A group of grooming gang child rape survivors who resigned from the national inquiry this week have issued a set of demands to the left-wing Labour government if it desires their participation, including the sacking of Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips.
The national inquiry into the mass rape and sexual exploitation of mostly young white working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, in addition to the cover-ups and failure of local authorities, has been thrown into complete chaos this week after four members of the survivors/victims advisory panel resigned.
UPDATE 1000 — Phillips has ‘complete confidence’ of Prime Minister
The apparently impending collapse of the government’s grooming gangs inquiry — which, remember, it never wanted and had to be forced into hosting in the first place — is becoming a serious political issue for the Prime Minister. Amid demands for Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips to resign over what was widely perceived as accusations of lying made against the survivors themselves, which given the circumstances of years of official cover-ups of industrial-scale child rape is probably just about the worst position for the government to have put itself in, the government has moved to assert it has total faith in her.
All of the other issues aside, this is not a comfortable position for Phillips to be in. Over many decades of British political tradition, the Prime Minister publicly stating that they have full confidence in a minister has so often been the final public pronouncement on the matter before said minister returns to the back benches.
Speaking on behalf of Sir Keir Starmer this morning was Josh MacAlister, the children’s minister, who The Guardian notes said the magic words: “[Phillips has] full backing of the prime minister and the home secretary”. Watch this space.
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They accused the government of tapping people with conflicts of interest to head the investigation and of broadening the scope of the inquiry to include other forms of child sex abuse, which they claimed would serve to diminish the focus on the specific failures surrounding the horrific crimes of the grooming gangs, which were often overlooked or covered up for politically correct reasons, such as government authorities fearing accusations of racism from perpetrators.
Insult was added to injury on Tuesday when Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips — who previously opposed a national inquiry — took to the floor of the House of Commons to accuse the victims of lying about the inquiry, claiming that it was “categorically untrue” that the scope of the inquiry was set to expand. However, according to Sky News, leaked internal communications between Philipps and survivor Fiona Goddard demonstrated that such concerns “were valid”.
In a letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Wednesday, the four women said that they would only consider returning to the inquiry if Phillips is removed from her post, writing: “Her conduct over the last week has shown she is unfit to oversee a process that requires survivors to trust the government. Her departure would signal you are serious about accountability and changing direction.”
“Being publicly contradicted and dismissed by a government minister when you are a survivor telling the truth takes you right back to that feeling of not being believed all over again. It is a betrayal that has destroyed what little trust remained,” they added.
Additionally, the group of survivors demanded that the inquiry remain focused solely on grooming gangs “without expansion or dilution”, and that victims be “free to speak openly with their support networks without fear of reprisal”.
They also said that all victims must be “genuinely consulted” about the appointment of the inquiry chair, which they said must “be a senior sitting or former judge, with no major conflicts of interest in policing or social services.”
It comes as both frontrunners to chair the inquiry quit the investigation amid accusations that they had conflicts of interest, given their ties to the police and social services, which the victims noted were the two main agencies responsible for many of the coverups of grooming gang crimes.
The group of victims went on to call on the government to replace the victims liaison lead, Sabah Kaiser, over past comments attempting to downplay the role that race played in the scandal.
According to The Telegraph, she previously argued for Al Jazeera in 2023 that it was “destructive, distracting, irresponsible” and “not based on evidence” to note that Pakistani Muslim men were primarily responsible for grooming gang crimes.
This comes in contrast to the findings of the Casey Report, which found that “many cases of group-based child sexual exploitation have involved men from Asian or Pakistani ethnic backgrounds.” The Casey Report, as with others before it, also found that police and local authorities consistently attempted to downplay that Muslim men were sexually exploiting young working-class white girls for fear of stoking community tensions or appearing racist.
The issue was long a taboo in the British press, with those who raised the involvement of race and religion frequently being dismissed as conspiracy theorists. As recently as January, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer accused proponents of a national inquiry as jumping on the “bandwagon of the far-right” and of spreading “misinformation.”
Starmer even actively whipped members of his left-wing Labour Party — which has also been implicated in grooming gang coverups — to vote against demands for a national inquiry. Following steep international and domestic pressure, which intensified following the Casey Report, Starmer finally acquiesced in June to hold an inquiry.
However, some, including former detective turned grooming gang whistleblower Maggie Oliver, have accused Starmer of attempting to sabotage the inquiry, saying this week: “It really is another cover-up, another attempt to water down what this national inquiry should be.”
“They’re even trying to expand it to cover child sexual abuse and not grooming gangs, any form of group-based abuse, again trying to muddy the waters and pretend that this kind of offending is not still going on and it is a national scandal.”
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