TORY attempts to weaponise historic child sexual abuse against the Labour government are cynical and dishonest.
Together with US billionaire bigot Elon Musk, who seems to have inspired Kemi Badenoch’s sudden interest, they deliberately incite racism and Islamophobia.
Labour can be criticised for having failed so far to enact the 20 recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales, which concluded in 2022. Its chair Professor Alexis Jay said in November she was lobbying the new government to act on them.
But not by the Conservatives, who failed to act when in government.
The demand the Tories press now is for a new inquiry into grooming gangs.
We should be careful not to conflate the case for such an inquiry with the racist motivations on display this week.
Oldham Council, which is Labour-led, asked for a government-led inquiry. Home Office Minister Jess Phillips declined, arguing the council itself should run it.
Phillips may feel that the seven-year inquiry that concluded two years ago is worth looking at before launching a new one; on the other hand, some experts believe Oldham Council is right that an individual local authority lacks access to data on people-trafficking by organised crime networks which is key to building a complete picture.
These are serious questions that need considering on the basis of how best to deliver justice for victims and prevent future abuses.
That is not what motivates the Tories.
They disregard the evidence of the inquiry they set up, which noted that child abuse was endemic in England and Wales (a separate inquiry is ongoing for Scotland); was enabled, covered up or ignored in multiple contexts from churches to schools, council-run care homes and when organised by criminal gangs; and is on the increase because of the rise in online pornography, grooming and pimping.
They ignore a report issued by the Home Office in 2020 when they were in power that concluded a majority of child sexual abuse gangs in Britain were made up of white men under 30.
They instead frame the question in racist terms. Shadow home secretary Chris Philps asks for an inquiry to ask why grooming gangs are “overwhelmingly of south Asian background.” Shadow safeguarding minister Alicia Kearns calls on Phillips to release the “ethnicity data.”
They hype up a far-right trope about Asian, and specifically Muslim, grooming gangs that their own government reports disproved. Musk seizes on this too, retweeting claims Phillips is refusing to open an inquiry into “Muslim grooming gangs.”
Musk’s role is novel and dangerous. The richest man on Earth is incendiary, attacking Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and demanding that the King dissolve Parliament to protect children from the Labour government.
So far so Musk, but the Conservatives seem happy to take attack lines from the toxic tech tycoon and turn his transient fixations into British political weather.
Musk is soon to be a high-ranking member of the US government, which Keir Starmer is as ready to fawn on as his predecessors. Labour should stand up to this abuse or it will be humiliated, to the benefit — as Musk intends — of the British far right he openly supports.
That means rejecting the racist weaponisation of the issue.
It cannot mean downplaying the terrible record of child abuse in so many towns and institutions, or how those in authority from clerics to councillors to police facilitated it.
Indeed, the failure to hold authority figures to account is one reason this issue remains explosive, as victims complained after 2017’s reports on years of abuse in Rotherham did not result in charges against any councillors or social workers.
Labour should implement Prof Jay’s recommendations, and explain its reasoning on the Oldham inquiry request, while being unafraid to denounce a racist Tory propaganda drive whipped up from the United States.
