A political pile-on distracts us from institutional failures

Over the New Year the grooming gang scandal flared brightly here in Britain, inflamed by tweets on X by its owner, Elon Musk. Politicians of various stripes piled on; establishment types came back with “nothing to see here,” with varying levels of indignation, before making interventions that should have been done some time ago. It has now died down again, as Mr Musk’s attention has moved on. But the episode is instructive.
The scandal concerns the grooming and abuse of teenage girls in a number of English towns (and presumably other British towns too) by groups of Pakistani-heritage men from the late 1980s on. The scandal was brought to public attention in the 2010s and has been flaring up periodically since. Abuse is probably continuing in some places – it has been so hard to contain because it was so widespread, especially if you consider group-based abuse more widely than that perpetrated by this ethnic group. The abuse was not investigated at the time it was occurring because the girls, from a lower class background, weren’t taken seriously, because there was a perceived sensitivity around the ethnicity of the perpetrators, and because authorities were generally struggling to take child sexual abuse seriously. It is far from the only child sexual abuse scandal circulating – others include the Church of England and the Catholic Church, and children’s homes (i.e. what used to be called orphanages).
Political exploitation of the scandal was led by what I will call the “far-right”, because I can’t think of a better term. Unfortunately different people mean different things by this term – so I need to explain what I mean. I am talking about extreme white-nationalist groups that believe in the use of violence to promote their beliefs. The de facto leader of this fringe is “Tommy Robinson” (not his real name, but that’s another story), now in prison, but with a following in social media, including in the United States. This group focuses explicitly on the racial aspects of the scandal (the victims are overwhelmingly white). Their political objective is the removal of people with brown or black skins (doubtless with exceptions), and a stop to their immigration. They have very little public support – their tendency to violence and the explicitness of their racism puts people off. Tommy Robinson has been vocal about the scandal for many years, and so far as his supporters are concerned, he is being victimised by the establishment for his troubles, and should be freed. Mr Musk has piled on his support for this, though how far he actually supports far-right objectives I am less clear; more likely he doesn’t really know who he is.
The next group to move in are what I will call the populist-right – which includes the Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage, and the Substack activist Matt Goodwin. These eschew the violent methods and explicit racism of the far-right, though their critics accuse them of implicit support of both. Their objective is to stoke up anger at an out-of-touch liberal elite. They don’t put forward specific policy solutions (though opposition to immigration is a central theme of theirs): in this case they are simply calling for any kind of public enquiry that the political establishment doesn’t want. They just want to scratch the itch until it bleeds. Ultimately their aim is to take political power. Reform UK polled in the teens in the 2024 election, and have 5 MPs, including Mr Farage. They now poll in the 20s, in the same ball-park as Labour and regularly overtaking the Conservatives. They are much more popular than the far-right, though to date a majority of electors has a strong dislike of them – which doesn’t stop the populist-right, especially Mr Goodwin, claiming that they speak for the majority.
And then finally came the Conservatives. In government they followed the establishment line, but now in opposition and worried about Reform, they are calling for a national enquiry, after calling for the publication of an ethnic analysis of abuse statistics that had already been published. The focus of this enquiry seems to be different from the call for a public enquiry that precipitated this particular flare-up – which just focused on the town of Oldham. The government had turned down the call for a central government-led enquiry in favour of a locally-led one. Some Conservatives, notably shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, are channelling the populist-right.
What about the establishment? They want to generalise the case of the Pakistani gangs into the wider problem of child abuse (which they say is much, much bigger) and adopt general solutions to the whole field, marginalising the racial aspect. They point to a public enquiry by Alexis Jay that reported in October 2022. There is no need for a further high-level enquiry, we just need to get on with implementing the Jay recommendations, they say – though it turns out that this implementation has not been particularly rapid. If further enquiries are needed for specific towns, these are best to be locally-led – and, indeed, there are several successful examples of these. Labour are following this establishment line, and, though I have heard nothing explicit, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are too.
What of the victims? Everybody claims to be putting them first, but that is hard to swallow. The BBC has found a few, and interviewed them. These women want a public enquiry – the motivation seems to be the feeling that the world has moved on since the original scandal broke, and they want more attention paid to it. I suspect they want the circle of accountability to broaden, beyond the direct perpetrators, to include those whose poor judgement and prejudice allowed the abuse to persist for much longer than it might have done. That would be a valid concern – though many local political leaders have paid a price, following local enquiries.
