13 January 2025

A lack of trust is empowering Britain’s extremists

By

What can recent developments in the scandal over child sexual exploitation tell us about our dangerous descent into a low trust society? Two Labour MPs have now broken ranks to contradict the leadership and say a national inquiry into child rape grooming gangs is now needed. Many people will not have heard of Dan Carden, but Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, is Red royalty and his intervention will matter.

Whether this was an attack of conscience or cynical opportunism is a subject for another time. But in his defence, Burnham did initiate an independent review of the police response to child sexual exploitation in Manchester, Oldham and Rochdale in 2017. The results of this review are wearily familiar to anyone following this grotesque phenomenon. A failure by police to apprehend predominantly Pakistani-heritage perpetrators for fear of racism. A failure of social services who were aware of the abuse to protect children at risk. An abject failure of the local authority to resource support for teenage girls who were not taken seriously, sometimes even treated as the problem and subsequently violated again. Dozens of white children with ruined lives burned on the pyre of institutional cowardice and political correctness.

Despite many criticisms of his local inquiry, Burnham correctly summarised the challenge in response to the findings: ‘It is only by facing up fully and unflinchingly to what happened that we can be sure of bringing the whole system culture change needed when it comes to protecting children from abuse.’

The Prime Minister’s view on this seems to be woefully out of step with public outrage in general and Burnham’s prescription in particular. Far from unflinching, Keir Starmer has accused those now highlighting the need for a national inquiry as jumping on a far-right ‘bandwagon’. His ministers are forced to repeat a line which says implementation of recommendations from the previous national review of child sexual exploitation led by Professor Alexis Jay was more than sufficient to allay public concern.

The stonewalling on a comprehensive judge-led inquiry into group sexual abuse of children seems inexplicable. Instead of Burnham’s culture change, we see proposals for yet more laws that replicate professional obligations and legal penalties already in place – which failed to make officials do the right thing. Moreover, the Jay report examined institutional abuse in churches, schools, care homes and the NHS with only a very limited, and bizarrely configured, examination of group-led sexual exploitation, which avoided the racialised abuse of white children and focused on areas where the demographic composition would be unlikely to replicate it.

And what are the silenced whistleblowers, sacked shadow cabinet ministers and victims ignored or redacted out of Jay’s £180 million report over seven years to make of the labelling of their concerns by the Prime Minister as ‘right-wing’? None of this shameful manoeuvring will improve public confidence that the state is fully invested in exposing the incompetence and institutional timidity that runs through this national scandal.

From Bristol to Huddersfield and countless places in between, children were abandoned to sadistic exploitation because the ethnicity of their perpetrators was placed above their dignity and safety. This is the land of lessons never learned, because accountability is a foreign country. But that has consequences for us all, including those who concealed and obfuscated the scale and nature of rape gang activity in the interests of ‘community cohesion’.

The secrecy and evasion of our ruling mediocracy at times assumes baroque proportions. Look at the explanation from the Home Office of its decision not to put data on research into grooming gangs and ethnicity in the public domain: ‘We recognise that this topic in general and any insight and learning are matters of strong public interest, although it does not necessarily follow that it is in the public interest to disclose any specific information relating to it.’ Too much truth is bad for the plebs.

Trust in politicians and parliament as measured by polling companies has been in recent decline and now languishes at around 30%. This can’t come as any surprise if we take the grooming gang scandal and the state’s reaction to it as a proxy. But the lack of transparency, openness and accountability that this awful safeguarding catastrophe exemplifies is the very thing that lets forces at the ideological polarities flourish.

Neofascists and Islamists both have something to gain from declining confidence in our democratic institutions and public protection agencies. Both thrive on grievance narratives and conspiratorial explanations which this void of indecision creates. A low-trust society is the ideal environment for violence to take hold. We have only to look at last summer’s riots, animated in part by official obfuscation over the identity of the alleged perpetrator, for evidence of its potency.

Restoring trust in our failing public institutions is every bit as important as the other foundations the Government says it wants to fix. A national inquiry into the nature and extent of gang-led child sexual exploitation is probably going to happen. Starmer must decide whether he is pushed into it or leads the way. Time is running out. You cannot defuse a bomb you pretend isn’t there.

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Professor Ian Acheson is Senior Advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.