KEMI Badenoch cannot be allowed to whitewash her party’s responsibility for letting the grooming gang scandal fester over many years. But this is exactly what she sought to do in her response to Sir Keir Starmer’s U-turn and announcement of a full national inquiry: ‘It has been left to Conservatives time and time again to force this issue,’ she claimed. ‘It was the Conservatives who established the grooming gangs taskforce, which supported police forces to make 807 arrests for group-based child sexual exploitation last year. So don’t tell me we did nothing.’ (my italics)
But what of all the previous years?
Badenoch of course was right to say that survivors and their families have been ‘ignored for far too long’. But what she omitted is the fact that they were ignored over a decade of Tory rule. I wonder where Kemi was when the press regulator ruled that Suella Braverman’s claim that UK child grooming gangs were ‘almost all British-Pakistani men’ was misleading? Braverman is one of the few truthful Tories. Did Badenoch support the then Home Secretary and castigate the regulator? Did the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak? If not, why not? They should admit their own silence and culpability.
What the Tory leader cannot ignore is the fact that for all those years from 2014 her useless party did nothing and that, perhaps, is the biggest scandal. They all knew about it and their negligence allowed it to fester. In Dewsbury, Bradford, anywhere the rape gangs operate, no-go areas became a fact of life. If the Conservative government was too scared of the Muslim community in Britain, we need to know; if they were too scared of being seen to be racist, or too scared of the local Labour authorities, we need to know. Badenoch ought to want to know why Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs were just an afterthought in Theresa May’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) set up in 2014.
So no, it is not good enough for Badenoch simply to say, ‘We did a lot and the more we did the more we realised that even more needed to be done.’ It does not get the Tories off the hook, Kemi. Nor does saying, ‘Apologies are easy, what we need to see is action.’ Proper apology is hard, not easy. Why? Because it means owning up to wrongdoing – the wrongdoing of Tory negligence. That, too, if she is honest, needs to be part of any ‘inquiry that actually gets to the bottom of this’, which is what she says she seeks.
A full ten years ago, when David Cameron was Prime Minister, we published an article by David Keighley headed ‘In the Rotherham madhouse, PC multiculturalism trumps child safety every time’. Kemi Badenoch should have read it then, but if she did not she should read it now – and admit the Tories have much to apologise for. This article was first published on February 5, 2015.
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The Louise Casey report into Rotherham child sexual exploitation and abuse is one of the most harrowing and damning documents about British public life ever to appear.
In essence, this grim catalogue of malignancy demonstrates that the octopus-tentacles of multi-cultural orthodoxy have penetrated every recess of administration to the extent that it swamps and trumps decency and common sense. In effect, it facilitates and condones barbaric behaviour to the extent of hounding out whistleblowers and destroying records that detailed the abuse.
The Baby P and Victoria Climbie murders, of course, also showed despicable treatment of children that could and should have been prevented by local councils and other agencies involved. But the hard truths of Rotherham are far worse in that Casey specifically posits there was systematic malicious intent by public officials paid to protect local youngsters.
They knew that men from the local Pakistani community were raping and sexually abusing local children on a massive scale but ignored the crimes, and pretended they did not exist, even when last August, they were presented with beyond-doubt proof by Professor Alexis Jay.
Casey demonstrates with forensic precision that some Rotherham councillors, senior council officials, South Yorkshire police and figures from ethnic minority groups were complicit in outrageous acts that have wrecked probably beyond recovery the lives of hundreds of vulnerable children and their families. These vile crimes were perpetrated on their victims on a systematic, near-industrial scale for at least 13 years.
And there is more. Sue Berelowitz, the deputy children’s commissioner, who is carrying out a nationwide investigation into child sex abuse, warned on Newsnight that her report would uncover dozens more instances that could be as disturbing as Rotherham.
So what are the lessons? It is clear that, unbelievably, the main objective of public officials has moved away from the core duty of public protection. Instead the main priority is now to embrace the ideals and the principles of multiculturalism. Casey demonstrates that in line with this, the need to protect Muslims (‘Pakistani Heritage’ in her Newsspeak) from allegations of racism trumps anything and everything else.
Put another way, the duty of Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police to protect local children was strangled by race relations zealotry. To accept the horrendous truth – that Pakistanis were in this instance operating massive organised crime and behaving with what amounted in any language and in any culture to deliberate barbarity – was something to be avoided at all costs.
In Rotherham, these public officials were of course overwhelmingly members of the Labour party – in fact the composition of the council is 49 Labour councilors , 10 from Ukip and two Conservatives.
But although Labour pioneered and built the legislative superstructure that enforces multicultural rectitude, party loyalty is almost irrelevant here. Call-me-Dave and his cohorts in the desperate-to-be-nice Conservative party flaunt almost exactly the same values and views, as do Nick Clegg and his henchmen. The Coalition has had the chance to root out the dangerous political correctness around multiculturalism but instead has often reinforced it. For example, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan’s Ofsted inspectors are busy as we speak enforcing this agenda among 10-year-olds, as has been reported on TCW.
And what of South Yorkshire Police? Since the Stephen Lawrence report and its politically-correct fallout engineered by New Labour, it has becoming increasingly clear that the multicultural agenda is far more important to chief constables than law enforcement. Not only that, there is a manic and wholly disproportionate focus is on public relations.
That is why, as the Rotherham abuse sickeningly continued last year, South Yorkshire policemen spent thousands of pounds on a stunt co-ordinated with the BBC to humiliate Cliff Richard. They judged it far more important to have their name in lights than to protect local children.
The media village – with the BBC at its heart – often appears complicit in the enforcement of this agenda. Its focus on multicultural values is relentless and dominating. In this vein, its coverage of Rotherham was strangely restrained. For example, the BBC Newsnight item – which could have delved deeply into the background, having had the report since the morning – spoke only to a father of one of the victims and Sue Berelotwtz. And by the next morning, Today did not even think the story merited a place on the running order.