The victims seem to have been mainly from what used to be called “broken homes” – lacking a secure family life, and in many instances in institutional care. The authorities regarded them as unruly and badly behaved, and the authors of their own fate. Lacking a loving home environment, they were very vulnerable to grooming tactics. The police and those responsible for their care were unwilling to help. This has been put down to class prejudice, though the difference in social class between the victims and those that might have helped probably wasn’t that great – so the prejudice was a more complex thing. I would like to think that things have moved on, but I am constantly surprised about how persistent prejudice can be.
A further aspect of these cases is the accusation that the authorities were soft on the perpetrators because of their ethnicity. This aspect is played up by both the far-right and the populist-right. The police are accused of fearing accusations of racism. There does seem to be at least some basis for this. But from the accounts I read when the scandals first emerged, it was a bit more complicated than that. Local government in the towns concerned was typically run by Labour councils who had a monopoly or near-monopoly of councillors. This meant that the key politics was between the various factions of the Labour Party and not public elections. These included paternalistic ethnic groups (typically referred to as “community leaders”) who were allowed to run their patches as their own fiefdoms. The problem largely stemmed from this: these leaders would rally round the accused individuals to protect their community’s reputation – and did not seem to be overly worried about it themselves. (Much as churches have in their own abuse scandals – lest anybody think this behaviour is specific to ethnicity). Any attempt to disturb this arrangement would indeed have been branded as racism – a standard defence of such community leaders and their political associates. The way that the British electoral system (more precisely English one now, as Scotland and Wales have reformed theirs) creates local one-party states is a democratic disgrace that both Labour and the Conservatives shrug at. It is much harder for such unaccountable relationships to flourish in properly competitive electoral systems. One of the biggest mistakes of the Liberal Democrats in coalition in 2010 was not to insist on local government electoral reform – rather than accepting a referendum on the Alternative Vote that set the cause of electoral reform back. This is beyond the scope of any mooted enquiry into child abuse, of course.
What of public enquiries? This is the standard British response to any scandal. The British way is to adopt a cumbersome process that usually takes years to get anywhere, and usually without any serious impact once it is finished. Politicians are accused of using them to kick issues into the long grass. As this episode shows, though, that isn’t entirely fair. In this case it is the voting public that seems keen, with politicians taking their lead from them. There seems to be something about the process of compelling witnesses to testify in public that the public likes – a case of the process achieving a degree of accountability that the wheels of justice don’t. The government’s case against the need for a new national enquiry is a sound one though. It actually delays the process of justice.
But this case is about a lot more than ensuring that criminal sanctions are brought against the perpetrators. It is about getting a degree of accountability for those who enabled the abuse to go on, often in open sight. Local enquiries can do that – and the government has announced five more. But there are also wider systems failures – and we are not likely to see much recognition of this.
I have already mentioned the tendency for one-party states to dominate the political leadership of local government – and this often creates a culture of paternalism and coverup. There is a further problem with the management of children and young people who lack a stable home life – and especially those who are institutionalised. Some public institutions actually work quite well: primary schools for example. But social services are hopelessly overstretched. Attitudes of the professions involved may have improved in the last 50 years, but resourcing has not kept pace. It is widely known that early interventions are the most effective – and the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 was making some headway – but this gets lost amid shorter-term public spending priorities, and the austerity years did for any progress. There was indeed too much waffle and verbiage (consultant-speak) in the government’s approach – but the direction was right. I am not as critical of austerity as many – but this is one of the areas (along with the criminal justice system) where very short-sighted cuts were made. The failure was both allowing the abusers to get away with what they were doing, and not looking out for vulnerable young people.
What is required is not more inquiries. What is needed is good political leadership, both locally to strengthen communities, and nationally to ensure that adequate resources are made available. This is not totally lacking, but it should be much, much better.
First published on Substack here
“A further aspect of these cases is the accusation that the authorities were soft on the perpetrators because of their ethnicity. This aspect is played up by both the far-right and the populist-right. The police are accused of fearing accusations of racism. There does seem to be at least some basis for this. But from the accounts I read when the scandals first emerged, it was a bit more complicated than that”
Undoubtedly it is but it’s not so much what it actually is but what it is perceived to be. Any attempt to explain, will inevitably require everyone to look at the bigger picture. They don’t want to look at the bigger picture. They want to focus on the grooming gangs. Any attempt to do other than this will be seen as the Establishment trying to downplay the issue and deflect responsibility away from their chosen targets.
It’s a very dangerous situation.
Agreed. Still, I think most people are largely happy with the government line on this, and see the right’s tactics as exploitative.