In the first parliamentary exchange on child sex gangs since the issue came to public attention, the Conservative leader said the country had yet to really understand how bad things were, simply because there had been no investigation. He said he didn't know.
Britain's traditional government parties, Labor and the Conservative Party, have been locked in a bitter spat over who is to blame for a decades-long scandal of industrial-scale child rape by traditional gangs of immigrants. But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch made an important point during Wednesday's parliamentary standoff, stressing the need for a new national inquiry into child sex gangs.
The choice is between acting on the recommendations already made by previous, less comprehensive reports, or conducting a new multi-year investigation; it is somehow impossible to do both. In response to the Prime Minister's position, Mr Badenoch said: work to do.
“More than 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone. Thousands more victims in Oldham, Bradford, Bristol, Rochdale and dozens of other towns, but dots and dots were added. No one knows the whole picture, and that's almost certainly still the case.”
In fact, there is no agreement on the number of victims or even the number of towns and cities affected. Speaking afterwards, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage cited research that suggested there could be as many as 50 towns and cities raiding gang abusers. Mr Farage said he would support Mr Badenoch's vote tonight as a matter of convenience, but nevertheless called Ms Badenoch's harsh words on the issue “disingenuous”, adding that during her term as women and equalities minister she had “not given a single victim”. I didn't meet him,” he said. I have never raised the issue of these rapes. ”
His reformist colleague Rupert Lowe made these points clear in his demands on the government, including that Pakistani nationals involved in abuses should be immediately deported. Expressing in detail just some of the questions that should be investigated in a survey: the senator asked Labor Government: 'How many girls are estimated to have been raped? Is there a tally of excess rapes? The frightening thing is, the number could be in the millions, we don't know.' How many vulnerable young girls are still involved in these gangs? If you don't have an estimate, why don't you?”
As Mr Lowe spoke, left-wing MPs shook their heads in apparent despair, and one Labor MP responded by criticizing Mr Lowe for speaking out.
Yet the debate over child sex gangs, which has now reached from the organic conversational spaces of social media to parliament, has devolved into endless rounds of confrontation and accusations. Labor criticized the Conservatives because they didn't do anything while they were in power, but the Conservatives criticized Labor because now that they were in power, the corruption of the grooming gangs was real. This is because they are preventing a full investigation to find out how serious the problem is.
Both are correct in a sense. If the systematic rape of young children by what is now accepted as a “primarily Pakistani grooming gang” has been going on for 40 years, then each year of abuse occurred when either Labor or the Conservatives were in power. It means that Where and when the cover-up took place.
The current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is the top lawyer who served as Director of Public Prosecutions when the first grooming gang case was brought, and has been keen in recent days to claim credit for making these prosecutions possible. There is. But no doubt this laudable research has now seen its way through its apparent willingness to look further into the grooming gang phenomenon, and how police and social services across the country have looked the other way over time. It has been completely overshadowed by the fact that the history has certainly been scrutinized. Doing the same thing again and even bringing consequences to the public servant who did it is a waste of time.
