Matt Goodwin: Labour is betraying the rape gang victims —yet again

Keir Starmer, Labour minister Jess Phillips, and the Labour Party are not serious about delivering truth and justice to the victims of the Pakistani rape gangs. This is the only conclusion one can draw after the events of the last week.

The Labour Party, the party that had to be dragged kicking and screaming into committing to a national inquiry to begin with, and Keir Starmer, the prime minister who less than a year ago derided all those who called for an inquiry into the mass rape of white working-class children as ‘jumping on the bandwagon of the far-right’, have never really wanted to prioritise the worst scandal in British history.

More interested in votes from Labour’s Muslim constituents than the pursuit of truth, more influenced by a ‘progressive’ ideology that presents minorities as good and majorities as bad, when it comes to Keir Starmer, as The Times pointed out this week, ‘a palpable sense has remained that he has never fully grasped why [an inquiry] is necessary’.

This reluctance, if not refusal, to take the rape gang scandal seriously has run through pretty much everything Labour has said and done this year.

Labour’s steadfast refusal to commit to an inquiry until the last possible moment, even when it was obvious to everybody else in the room that this was necessary.

Labour Ministers like Lucy Powell, who only five months ago dismissed people who care about the issue on live radio as ‘blowing a little trumpet’ and ‘dog-whistle’, displaying an attitude toward this scandal the British people have long suspected is rife among Labour Party politicians.

Labour’s decision to then insult the many victims of the scandal by initially pushing for a series of underfunded local inquiries, rather than the proper, fully-funded, national inquiry the scandal clearly warrants –and which would no doubt be offered in a second were it involving the mass rape of black or Muslim children.

Labour politicians like London Mayor Sadiq Khan refusing to take seriously rumours of rape gang activity in our own capital city, claiming there are ‘no reports and no indication’ of rape gangs despite an assortment of social workers, charities, experts, and survivors saying otherwise.

And now, as we’ve seen in Labour’s cack-handed approach to managing the inquiry this week, a refusal by the Labour government to get its arms around the issue in the way it would were it to involve one of their favoured minority groups.

I mean, seriously, could you imagine the Labour Party responding to the scandal in all these ways were this to involve highly organised gangs of white men targeting vulnerable Muslim children?

Could you imagine how quickly Labour would act, how it would instantly remove any and every obstacle and barrier to finding those victims the truth and justice they deserve?

Instead, by dragging their heels and showing the same indifference toward the rape gang scandal as politicians showed toward the issue for decades, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have now, clearly, lost the confidence and trust of the most important people of all –the victims.

Five survivors have now left the inquiry, with some claiming that behind the scenes Labour Ministers have been trying to downplay the racial and religious aspects of the scandal —as indeed they have done for the last 30 years.

Others have, rightly, complained about the fact Labour has been pushing forward former police officers and social workers to lead the inquiry, in other words asking people from the same stained authorities to essentially mark their own homework.

Put simply, this is not how a serious government, a serious political party that was sincerely concerned about the scandal would behave.

And everybody in the country can see it –the double standards, the glaring hypocrisy, the indifference, the instinctive desire to prioritise Labour votes from Muslims, and to not ‘upset’ the very same Muslim communities that happened to have nearly cost the likes of Jess Phillips and several other Labour MPs their seats last year.

I can see it, you can see it, the whole country can see it.

So, now, already months after Keir Starmer committed to the rape gang inquiry, Labour has nobody to lead it. Victims have lost confidence. And the shocking crimes are continuing.

The country’s reckoning with the true scale and severity of the rape scandal has yet to arrive. Truth and justice are nowhere to be seen. And the world looks on, wondering how a mature, supposedly civilised society like Britain could allow this to happen.

All that remains in Westminster, all that remains visible to everybody in the country except Keir Starmer, is a Labour government that is once again displaying the same terrible outlook that led to this scandal being downplayed and ignored in the first place: indifference

Indifference towards the issue, indifference towards the victims, and a stubborn refusal to prioritise it over everything else.

This will be Keir Starmer’s legacy, in the end –the man who failed to recognise the need for a full, national inquiry into the mass rape of our children when the neeD for it was obvious to everybody else in the room, and who then, after being dragged into finally committing to one, failed to show victims the respect and decency they deserve by making the inquiry swift, effective, impartial, and laser-focused on finding truth and justice.

Shame on Keir Starmer, and shame on the Labour government. Because those girls, and their families, deserve so much better than this.