Earlier this week, Independent MP Ayoub Khan stood up in the Commons to pose a question to Labour minister Jess Phillips about child sexual exploitation (CSE). He insisted that while CSE is committed by all races and religions, the abusers must be brought to justice “in such a way that it doesn’t fan the flames of hate”. Khan, when not lobbying for an airport 4,000 miles away in Kashmir, has previously branded the grooming gangs scandal a “Right-wing narrative”.

But more astonishing was Phillips’s response. The Birmingham Yardley MP admitted that there had been a “cover-up” for “multicultural reasons” and “that cannot stand”. Was this a rare example of frankness from the Safeguarding Minister? Is Labour finally admitting that despicable crimes were hushed up for years, and in some cases decades? More likely, it was a reluctant and limited acknowledgement — and even then, it came only after mounting political pressure. That’s not to mention the increasing evidence that systematic sexual abuse of children in Britain goes deeper and wider than previously imagined.

In January, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a series of local inquiries into the gangs, but stopped short of launching a statutory national inquiry. Earlier this month, Phillips declared that there would not be a judge-led inquiry into these areas as promised. Instead, councils will be able to access a £5 million fund to support locally-led work on grooming gangs. In other words, the very councils which presided over the abuse would be marking their own homework. Phillips may position herself as a champion of women and girls, but in refusing to call for a statutory inquiry she is failing in her safeguarding duties.

There have been several inquiries into grooming gangs across the UK. The Government is presently awaiting the findings of an audit by Baroness Casey into group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse. In 2022, meanwhile, Alexis Jay finished a seven-year investigation into sexual abuse across England and Wales. The nation, she found, had been scarred by an “epidemic that left thousands of victims in its poisonous wake”.

However, critics point out that the report looked into all forms of abuse, while only five pages were dedicated to the rape gangs. So far we have only had localised inquiries, but these have nonetheless demonstrated that, time and again, authorities at multiple levels consistently turned a blind eye to child abuse.

In Rotherham, for example, the police told Jay’s inquiry in 2014 that Pakistani-heritage councillors acted as barriers to communication on grooming issues. Muslim leaders in the town were accused of “ignoring a politically inconvenient truth” by insisting there was not a deep-rooted problem of men from Pakistani backgrounds targeting mainly young white girls.

Labour isn’t solely to blame for this problem. The Conservative government failed to implement any of the 20 recommendations from Jay’s report, and the historic negligence from both main parties has left an opening for Reform UK to exploit in this week’s local elections. Reform leader Nigel Farage has joined forces with Labour peer Maurice Glasman to persuade Keir Starmer to launch a national inquiry into crimes committed by the gangs.

By silencing the debate out of a fear of being branded racist, “Islamophobic”, or amplifying the “Right-wing” narrative, as Ayoub Khan has suggested, we have racialised this crime even further. Journalists such as Julie Bindel were investigating the scandal two decades ago, but the vacuum elsewhere is being filled by the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson. Abused children were failed first by the institutions which should have protected them, and now are being failed once again by another government unwilling to pursue the truth.

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Iram Ramzan is a journalist and commentator who has previously worked at the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. She writes the Substack Off The Record With Iram.

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