“Never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer” is an old piece of courtroom wisdom, and it is one that the British public should be mindful of whenever their government announces that it is holding an inquiry into anything.
British politics nowadays rarely gives cause for anything but the most joyless of laughter, but it was difficult not to chortle last Thursday when one disgruntled Tory MP responded to the publication of the COVID-19 inquiry by calling for an inquiry into the inquiry. People sometimes talk about the collapse of Britain’s high trust society, but what level of wilful naivety do you need to be operating on to suggest that a system investigate and report on its own capacity for whitewashing and motivated judgement?
Few were really expecting anything terribly interesting out of the report commissioned in 2021 and chaired by Baroness Hallett. For the establishment, the report merely confirmed all they already knew, and for the sceptics and cynics, they expected it to reassert the received wisdom they have been straining against since the summer of 2020. According to the official version of events, scientific advice was unanimous from the outset that the only response to COVID-19 was locking down society and preventing all but the most essential mixing of people, but this was prevented by the ideologically motivated libertarianism of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. As early as May 2020, Christopher Snowdon was noting in these pages that this fatuous nonsense was already being woven into a consensus by prestige media, despite mere weeks having passed since senior scientists had been talking on television about “flattening the curve”.
Nevertheless, that is now what our betters apparently sincerely believe. Across the world, the pandemic showed up the shortcomings of institutions and expertise to such a degree that those whose personal self-worth comes from being part of such institutions or from their sense of expertise, desperately needed a psychological get-out-of-jail card. And in Britain, that came in the person of Boris Johnson.
Boris Johnson ranks among the worst of our prime ministers for a variety of reasons — his egoism, his vanity, his laziness, his political cowardice, and most importantly, because of his desperate need to win back the love and affection of the metropolitan set which he alienated forever in 2016. Those people see themselves as intelligent and right-thinking, and they are incapable of casting those whom they dislike as being anything other than the opposite of themselves. Thus, Boris Johnson is stupid and right-wing, and all of his failures can be explained by those factors alone.
This is the purpose of inquiries in British politics. They are often called to take the heat out of big political problems
As far as the British establishment was concerned, the record needed setting straight. Lockdowns were a singular and cost-free button that was there for the government to press to stop people dying; the experts knew this and told Boris Johnson to push it, but he hesitated to because he was stupid and he didn’t like experts, and he was right-wing and his friends in the City didn’t want him to. Experts needed to be exculpated and exonerated, and faith in process and officialdom needed to be restored. So, an official process would call experts as witnesses, and a lazy media narrative would be transformed into an official finding. Hereafter, any displays of scepticism regarding this version of events can now be admonished as an example of the same feckless disregard of expertise as Boris Johnson’s original failures.
This is the purpose of inquiries in British politics. They are often called to take the heat out of big political problems that are becoming unmanageable for the government of the day, but that can become a gamble for a prime minister who is losing influence or who is at odds with elite consensus. On those issues, where there is an alignment between the view of the media, the legal establishment and the permanent state, as there so often is nowadays, inquiries are a means to launder a particular view into a formal finding with a legal veneer. They are absolutely not, as some might naively imagine, to establish what actually happened, or to get to the bottom of things.
Connoisseurs of official inquiries will remember fondly the life-cycle of the British state’s various attempts to have a word with itself over the Iraq invasion, from the initial Intelligence and Foreign Affairs select committee reviews, through Hutton, Butler and finally Chilcott. With the benefit of hindsight, one can appreciate the slowly evolving elite consensus over the wisdom of the war, and the slow distancing of those with personal skin in the game from the locus of power. We can discern the diminishing control of No.10 over the judicial and media classes, and the waxing and waning of whom and what it was acceptable to criticise in polite society. If you’re in the right frame of mind, it can be enjoyed as a sort of reimagining of A Dance to the Music of Time, but about interventionist foreign policy.
This is not to say that official inquiries are simply vehicles for the government of the day to bury inconvenient stories and rewrite history to its liking. Although a government that is truly in control, to the extent that it holds sway over the bar of elite opinion, can come close to holding that power, as the Blair governments did for a while. Instead, they are extra-parliamentary mechanisms for exercising political power. A strong government can use them to its advantage; either to neutralise difficult issues, or as a means to overcome reluctance in parliament or among the public to a set of policy proposals. At a time when governments are weak, or in cases where the government that commissioned an inquiry has lost office, as in the cases of Chilcott and Hallett, they serve as a platform for institutional Britain to write history according to anti-populist preference. Can there be any piece of legislation that by itself has had the impact on British society of the Macpherson report?
Yet we frequently hear calls for official inquiries about all sorts of subjects, very often from people far from the corridors of power. The very fact of an inquiry being opened raises the salience of a particular issue, and theoretically creates an arena for difficult questions to be asked, and for as yet unheard witnesses to be called to give evidence. But history shows us that inquiries are inherently political manifestations, and that they should only be called for by those who know what the outcome is that they desire, and who believe that they have a reasonable chance of it being reached.
This brings us on to the subject of the inquiry into the rape and grooming gang scandal across England. The exposure, late in 2024, of some of the most extreme and distressing evidence relating to the exploitation and abuse of young English girls by Pakistani men, led to a growing campaign for a statutory inquiry into the crimes, and the alleged cover-up. This was successful in raising public awareness and the political salience of what is probably the most serious criminal phenomenon and case of state failure in modern British history. The Government and the media were forced to concede substantial moral ground, and the Prime Minister was subsequently backed into accepting the need for an inquiry, even after many of his MPs had taken the electorally toxic step of dismissing the need for one in public.
