Keir Starmer knew. Senior Home Office minister Jess Phillips knew. They all knew.
Today the wall of deceit, corruption and confusion the government attempted to buttress around the rape gang scandal finally collapsed. The ‘audit’ produced by Baroness Casey at the behest of Downing Street – clearly in the forlorn hope it would cement the cover-up of the worst sexual abuse crisis in British history – instead brought the entire crumbling edifice crashing down.
Children and women had been abused on an industrial scale, Casey confirmed. A disproportionate number of the vile assaults were perpetrated by men of Pakistani origin. The race of the abusers had been a major factor in the failure to intervene or prosecute them. A national investigation was now required.
If you believe the Prime Minister, all this came as a bolt from the blue. On Saturday, as he expeditiously jetted out of the country to attend the G7 summit, he claimed to reporters: ‘I have read every single word of her report, and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit.’
But no one does believe Keir Starmer. Rightly so.
Sir Keir Starmer, pictured with Canadian prime minister Mark Carney in Ottawa yesterday, knew about the appalling scale of the abuse a decade ago, writes Dan Hodges
The pretence he was unaware of the compelling moral, legal and political need for an inquiry into the rape-gangs until Casey’s report landed in his ministerial red box is a ridiculous, self-serving fiction. In 2014, when he was not yet even a Labour MP, Starmer penned an article for The Guardian in response to the Jay report into the Rotherham rape gangs.
‘The patterns of sexual abuse and exploitation described in the report are not new, unique or specific to Rotherham,’ he rightly wrote, ‘nor are the inadequate responses’. Inevitably he skirted the racial component of the crimes. But he acknowledged that ‘in Rotherham, the abuse and exploitation uncovered by Professor Alexis Jay went on for 16 years, involved at least 1,400 victims and was the subject of a number of previous reviews that barely improved matters’.
Starmer knew about the appalling scale of the abuse a decade ago. He knew about the appalling nature of the crimes. He knew about the appalling conspiracy of silence that attended them. Yet he now seriously wants us all to accept it wasn’t until Saturday the scales finally fell from his eyes.
Remember, it wasn’t simply that the Prime Minister resisted a national rape gang inquiry. He sanctioned his ministers to embark on a campaign to gaslight, and openly abuse, those who advocated one.
Brothers Arshid, Basharat and Banaras Hussain, who groomed, raped and sexually assaulted teenage girls in Rotherham
When Tory shadow minister Katie Lam read out in the House of Commons the harrowing testimony of one rape victim, who had been taunted by her attacker ‘We’re here to f**k all the white girls’, Jess Phillips replied: ‘I think it is a shame that she referred to only one sort of child abuse victim, when the statement is clearly about all child abuse victims. There should be no hierarchy.’
When commentator Tim Montgomerie dared to raise the issue on the BBC’s Any Questions, Leader of the House Lucy Powell sneered: ‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now do we…let’s get that dog whistle out shall we?’
Powell later apologised. But she knew what she was doing. Just as Phillips knew. Just as they all knew.
Some people are now attempting to argue that the stonewalling that preceded the Government’s latest humiliating capitulation doesn’t matter. All that really counts is eventual justice for the victims.
But it does matter. Not least because the victims have been the last people to factor in the Prime Minister’s calculations.
The sole reason Keir Starmer has fought tooth and nail to oppose and obstruct a national rape gangs inquiry is cold, cynical politics. The majority of councils where the abuse occurred, and was covered-up, were Labour councils.
The disproportionate number of Pakistani heritage men perpetrating the crimes came from Labour’s fracturing Muslim base. The seething resentment the crimes have fostered in white, working-class communities is seen by Labour strategists as being a component of the surge in Reform’s – and collapse in their own party’s – support.
In her ‘audit’, Baroness Casey confirmed that women and children had been abused on an industrial scale, and that a national investigation was required
But there is another, more compelling reason why it’s important to confront the truth about the Prime Minister’s contemptible rationale for his U-turn on a national grooming gangs inquiry. Which is that even now, it’s not clear we will be getting a truly independent, national inquiry at all.
The local inquiries – announced, then watered down – appear to have been reinstated. There will be some vague statutory investigation by a form of ‘national commission’. But beyond that, Starmer seems to have authorised another deliberately confusing, opaque investigatory framework, when what the victims and British people are crying out for is clarity and transparency.
The reality is the case for a full, formal, judicial public inquiry into the worst sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history has become unanswerable. Literally, because with Starmer’s acceptance of Casey’s broad conclusions, every excuse he and his ministers have trotted out to resist a national inquiry has been invalidated.
The claim that it would undermine efforts to implement the recommendations of the Jay report into wider sexual abuse. The claim it would pressurise victims who did not want national scrutiny. The claim it would simply be weaponised by extremists. Each and every one of these has now been officially rubbished.
There is no need to reinvent new structures. In 1997, after a tireless campaign – backed among others by this newspaper – the then Labour government announced a formal judge-led inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The parallels are striking. An appalling crime with national implications. A clear racial motivation. Establishment connivance and complicity.
The only difference – clearly a significant one in the eyes of a liberal-Left that routinely lectures the world on the evils of racism – is that in this instance the victims were overwhelmingly white and the perpetrators almost always south Asian.
A fundamental principle of British justice is not just that it is done, but seen to be done. Yet without full, transparent judicial oversight no one will trust the ‘national inquiry’ Keir Starmer’s Government has announced today to even come close to delivering that.
How can they? It’s not just that the Government opposed a national investigation into the rape gangs scandal. They didn’t want any inquiry of any kind.
The entire political reignition of this toxic issue came when Oldham Council – at the request of the victims – asked for assistance with their own inquiry. The response of the Starmer administration? It was for local authorities ‘alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the Government to intervene’.
But this Government has intervened. It has only been in power eleven months. But it has already intervened time and time and time again to prevent the victims getting the justice, and the perpetrators – as well as those officials who engineered the cover-up – facing the reckoning they all deserve.
Just as it did yesterday. The Prime Minister had no need to wait for Louise Casey’s findings. He already knew the truth. His ministers knew the truth. And now – to Sir Keir’s eternal shame – so does the country.
