This is the story of two ambitious and clever female politicians.
One Katie Lam, a super-bright Tory, educated at a local comp, is fighting for the white working class victims of Pakistani grooming gangs and wants an inquiry to discover how one ‘’community’’ managed to reek so much pain in so many towns as social services, local councillors and the police looked on.
The other is Jess Phillips, educated at a grammar school, who, unbelievably, has the job of Minister for protecting women and girls and yet stood up in the Commons and watered down local inquiries (no judges, no compelling witnesses to attend) fearing Muslim voters would take revenge on Labour in the polls. After all it’s 45% Islam in her constituency alone.
I don’t know if Ms Phillips was in the Chamber when Katie Lam spoke. If not, it would do her good to read her speech in Hansard. It’s quite the most upsetting I can remember.
Ms Lam read from a judge’s summing up at Oxford Crown Court where a Mohammed Karrar was before him on multiple rape charge concerning a white girl aged just 13.
The evidence was shocking. I won’t go into the detail as it’s too disturbing, but Karrar used a pump on the girl. On one occasion she took a knife to him and so he hit her with a baseball bat and then abused her with the bat.
A tale of two politicians - one protecting rape victims and one abandoning them - Kelvin MacKenzie
GB News/Getty Images
He encouraged other 5-6 other men to rape the girl and was jailed for life. These appalling attacks were going on all over the country and it was clear Pakistani men were at the centre of the abuse. Also clear nobody in authority could give a damn. The inquiry, or inquiries, were to find out why. Must say that renegade former Reform MP Rupert Lowe is to be congratulated for raising £500,000 to fund a national inquiry of his own. Despite the tensions Reform should join in on Lowe’s fund raiser.
Ms Lam hadn’t come across my radar before but she’s clearly one to watch. Her grandparents family were wiped out in the Holocaust, was made head girl of her comp in Guildford, Surrey, was President of the Cambridge Union, six years at Goldman Sachs was followed by a spell as a spad to a series of Tory Prime Ministers before becoming MP for The Weald in Kent last year.
I will follow her thoughts intensely from now on. I want MPs to spell out the ugly truth about these gangs and I find it truly shocking that because all these organised attacks happened in Labour constituencies and Labour-held council Starmer has decided it would be too politically painful to face the truth of this almighty cover-up.
The Prime Minister is wrong. Those white girls need somebody to speak up for them. Imagine if white men all over the country had been abusing Pakistani girls there would have been the biggest inquiry in history.
Keir Starmer doesn't say a word on the appalling grooming gangs scandal.
Getty Images
What angers me is how Jess Phillips can continue to pretend she is living up to the title of her Ministry is beyond me. If she had any guts she would tell No.10 push for an inquiry, as I presume from her advocacy on these matters in the past, she wants to hold the inquiry but Downing Street doesn’t want the Muslim backlash.
The reality is that she only has a majority of a few hundred in Birmingham Yardley anyway and will lose big time in 2029 so why not go out now with her head held high.
It’s sickening that Starmer has enough time to hold a round table on the acclaimed Netflix drama Adolescence and mandated that it should be screened in schools, but doesn’t say a word about the grooming gangs.
My bet is that one way or the other there will be an inquiry. Labour will emerge poorly and will deserve to do so.
