Musk and Badenoch are playing gutter politics with grooming gangs scandal - Bill Rammell
Musk and Badenoch are playing gutter politics with grooming gangs scandal - Bill Rammell
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Elon Musk and Kemi Badenoch are playing gutter politics with the issue of grooming gangs and child sexual abuse and exploitation. And our Prime Minister is right to accuse them of being ‘desperate for attention and spreading lies.’
Fact one - The issue of grooming gangs of predominantly Pakistani heritage men preying on predominantly white girls is, appalling and needs to be rooted out, and those guilty severely punished.
Fact two - There has already been a comprehensive independent, national inquiry into child sexual abuse led by Professor Alexis Jay, which reported in 2022. It made 20 recommendations for change. The last Conservative Government acted on none of them, prompting Professor Jay to accuse Tory Ministers of having “failed to understand the recommendations either in substance or significance.” Very welcomely Labour is committed to full implementation.
Fact three - Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, has rejected the request by Oldham Council for a national statutory public inquiry, and argued that the council-run inquiries in Rotherham and Telford had greater legitimacy because they were commissioned and delivered locally. There would be massive cost and delay in a public inquiry, taking about 10 years. We have the Jay review. The priority should be to enact its recommendations, as our new Government is committed to.
Fact four - The Tories in Government rejected a public inquiry. To call for one now is breathtaking hypocrisy.
Nazir Afzal described Musk's criticism of Starmer as "offensive".
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The Musk and Badenoch attacks on Kier Starmer are wrong and offensive. Nazir Afzal, the former hugely respected chief crown prosecutor for northwest England who brought the Rochdale grooming gang to justice, said that Musk’s latest criticism of Starmer was “offensive”.
In the role, Afzal overturned a previous decision not to bring charges against men suspected of sex offences against teenage girls to lead a ground-breaking prosecution in 2012. The former prosecutor said Starmer was “immensely supportive” of him in bringing prosecutions.
Afzal has said “There were clearly major failures in the early 2000s prior to Keir becoming DPP which hadn’t been addressed until we dealt with the Rochdale grooming gang case.”
Afzal credited Starmer with bringing about an overhaul in the immediate aftermath of the Rochdale case. “It became priority number one,” he said. Changes included introducing prosecutorial guidelines that place investigative focus on suspects and not the credibility of victims.
“After Starmer’s involvement, the police were told that the policy was to believe the victim and then investigate,” he said. “This was a 180-degree turn, a sea change in the way we approach these types of cases. And the impact was immediate.”
Kier Starmer has been the agent of positive change in tackling the issue of grooming gangs.
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Starmer ordered a comprehensive restructuring of the Crown Prosecution Service’s response to sex grooming in 2012.
Starmer as DPP said “In a number of cases presented to us, particularly in cases involving groups, there’s clearly an issue of ethnicity that has to be understood and addressed,” Starmer said. “As prosecutors we shouldn’t shy away from that.”
The reforms he introduced applied to the handling of current and historic cases. Afzal said: “Once Keir became aware, he grasped it and was immensely supportive of what I was doing and what we then had to do to ensure that we dealt with these cases in ways that hadn’t been dealt with before.”
So, rather than being ‘complicit in the rape of children’ as Musk has grotesquely and falsely claimed-bluntly he was lying-Kier Starmer has been the agent of positive change in tackling the issue of grooming gangs.
I repeat, Elon Musk and Kemi Badenoch are playing gutter politics with a hugely important issue and should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
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