The results of the National Audit into group based child sexual exploitation led by Baroness Casey, which was commissioned by the Prime Minister at a time when he was still officially opposed to the idea, made calls for a full inquiry impossible to resist. However, the difference in scope and weight between something like a National Audit and a statutory inquiry have become immediately apparent in the months since June. The audit had narrowly defined terms of reference, and a far smaller secretariat which lacked the kind of ambitious, political characters who lurk further up the food chain in the Whitehall ecosystem. And to some extent, it was able to operate below the radar, with voluntary interviews that didn’t attract media scrutiny at the time. The result was that it could deliver a surprising and devastating blow to the government, and to elite consensus.
Over the autumn however, we have seen the cynical and brutal politics of a public inquiry start to play out. Survivors were brought in to give the process credibility and, it seems, were put under pressure to go along with official attempts to broaden the scope of the inquiry in order to blunt its political potency. This was crass, and the government got caught out because the victims refused to be put upon and blew the whistle. But those hoping for a genuinely meaningful inquiry cannot rely on foes as thick and tin-eared as Jess Philips when a proper Whitehall secretariat gets their teeth into it.
We saw this with the Hallett Inquiry. We saw senior political witnesses, including a former and an incumbent prime minister, snapped at and shut up the moment they began offering insight into decision-making that veered away from pre-approved conclusions. We have seen discredited informatics and modelling go unchallenged as starting assumptions. We witnessed counsel raising their eyebrows and scoffing at the concept of second order consequences and trade-offs in policy making. And now we have seen the final product. The victims of the rape gangs themselves may have the moral courage and the lack of concern for political niceties not to put up with it, but imagine what these KCs will do with a group of spineless former police chiefs, or social services “leaders” in early retirement?
Britain’s ruling classes have taken some very serious moral defeats over the revelations that have come out from the rape gangs prosecutions and victim testimony. Moral certainties which had been insisted upon by the leadership of all of our major parties and especially Labour for decades, have been shattered. The entire worldview of the left-of-centre leadership of the nation’s public sector institutions, the judiciary and the civil service — not to mention the prestige media — is looking dangerously jeopardised.
We are expecting this inquiry to consider the endemic practice of organised sexual violence, comparable in scale to that which was undertaken during the Krivaja Operation (albeit over a longer timeframe), and which the state stands accused of proactively dismissing and covering up. A full public inquiry, if it truly delivered on its revelatory potential, would be utterly devastating for the legitimacy of the British state. Let us be clear here — the institutions which will come together to deliver the Inquiry, as they are currently constituted and under the current government — will not, cannot, allow that to happen.
Instead, the inquiry will be used to sanitise and neutralise the threat. Yes, it will have to make concessions — it will make damning judgements about the police and how they overlook victims. There will be more funding for various public agencies. Almost certainly, it will recommend further statutory oversight of the media and the internet, because that is what the British state does when it is asked to consider any question. But what it will not do explicitly is state that the institutionalised assumption of the primacy of ethnic harmony made these crimes impossible for our authorities to contend with — because in today’s Britain, that would be tantamount to a call for regime change.
If we are to have any hope of such verdicts being made official by our state, and the historical record set to the truth, then it is going to be necessary to change the nature of the elite consensus on the subject first. Significant progress on this has been made over the last year, but there is at least eighty or ninety per cent of the way yet still to go. Among other things, this will require a wave of retirements at senior level in public institutions, in order for compromised individuals to clear out of the way before others are free to look facts in the face. It will require the media to steadily grow used to a more open way of speaking about ethnic disparities in patterns of criminality, and of the differences in social structures which sit behind them. Obviously, it is going to need a change of government.
The previous example of this is the Cass Review of Gender Identity Services for children. Though not a statutory review, it attracted far more political scrutiny and opposition than the Casey audit, especially after the draft publication in 2021, and it was looking at an even more professionally fraught environment. However, the review was commissioned only after serious cracks had begun to emerge in Britain’s elite consensus around so-called “gender affirming care” for minors, and around transgenderism generally. Then prime minister Boris Johnson had expressed concerns a couple of months prior to the NHS commissioning the review, but much of the critical commentary had come from socially and politically respectable voices on the feminist centre-left.
Since it was finally published in 2024, the Cass review has given institutional credibility to the gender critical side of the debate, and precipitated further judicial and official landmarks that have reversed the tide of a radical set of ideas that briefly appeared to have established themselves as an unchallengeable orthodoxy. However, that review finding as it did would not have been possible had it been carried out two or three years previously. It would still not be possible in a number of other Anglosphere countries today. Had its findings been issued in 2018, it is easy to imagine the likes of Boris Johnson dismissing them out of hand in order to win progressive platitudes. But things had changed by 2020, let alone by 2024. The British elite moves as a herd like that.
The enemies of the truth still control the commanding heights of the institutions that would carry out the inquiry
The Casey Review, and all of the reporting and investigatory work that has been carried out so far, has prompted a sea change in awareness and discourse around the rape gangs and what led to and perpetuated them. Yet the enemies of the truth still control the commanding heights of the institutions that would carry out the inquiry, and as we have seen so far, they will be ruthless and shameless in using it to protect their position and the shibboleths their legitimacy rests upon. If the review goes ahead with the current elite consensus and balance of political power in place, it will be a whitewash far more iniquitous than the Hallett inquiry.
