Keir Starmer has announced a national inquiry into grooming gangs. “Without relentless campaigning from survivors, campaigners, and the Conservative Party,” writes Chris Philp MP, Shadow Home Secretary, “This inquiry would not be happening.”
The sheer absurdity of this is hard to grasp. It is tempting to compare it to the binman at Bletchley Park saying that without the Polish cryptanalysts, Alan Turing and himself, the Enigma code would not have been cracked.
But this does nothing to capture the offensiveness of Mr Philp’s claim. It is more like if there had been a boss at the Government Code and Cypher School who had actively hampered the work of codebreakers but had then taken credit for their success.
A lot of people deserve credit for bringing the grooming gangs scandal to light: journalists like Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters, whistleblowers like Maggie Oliver and Jayne Senior, and, of course, courageous survivors of abuse. (I wouldn’t dream of putting myself in their company, but if it counts for anything, I have been writing about this subject since 2018.)
How much credit do the Conservatives deserve? Very little.
It would be unfair to say “none”. Prime Minister David Cameron did have strong words regarding “the abuse suffered by so many young girls” amid a “culture of denial”. He met with victims and brought forward measures to safeguard kids.
Yet there was no sustained demand for accountability. A Home Office paper on “group-based child sexual exploitation” ended up being grossly insubstantial. Local authorities who had hampered crime prevention efforts failed upwards without being intercepted. The Conservatives had fourteen years to launch a “national inquiry” — which could have already reached conclusions — and did not.
Mr Philp writes that Starmer has U-turned on a national inquiry amid “mounting public anger”. True enough. Yet the Conservatives have been exploiting this anger. It is right and proper for them to do so, of course, but they should not speak as if they created the demand for accountability rather than seizing upon its newfound prominence after Elon Musk latched onto anonymous Twitter posts and commentary from authors like The Critic’s Sam Bidwell.
If Mr Philp and Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Conservative Party, were drawing attention to this scandal prior to 2025 then I can find no evidence of them doing so. Philp himself spent two years as Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire and I can find no record of him mentioning the issue. If he truly thinks it represents “one of the most disturbing institutional failures in modern British history” then Hansard fails to reflect that:
If Kemi Badenoch has long been exercised by this issue, meanwhile, it appears to have been a private matter:
Well, there is joy in Heaven over the sinner who repents. It is good that the Conservatives are putting pressure on the government over this issue. But Philps and his colleagues have not repented in the least. To celebrate how “the Conservative Party has led the calls for doing what is right”, when those calls have only erupted in recent months, is downright obscene. To pompously hold forth on how “leadership is about having the courage to do what’s right before it becomes unavoidable”, meanwhile, is morbidly ironic.
