Is it any wonder thousands are joining Reform when our PM is so blinkered - Kwasi Kwarteng

The protection and safety of the young girls themselves were sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. It is clear now that the protection of young girls was of minor, if any, importance.

Authorities turned a blind eye to years of abuse, because they didn’t want to appear racist. Last week Jess Philips, the Labour government minister, decided not to hold a national inquiry into this scandal. I don’t know why she made this decision.

She may have been influenced by the old anti-racist mantras or, even more worryingly, she may have been frightened, as she did not want to antagonise the “Muslim community”. She has a very high proportion of Muslims in her constituency, and she barely held on to it in the last General Election.

She may, we can surmise, be reluctant further to antagonise this voting bloc. In a year which saw a landslide for Labour, she won her seat by only 693 votes.

Of course, she could never admit this, but I know that’s how many MPs and ministers think.

In any case, whatever the reasons, her decision was wrong. It looks like an attempt to sweep this grotesque scandal under the carpet, as though nothing happened. But evil things did happen, the like of which we can scarcely believe.

Young girls from traditional white working-class communities, as young as 10 or 11, were groomed and then raped by gangs of men. Some were killed for speaking out.

In 2000 Lucy Lowe, her sister and mother were all killed in Telford by her abuser when he set fire to their house. Lucy was only 16, but had already given birth to their daughter, when she was only 14. Remarkably, the former Labour MP for Keighley, Ann Cryer, put it best: “authorities were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness”.

As a Yorkshire MP, she represented communities where much of this systemic and chronic abuse had taken place. Yet the current Labour leader and Prime Minister has this week accused people who have expressed similar views of jumping on a “Far-Right bandwagon”.

Sir Keir seems to think that anyone who has the temerity to raise concerns about the rape and abuse of children is a card-carrying member of the “Far-Right”. It’s precisely this blinkered thinking , as expressed by Sir Keir, that got us into this foul mess in the first place.

“Racist”, “far right”, “fascist” are just some of the knee jerk responses of the metropolitan left, when anyone questions their dogmas.

They are key words of abuse in the lexicon of the left. It was this culture of verbal abuse that scared the “authorities” into turning a blind eye to such bestial crimes in the first place.

It was better, they seemed to think, that young girls should be serially raped than that they should appear “racist”. Justice should be even handed and colour blind.

It shouldn’t matter what ethnicity the criminals are, so long as they are caught and summarily dealt with. In the obsession to preserve an image of a perfectly harmonious multi-cultural society, this basic principle of justice was ignored.

Race became everything, justice was nothing. This scandal shows how perverse and out of joint much of our culture has become.

Labour blame the Tories and the Tories blame Labour. Yet these crimes took place over decades. Both parties failed the victims of these crimes. Is it any wonder that thousands are joining the Reform party?