Is Keir Starmer’s Labour government trying to postpone a proper inquiry into the rape gangs scandal until after the next election? Or worse, is Labour out to sabotage the search for truth altogether?
For decades, Labour authorities and police in English towns and cities covered up the rape of thousands of young British girls by gangs of largely Muslim men of Pakistani origin. It was one of the greatest scandals in modern British history.
It will be an even bigger scandal if the Labour government tries to sacrifice justice for the victims again, in a desperate bid to save its own skin at the ballot box.
Whose side are these people on?
Let’s recall, Starmer never wanted a national inquiry into the rape gangs in the first place. In January he marshalled Labour MPs to vote the proposal down in parliament.
It was only under pressure from a wave of public outrage, plus the revelations in Baroness Louise Casey’s report, that the prime minister finally caved in and reluctantly agreed to set up a national inquiry.
Four months later, no chair has been appointed and the inquiry’s terms of reference are still “under discussion”.
Given the years that these things often take, it is now very likely to be after the next election before any inquiry grinds to a conclusion.
But this is far more than a case of time-wasting or incompetence. All the signs are that Labour is actively trying to sabotage the search for truth and justice again.
Four survivors of the rape gangs have resigned from the victims’ panel because they fear that the inquiry’s focus is being “broadened” away from its focus on the grooming gangs.
In other words, its teeth are being pulled even before it starts work.
There are also rightly concerns that the shortlisting of an ex-top policeman and a former senior social worker to chair the inquiry mean the authorities behind the cover-up will be “marking their own homework” once more.
The resigning survivors talk about a “sense of control and stage-management” around the process, a feeling that it is all “scripted and pre-determined” so that their voices are being silenced yet again.
In response, self-professed feminist Labour minister Jess Phillips added insult to injury by effectively accusing these women of lying.
That of course was what the rapists and the police also said for years.
If all of this isn’t repulsive enough, we now learn that Labour London mayor Sadikh Khan stands accused of covering up evidence of grooming gangs in the capital.
Mayor Khan and the Metropolitan Police have always insisted that there were “no reports” and “no indications” of London suffering from the same sort of rape gangs that operated in northern towns such as Rotherham and Richfale.
But a Daily Express probe has now revealed that Khan did read and respond to official reports that described in “horrific detail” the ordeal of young girls being raped by gangs in London hotels, plied with drugs and threatened with violence.
As former police whistleblower Maggie Oliver says, it looks as if Khan’s London is the “last bastion” of the national cover-up of the rape gangs scandal.
This ever-worsening scandal should surely be the last straw for this morally corrupt Labour government.