Baroness Casey, who has long dealt forthrightly with the “too difficult” box of issues which face governments, from her role as homelessness and youth crime “tsars” under Tony Blair, to working on a prophetic report under David Cameron on problems of lack of ethnic integration in areas with high concentrations of immigration from a single ethnic background – has made this step impossible to resist.
Leaked versions of her report, commissioned at the start of the year by the Government, are reported to cover the link between illegal immigration and the incidence of violence against young girls.
In essence, the Government’s default response to unwelcome interest from Elon Musk, Reform UK and its opponents on the right was that an inflammatory subject was best dialled down, with inquiries and remedies focused at local level. It was symptomatic of a Starmerite fear of the topic – the biggest personal shock he has had as prime minister were the Southport riots after the murders of little girls by the son of a family originally from Rwanda and how badly his statements on the killings failed to capture the sorrow and anger across the country.
And Labour knows at heart that it is at fault. With very rare exceptions like the outspoken Ann Cryer – the long-standing former Keighley MP who shone a spotlight on the dangerous degree of alienation in many constituencies like her own from the late 1990s onwards and was little thanked for this – the party in and out of government has mostly turned a blind eye to a topic it found hard to square with a default progressive view that diversity is a good thing and “community cohesion” trumped other concerns.
A bedrock of indifference and avoidance by the main political parties allowed a toxic culture to go unchallenged.
In one of those horse-shoe ideological moments, a left-of-centre establishment uneasy at focusing negatively on a problem concentrated in a single faith and ethnic group has coincided with the evasions of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, whose passive-aggressive response to the Casey report was that it would “support yet another investigation into the grooming scandal if proponents can explain why previous inquiries costing millions have not given them the answer they are looking for”.
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The shift of mode in Government from reluctance to focus on a thankless subject to full transparency will also come at a cost. The timing and duration of the inquiry and its electoral implications will be high on No 10’s minds, given that the link between Labour and the Muslim vote will be strained in some areas where support for Reform is rising – and painful for Starmer, who has tried to focus us on his own record of instigating convictions in his days as director of public prosecutions.
None of us did. The late Andrew Norfolk, who pursued the scandal for The Times, was an outlier in journalism in his detailed attention to the fate of so many vulnerable girls. Successive Tory governments could not decide which way they faced on arguments on integration and how to deal with social tensions in milieus they did not understand. Now Starmer has reached for vintage Blair-speak by saying that a full inquiry is “the right thing to do”.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of the Politico/Sky’s Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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