age from distant lands are flooding freely into our country on a daily basis? In Westminster, our completely hapless politicians will try to distract you and downplay all this by blabbering something like 'we have always had an asylum problem', or, even worse, 'we have always been a nation of immigrants'. Both of these claims are nonsense. If you want to get a sense of just how historic and unprecedented this population explosion really is then consider just one astonishing fact, shared this week by an expert on the topic, Dr Paul Morland. 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And how, we might also ask, is it even possible to maintain things like a shared sense of history and culture when millions of people are being added to the population, more than 80 per cent of whom are today coming from outside Europe? I do not know for certain what those ancient thinkers Pericles and Cicero would make of it were they to come back to life and assess the state of Britain today. I suspect that, like thousands of years ago, they'd warn we are living in a civilisation that looks set to crumble from within — a place where our leaders no longer appear all that interested in fulfilling their responsibility to the people and where mass immigration is blowing apart that once sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled. And for these reasons alone, they would probably conclude that unless we can somehow find our way to a radical change of direction then our civilisation, as we currently know it, will most likely not survive. 11 11 11
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