In the recent debate on Britain’s hideous and historic rape gang scandal, Jess Phillips has played the unwitting part of Gavrilo Princip.
I have mixed feelings about Phillips. Her buddy cop routine with Jacob Rees-Mogg was charming. Her commitment to helping victims of domestic and sexual violence is long-standing and noble, with her appointment to the safeguarding women and girls brief being an all-too-unusual example of a minister receiving a role that they actually know about. Then again, she seems to not be lacking in ego – and her Question Time comments about the Cologne sex attacks a decade ago were a straw in the wind.
With her refusal of Oldham Council’s request for a government-led public inquiry into the town’s rape gangs, Phillips has made herself a lightning rod for domestic criticism, including from Ben Houchen and Nigel Farage. But readers will be most familiar with her international notoriety after a striking intervention from Elon Musk, the self-appointed Leader of the Opposition and strongest soldier of the Anglosphere. He accused Phillips of being a ‘rape genocide apologist’ and called for her to be jailed.
Unsurprisingly, Keir Starmer didn’t take this criticism of his minister very well. Overshadowing his latest relaunch speech, he suggested yesterday that ‘a line has been crossed’, that politicians backing a new inquiry are ‘amplifying’ and ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ of the ‘poison of the far-right’ to besmirch Phillips. If MPs won’t ‘denounce what’s been said about…Phillips, then [they] need to seriously think about why [they’re] in politics’. Strong stuff, certainly.
I agree with Starmer. Musk’s language about Phillips was outrageous, ill-informed and counter-productive, if one’s intention is to spur her to change her mind. But in suggesting that anyone who demands a reckoning for the disgraces in Oldham, Rotherham, Telford and dozens of other places is ‘jumping on a far-right bandwagon’, the PM is being even more hopelessly tin-eared than usual.
To use the criticism he levied against the Tories, Starmer is playing politics. Rather than concede that his critics might be on to something when they demand an inquiry into the decades-long cover-up of the rape of young women on an industrial scale, he instead tries to deflect to Musk’s language, or the iniquities of prominent police informant, cocaine enthusiast and, alas, my fellow Luton Town supporter, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
Labour MPs like Phillips – who has a majority of only 693 – in seats with substantial Muslim populations have little incentive to agree to a national inquiry if they fear a backlash from their constituents. That this may leave many more of their colleagues vulnerable to Reform UK appears to be a reality that their party hasn’t quite woken up to. Fortunately for readers, my ex-Editor at ConservativeHome has.
If Starmer really was serious about blunting the advance of those he considers to be ‘far-right’, he would welcome an inquiry, whipping his MPs in favour of Kemi Badenoch’s amendment tomorrow. If he is proud of his record on child sexual abuse as Director of Public Prosecutions and denies any complicity in a cover-up, he should welcome sunlight’s arrival as a long-overdue disinfectant. But that would mean conceding that nasty Mr Musk has a point, which is much too grim to contemplate.
Instead, we get the ludicrous suggestion that we might suspend our security partnership with the United States. Not as an overdue recognition of our post-Suez vassalage, but because of the President-Elect’s failure to condemn his pal’s hurty words – the diplomatic equivalent of throwing one’s toys out of one’s pram. This would be an international humiliation remarkable even by Starmer’s standards.
But the best reason for the Prime Minister to agree to a full national inquiry is not to blunt Reform’s advance, stick one to Musk or buddy up to the incoming President. He should want one because the rape gangs scandal was a national tragedy – ‘perhaps the greatest racially motivated crime in modern Britain’, in the words of Robert Jenrick – and deserves a national reckoning.
Read the accounts highlighted by Charlie Peters, Sam Ashworth-Hayes and all those who have done so much to bring a light to this scandal in the face of concerted opposition. Victims prepared for gang anal rape using a pump, or burnt in their homes as a warning to others or arrested ahead of their groomers. A catalogue of horrors affecting thousands of children over decades, as the police, social workers, councillors and others in power demurred in the name of community relations.
No government or police employee has gone to prison for their complicity, even as the evidence suggests that these abuses took place in over fifty UK towns and cities. Alexis Jay’s report treated grooming gangs as one part of a wider epidemic of child sexual abuse. While it is right that the Government is now implementing her recommendations where the Conservatives hesitated, a 450-odd page report that only mentions Rotherham once cannot be considered the last word on these outrages.
Politicians and journalists like Ann Cryer and Andrew Norfolk called attention to these crimes over twenty years ago. Both major parties ducked demands for a stand-alone national inquiry in that time; both need to now make amends, accept that one is overdue and give it their full support. Badenoch’s decision to call for one is welcome, but hollow if Starmer will not put justice for victims ahead of his own wounded pride.
Even then, an inquiry would only be the start, especially if it follows the recent tradition of forming an extenuated and expensive exercise in can-kicking. A hard rain needs to fall on anyone, in any position, who was complicit. Prison time, exclusion from public office and a deportation of any foreign nationals involved seems the bare minimum of what is required, before we even discuss migration.
I thought Britain’s intended fate as a giant Bicester Village for the benefit of Eurasia’s least discerning shoppers was embarrassing enough. But to have the country I love exposed to the world as a grim and desperate land of rape gangs and myopic politicians is even more of a tragic shock. But it so often takes the intervention of a friend – even one as dicey as Musk – to make one see one’s own failings. It shouldn’t take his rudeness to turn Starmer puce-faced about these crimes.
Just as Princip’s bullet unleashed a conflict that upended the face of Europe, so too might Phillip’s unwillingness to concede an inquiry trigger an outcry that sees her Government hounded from office in a righteous groundswell of anger. Or, much more likely, it will carry on, sheltered by its unearned landslide and self-delusion from the contempt with it of a frightened, poor and angry country.
Even if it takes another four and a half years for the victims of this national catastrophe to get the justice they deserve, the last week has ensured that they will. But it shouldn’t have to take so long.
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