“The findings are here, and they are damning.” This was the assessment of Yvette Cooper in response to the peer Louise Casey’s rapid national audit of the grooming gangs scandal.
As the Home Secretary stood up to make her statement on the Casey report, a group of schoolchildren were hurriedly shepherded out of the public gallery, where they had a moment ago been watching Education Questions. A few stragglers will have heard Cooper speak of the conviction of seven men in Rochdale last Friday for “treating teenaged girls as sex slaves”. It has, she added, taken 20 years to bring them to justice.
This was the theme of Cooper’s statement. She outlined the recommendations in Casey’s 200-page report, which MPs were frenetically skimming during her speech, and confirmed that, despite the government’s insistence to the contrary that there was no need to hold a national public inquiry into this scandal, one would now be launched. But Cooper returned again and again to the issue of time. “Most disturbing of all,” Cooper told MPs, “is the fact that too many of these findings are not new.” Later, she cited 15 years of reports and reviews: “We have lost more than a decade.”
This is the message the government will be trying to get across as the backlash from the report – and from the six months of delay since the historic scandal was pushed to the top of the news agenda – plays out. The failings listed in such stark terms by Casey, horrific though they are, should not come as a surprise: victims as young as ten were repeatedly failed by police and social services; the use of the law to protect adult perpetrators rather than child victims; ethnicity data not collected; calls for mandatory reporting of child sexual violence (which Cooper herself demanded more than ten years ago) ignored; a “deep-rooted failure to treat children as children”, as the Home Secretary put it.
Cooper attempted to strike an impartial tone, trying (though not always succeeding) to keep the emotion out of her voice as she outlined the steps that had not been taken over the past decade and a half, during almost all of which the Conservatives had been in power. She talked of the House coming together now to right this injustice, as though the cross-party consensus of the horrors in the Casey report could extend to cooperation.
Any such illusion was shattered the moment Kemi Badenoch stood up to respond. It is no surprise the opposition leader chose to take this on herself rather than leave it to her shadow home secretary. There are few issues on which she is more passionate, and few areas on which her attacks against the government land better. “We all know this is another U-turn,” Badenoch contended, sweeping away Cooper’s attempts to deflect the government’s abrupt change in stance. Her rhetoric had the frenzied intonation of a religious preacher as she accused the Home Secretary of having been “dragged” to this new position, and the Prime Minister of “an extraordinary failure of leadership”.
While the House was hushed in sombre silence when Cooper spoke, the jeers and taunts from both sides while Badenoch was on her feet were grew so aggressive she had to pause and repeat herself as she ran through a list of the three times Labour MPs had voted against the national inquiry the government now supports. Pausing theatrically for a sip of water, she speculated that perhaps the fact these crimes often occurred in Labour-run local authorities was a factor in the government dragging its heels. “The people out there believe this is why nothing has happened,” Badenoch added slyly, couching her accusation in terms of rumour and public discontent. There were cries of “shameful” from the Labour benches; Cooper looked pale with anger.
These are the battle lines to watch as this fight plays out: the Labour government endeavouring to take the heat out of an issue that has exploded on its watch, the Conservatives determined to stoke it. And not just the Conservatives: four Reform MPs were present in the Commons today (though Nigel Farage was absent – as was Rupert Lowe, which is curious given he has been spearheading his own grooming gangs inquiry campaign).
Critics of the government have all the ammunition they need. Cooper all but said it herself: the findings in Casey’s report are damning, but they are not new. Starmer and Cooper can argue that they were waiting for the recommendations that will now be implemented in full – including an inquiry with statutory powers, new police operations, new ethnicity data and research, and further support for child victims – rather than making a rushed response. But this hesitancy has made the government appear as if it has been bounced into its new position, and as such it has lost much of the moral high ground it had when pointing to the Conservatives’ patchy record on the topic.
It is true that Badenoch only seemed to care about this issue once she was out of office and looking for a stick with which to beat the government. It is also true that the government handed that stick right to her.
[See also: The truth about the grooming scandal]
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