A prime minister like Starmer who only acts when forced to do so by others inspires neither confidence nor respect. But this is something we have seen repeatedly with Keir Starmer and this Labour government. The latest – and arguably most egregious – example is the U-turn on holding a full national inquiry into grooming gangs.
In January, Starmer accused politicians calling for such an inquiry as 'jumping on the bandwagon of the far right”.
Robust debate, Starmer said can only be based on true facts” even though the facts have been there for years.
Thousands of vulnerable girls have been groomed and raped by groups of men, disproportionately of Pakistani heritage.
We knew from Alexis Jay’s report in 2014 – 11 years ago – that 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham alone between 1997 and 2013. And that was a “conservative estimate”. Stories first appeared in the media in 2007, by Julie Bindel in the Sunday Times Magazine. The late Andrew Norfolk of the Times published hundreds of articles from 2011 on child rapes perpetrated across England.
Some of those closest to the Prime Minister privately warned him last year in stark, emotional terms about the scale of the collective failure to protect the most vulnerable girls & that some of the responsibility lay with Labour-run or Labour-dominated local authorities – in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere & one of the most shameful episodes of British history,
Louise Casey points out in her National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, released on 16 June, “we are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions including beatings and gang rapes”. Earlier this month, survivors of the abuse spoke to BBC Newsnight. A lady called Kate (not her real name) was raped “almost daily” by “multiple Pakistani men each day”. Another girl,Fiona was plied with drugs and violently raped from the age of 14 & then shortly after she was taken into care. Another girl, Chantelle wasin the care system when she was first abused and drugged at 11 years old. The perpetrators of these crimes were all gangs of British Asian men. Because Starmer had to ask troubleshooter-in-chief Casey to decide whether a national inquiry was needed is disgraceful cowardice. For the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, to declare on the day Casey’s report was published that the systematic rape of girls marked “a stain on our society and a failure of those who were meant to protect them” – only after someone else gave the government permission to say so – was pure chutzpah. Even when confirming his change of heart, the Prime Minister made no compelling case of his own for why these crimes needed proper examination. Rather, Casey had “come to the view there should be a national inquiry” and he would “accept her recommendation”.
But this shameful U-turn is part of a wider pattern of this government effectively subcontracting out difficult decisions to others. It looks weak, directionless and lacking in conviction as a result.