The white hot fury on the streets of this country over the Pakistani rape gangs is matched only by the anger at the supine complicity and cover-up of the establishment, who stood back for decades and let our children be abused on an industrial scale. As I listened, physically incensed, while this appalling crop of politicians tried to offload the blame they ALL share, I was praying for a stray Iranian missile to land on the House fo Commons.
A plague on all their houses was never quite so apt. They have no idea do they? These well-off metropolitan MP types who seek to govern our lives. No idea what the mood is in the front rooms of Blackburn, the streets of Bradford, the pubs of Rochdale. The whole thing is just another political football. A game to be played, a point to be scored.
My God the barefaced lies. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary of a Labour Party which, until literally hours ago was refusing a national inquiry, started coming over all sombre-faced and furrowed-bowed, as if a far-reaching inquiry had been her idea all along. This was the party who jeered at the notion of collecting ethnicity data on rapists, who accused anyone who believed a proper data-led inquiry into how so many young white girls were being raped by so many old Pakistani men was the mindset of a hard-right fascist.
The Muslim abuse gangs told these vulnerable children, thousands of them, they were kafir, scum, the lowest of the low, to be loathed, used, and discarded. They were right weren’t they. These poor children’s attempts to get help, from the police, from social workers, from what Cooper called “inter-agency support” (whatever that gooobledegook means) resulted in them being called prostitutes, promiscuous, not worthy of being taken seriously.
And it is these people – quite as much as the evil perpetrators themselves – that I – and I’m happy to stake my mortgage, you – want brought to book. Named. Shamed. Jailed. For far, far too long our civil servants have been allowed to hide behind a cloak of anonymity (when was the last time one of them gave you their name?) – well, no more. Even Cooper got this and told the Commons those in authority who had knowledge of grooming and did nothing about it could now be charged.
She was also wise enough to state that any would-be asylum seekers convicted of sex crimes would be denied and – we can only hope – deported. But while we’re still signed-up to the ECHR don’t hold your breath. Cooper delivered the whole thing as if it was new and revelatory information – instead of stuff the rest of us normal people, who haven’t been in professional PC denial for the last 20 years – have known for a generation.
And Badenoch was no better. This was a time for hanging heads in shame not making political capital. If ever the phrase “too little too late” was ever so terribly, horrifying and tragically apposite, it was on Monday afternoon. It was truly a day of deep deep shame for the British establishment, civil service and police force.
Cooper – who tried to stymie an inquiry until a few hours ago remember – once again apologised to the girls, now women, who were so grotesquely abused. She may as well have spat in our faces.