SO, A national inquiry into the rape gangs at last. There is plenty of instant commentary about what the inquiry will/will not reveal, divided between those who are elated and see it as a definitive turning point – such as Matt Goodwin – to those who are deeply cynical and see it as an exercise in pure deflection. At the extreme there are those, including myself, who think that Labour always knew a national inquiry would be necessary and were just stalling for as long as possible so that damage limitation strategies could be deployed and perhaps incriminating evidence destroyed or quietly buried.
After all, we have reasons to be deeply cynical about national inquiries, whose chief outcomes seem to be to make lawyers and others of the great and good very rich indeed at the public’s expense: the system investigates the system and largely exonerates the system from blame, as has happened most recently in the ridiculous scam of the inquiry into the handling of the covid pandemic.
There are a number of well-known ways governments can essentially fix the results of the inquiry before it is even started. Firstly, it can set the terms of reference to be either too broad or too narrow. Make the terms too wide and the inquiry may not have the resources to look into key areas at any great depth. Make the terms too narrow – such as with the original Casey report – and you help to avoid those salient areas either partially or even entirely.
Then there is the length of time the inquiry may take to come to its conclusions, which can take several years. By that time many of those found at fault may be retired or dead. Any attempt at criminal prosecutions would be made more difficult because of the waning reliability of witness and defendant testimony after so long a hiatus.
Finally, there is the trick of simply making sure you appoint the right person to lead the inquiry. To a great many people, this was illuminated to spectacular degree by what many considered the disastrous Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly and the alleged ‘sexing up’ of intelligence by the government in the lead-up to the Iraq War, reported at the time by the journalist Andrew Gilligan for the BBC. Lord Hutton was a judge widely admired for his probity and his handling of the inquiry. It was widely expected – and hoped – that the evidence presented would damn the Prime Minister Tony Blair and his chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell and force both to resign. However, Labour Party insiders were apparently much more sanguine, smirking that they had ‘appointed the right judge’. No one has ever suggested that Hutton was personally corrupt, but he was known to be an establishment ‘small c’ conservative and it was felt unlikely that he would be too radical and disruptive in his conclusions. Sure enough, the Hutton report largely let the government off the hook, blaming the BBC for sloppy journalism instead.
Thus, the fact that Rupert Lowe’s independent, crowd-funded inquiry into the rape gangs is to continue in parallel is just as important as the news that an official inquiry is to be launched. This is to my knowledge an unprecedented development in UK political life.
The effect of both may be limited. Lowe’s inquiry would not of course have statutory powers and although it may yield revealing and damning witness testimony from those willing to testify (and apparently a great many witnesses have already come forward), it may struggle in other areas to make headway. For the reasons discussed above, a national inquiry alone is unlikely to reveal the whole sordid truth of this hideous stain on our national life. Even if it did, a great many would not believe it, such is the cynicism and distrust towards the Establishment.
Together, though, they might just get at something approaching the truth, with Lowe’s inquiry essentially keeping the official inquiry honest. The Establishment must know that it will not be able to fix the outcomes to those most congenial to the system and its inhabitants if these are seen to deviate too far from what Lowe’s inquiry reveals.
In conclusion, we see yet again that it is only the mechanism of direct accountability and democracy that can hold our lumbering, unresponsive and deeply corrupt system of ‘Unrepresentative Shamocracy’ to account. Left to itself, the system will continue to protect the system and those within it, as this terrible saga has demonstrated so cruelly and for so long. The purely representative model of governance is both discredited and finished. From the Brexit referendum to Lowe’s crowd-funded inquiry and beyond, it is this hybrid model of representative and direct mechanisms of transmission that is the way forward for all our dealings with the state in future.
This article appeared in John Wycliffe on June 17, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
