Whether or not it counts as a U-turn, as it’s been called, is somewhat beside the point: the government’s announcement of a full statutory national inquiry into the way the grooming scandal was mishandled by the authorities is long overdue and highly welcome.
The prime minister and the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, are showing the kind of determination to secure justice that has been absent for an inexplicable run of time.
Perhaps even more heartening, showing that it is actually possible for ministers to take control of events and not wait for lengthy inquiries, is the news that there will be a nationwide policing operation to bring any known or suspected historic grooming gang members to justice.
Led by the National Crime Agency rather than the local forces sometimes discredited by past behaviour, more than 800 older cases – an astounding figure suggestive of a vast backlog of organised, predatory child cruelty – are being reopened. A new police model of investigating these gangs will help prevent future shortcomings.
Baroness Casey, true to her past record of cutting through bureaucratic inertia, has set out the extent to which the victims of these evil men were let down by the few people they could turn to when they needed help – and thus the assistance and, indeed, justice to which they were entitled.
The government is right to say that the issue has not been completely ignored until now. Certainly, it arose at the start of the year when Elon Musk made false claims that Home Office guidance supposedly issued in 2008 had asked police not to intervene in child grooming cases. There have been prosecutions and convictions, the particular and striking racial dimension to some of the gangs’ modus operandi has been well recognised, there has already been one overarching national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay, and some in-depth local investigations, such as in Rotherham.
Indeed, the press began reporting on the way gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin or heritage had been preying upon white girls and young white women as long ago as 2011.
So it was not a case of complete inaction and a scandal erupting even now. But what has also been long apparent is that what has been achieved so far has not been enough – and there is no excuse for the failures and the neglect of many victims. It is unforgivable.
That is the point of the Casey review, which has looked at the facts and the sorry history of the predators in unflinching detail. These were rape gangs, and they engaged in sadistic and life-changing abuse. They acted in concert, and without conscience.
The racial aspect, where there was one, is disturbing. Calls for a proper resolution of the crimes had become irresistible.
It is thus time to find out, on a comprehensive basis, what went wrong and why, and to identify, in as fair and dispassionate a manner as possible, those institutions and those individuals who have questions to answer. The victims – all of them, without exception – deserve nothing less than this.
The cost, once so publicly resented by Boris Johnson when he was prime minister, is immaterial.
For too long, because they were young, because they were girls, because they sometimes were lured from care homes or unhappy lives (but by no means exclusively), or were not from families that had the knowledge and confidence to challenge the system, they were abandoned, left defenceless and even blamed.
Some were pregnant and having to face their abusers as if they were in some sort of romantic relationship. The consequences of those encounters in the streets and chicken shops will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Healing is itself painful. With everything else they were subjected to, the wall of official complacency is unfathomable.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that class, as well as race, played its part in these events – and indubitably so when their perpetrators were predominantly or entirely white. Physical or mental disability was no barrier to being a victim of depravity.
In any case, these were emotionally and physically devastating experiences for children, and have an obscenely, almost Victorian, quality to them. Yet they were committed only a few years ago, almost in plain sight, with something like collusion in parts of local government and the police, and the victims, even now, are still young.
Plainly, the country needs to have an accurate and a balanced accounting for this. The racial and class dimensions have to be faced up to and set in proper perspective. There should be no slide into a toxic Islamophobia. Not all child rapists are men of Pakistani origin and heritage, and, even more important to stress, not all Pakistani men, by origin or heritage, are abusers – indeed, they are as decent and as appalled as anyone else.
The danger – and it is a real one – is that these tragedies do become politicised and abused by those with ulterior, twisted motives, part of a grotesque narrative that sees all migrants, and particularly Muslim people, as sinister sexual predators. This is one reason why the riots last summer in England, and now again in Northern Ireland, have broken out.
The attitude of the far-right extremists is as if no white person had ever conspired to sexually abuse a child, as if Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, Fred and Rose West, Ian Huntley, Jimmy Savile, and countless other notorious paedophiles – some so-called VIPs – had never lived. Each and every one of these cases of child sexual abuse is a crime against a vulnerable person, and then too often exacerbated by indifference shown by carers, social workers, police officers, prosecutors and, yes, the media generally, which didn’t take the issues seriously enough, early enough.
Whereas in the past, British official inquiries have rightly focused on “institutional racism”, Ms Casey’s work suggests that institutional fear of racism – ie, accusations of it – can also be a problem.
If there were “cover-ups”, or else a non-conspiratorial oversensitivity about political correctness, then they should be exposed, the reasons identified, and appropriate reforms implemented. The recommendations of previous reviews have to be enforced.
Whether Sir Keir Starmer, Ms Cooper and their colleagues will ever be given political credit for doing the right thing – identifying the crimes committed by people and organisations in the past, and delivering a measure of justice and restitution – we shall see. But as a nation, Britain is now doing the right thing by the victims. At last.
There may be trouble ahead, but Labour should stick to the plan for national renewal
The spending review will show how far Labour has been blown off course
Rachel Reeves needs to do more than hope for the best
Inside the 24 hours in which Reform imploded
The UK must exercise all its leverage to de-escalate the Middle East
