Badenoch’s call for new grooming gangs probe reflects old fixations

Good morning. Tulip Siddiq has resigned from the government. I don’t have all that much to say other than “not before time”: it was obviously untenable for the government’s anti-corruption minister to be the subject of not one but two corruption probes herself.

Keir Starmer’s sluggishness in acting to remove one of his longest-standing allies, in stark contrast to the swift exit of Louise Haigh, makes it look like standards of behaviour in government are on a sliding scale of how quickly you rallied behind his leadership in the winter of 2019. It’s exactly the kind of thing his government was meant to represent a breach from.

Elsewhere, Kemi Badenoch gave an interview to GB News about her call for a further inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. The Tory party leader made a number of claims about the inquiries into this crime and the crime itself that do not fit the evidence. To discuss it further I need to quote fairly extensively from what is a pretty harrowing set of documents. In addition, this means that today’s newsletter runs rather longer than it does usually. My apologies in advance for both.

Assessing the evidence

In Kemi Badenoch’s sit-down interview with GB News, she set out what she sees as the shortcomings of previous inquiries into grooming gangs and the issues that need to be looked at extensively.

Later on in the newsletter I will address one of Badenoch’s remarks that has been driving all of the news coverage of the interview — that grooming gangs are made up of “peasants”, “not even just from one country, but from sub-communities within those countries”.

First of all, however, I want to examine several of the comments Badenoch made in that interview that have not made headlines. They concern her belief that the last government’s inquiries were inadequate and need to be examined further. Badenoch claimed that the inquiries “ended up not even looking deeply at grooming gangs”. This surprised me, because the 2022 inquiry released a separate 185-page report into “child sexual exploitation networks” (ie grooming gangs) in February 2022, ahead of the more wide-ranging report it gave in the autumn of that year.

Badenoch believes that there are “two cultural issues” that a further inquiry needs to examine. One is the culture that allowed these crimes to go unpunished, “the culture of silence, the culture of ‘computer says no’, the culture of ‘move along, nothing to see here’, the culture of ‘this is not our problem’ which is on the side of the state”.

I am now going to quote extensively from the first case study in the February 2022 report, concerning a child named in the report as CS-A12 (bold emphasis mine):

CS-A12 described her stepfather’s regular violence towards her and her mother. At age 12, she started running away from her home. She self-harmed and was treated for depression. Shortly afterwards, in the mid-2000s, CS-A12 was placed in residential care. She said that staff “just left me basically to do what I wanted”.

She explained how she met adult men who gave her alcohol and drugs and sexually exploited her over the following three to four years: “They pretended that I was part of their family. They gave me what I was lacking at the care home. They gave me somewhere where I felt like I belonged and somewhere where I felt like I was wanted”.

Police often stopped cars in which CS-A12 was with her abusers. She told us that while the police often asked her age and identified that she was missing from care, no action was taken against the men. She said she was regularly told that she was wasting police time: “One police officer told me I was what was going wrong in our society and that I was the type of person that was bringing about a bad society . . . Another one said that we were going to get these men in trouble because we wanted to act like child prostitutes”.

CS-A12 said that the care home staff knew that she and other girls were being given alcohol and drugs by adult men. Staff helped one girl to select an outfit for a “date” with a 30-year-old male. They missed many opportunities to end the abuse, for example, when the men bought CS-A12 gifts or dropped her off at the care home when drunk. Instead, she said: “I was told by the staff that I was attention seeking and stuff like that, which I probably was, to be honest, I probably was . . . crying for help, trying to get someone to notice that something wasn’t right, but no one ever paid attention. I were just treated like I was disgusting for doing it, not that there was a reason behind me doing it.”

That there is a problem with a culture of not speaking out and speaking the truth, that the state is hidebound by a “computer says no” culture . . . these are regular preoccupations of Badenoch’s. In my view, there is some merit to her view that these can be important issues and flaws explaining why the state fails in some instances.

However, what we see uncovered in the extensive inquiry into the issue of grooming gangs reveals a far graver issue. Frankly a “computer says no” culture, or “a culture of silence” would represent considerable upgrades on what we see in the 2022 reports. What we observe there is a culture of active complicity with people abusing children, a complicity driven by a cocktail of misogyny and classism.

I cannot look into Badenoch’s mind and know whether she has read and absorbed any or all of the inquiry reports. Yet her claims about the shortcomings of previous inquiries and her diagnosis of the underlying problem of grooming gangs seem no different than if she had ignored the evidence, and had instead decided that the real problem were her usual fixed explanations for state failure.

Something similar is at work with her claim about the second “issue of culture” that her mooted new inquiry should look at:

“Where do these abusers come from? There’s a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of generalisation and many innocent people will end up being grouped in with them. But there is a systematic pattern of behaviour, not even just from one country, but from sub-communities within those countries. People with a particular background, work background. People with a very poor background, a sort of peasant background, very, very rural, almost cut off from even the home origin countries that they might have been in.” 

This is a less precise version of an argument you hear from parts of the British right: that what drives grooming gangs in the UK is the culture and kinship ties of Mirpur in Pakistan. Here is the ethnicity breakdown of suspected cases of group-based child sexual abuse in England and Wales in 2023, where the ethnicity of the suspected perpetrator is recorded:

Now, I would advise great caution in seeing this as a complete picture of group-based child sexual exploitation in England and Wales. White British children account for 63 per cent of school children in England, so that is quite a chunky over-representation among both perpetrators and victims. That suggests to me that the failures to identify both perpetrators and victims among ethnic minority Britons, and to correctly record their ethnicity once they have been found have not been fixed yet.

This is also consistent with the wider statistics on child protection plans that suggest white British children are far more likely to be on them than their ethnic minority peers. This is a problem that Alexis Jay identified in her reports. It is not clear to me what purpose another inquiry, let alone the one on the lines Badenoch proposes, will serve in speeding up the process of fixing it.

The 1,884 white suspects and the 110 black ones are not “peasants” from “sub-communities” in Mirpur or elsewhere. Nor, I think we can safely say, were all 60 of the “mixed” ones. I see no reason to treat the same crime as requiring a different explanation when it is committed by a different ethnic group.

This is a Badenoch preoccupation, too. It aligns with what she has said of Nigeria, where she spent most of her childhood, that she has “nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies”.

The leader of the opposition, both in the job they have now (holding the government to account) and the job they aspire to (actually running the government), does have to show clear signs of reading the evidence, and reaching a view that matches that evidence, rather than reaching for their own preoccupations and their own ancient enmities. On the evidence of the past few weeks, Badenoch can do neither.

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