Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch leapt on to Twitter/X yesterday to demand a national public inquiry into what she called the “rape gangs scandal”. It seemed rather odd timing on her part, with much of the world’s media – and population – focused on New Year’s terrorism outrages in New Orleans and Las Vegas. But then, it wasn’t really her idea.
Badenoch was leaping on to a bandwagon set in motion a few hours earlier by world’s richest man and Twitter /X owner Elon Musk, and he in turn had picked up the demand from right-wing TV channel GB News (GBN), employer of serial rabble-rouser Nigel Farage – when he’s not moonlighting on some of his less well-paid other jobs, such as being absentee MP for Clacton.
The channel had its Union Jack boxer shorts in a twist about Oldham Council’s request for such a national inquiry being turned down by Home Office minister Jess Phillips (full job title ‘Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls’). Phillips advised Oldham that it should itself lead an inquiry into grooming in the town, back in… er… October.
Perhaps still recovering from a surfeit of festive spirits, the GBN editors decided that this would do as a hot New Year’s topic, Musk picked it up, Badenoch and her home affairs muppet, Chris Philp, pulled out their megaphones and much of the right-leaning media parroted them (though in some cases having waited to see what Farage had to add to the ‘debate’).
Microtalented Home Office shadow Philp told the BBC the time had come for a national inquiry, with powers to “compel witnesses to come forward”, to get “to the truth,” while Badenough posted on Musk’s platform: “Trials have taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority has joined the dots. 2025 must be the year that the victims start to get justice.”
You might think that at least a little sheepishness ought to be on display, considering how many grooming gang scandals came to light under a succession of Conservative prime ministers from 2010 to 2024, but humility is hardly one of Badenoch’s key personality traits. She’s not going to explain why this supposedly urgently needed inquiry wasn’t called while she was Minister for Women and Equalities (25 October 2022 to 5 July 2024). Not while she’s in with a shout, albeit a quavering one, of persuading Musk that he shouldn’t be precipitant about bunging a £100 million donation to Reform UK, which appears to be on the cards.
The present hysteria among right and far-right politicians, sect leaders, media figures and assorted rentagobs has put us in mind of one particular child abuse gang case, that readers may need reminding of – or, indeed, may have never noticed in the first place.
This scandal concerned the conviction in 2023 of no less than 21 individuals for sexual offences against children in Walsall, resulting in prison sentences of between two and twenty years. The abuse had taken place over almost a decade, and once the facts began to come to light it resulted in the largest child sexual abuse investigation ever carried out by West Midlands Police.
Our guess is that most of our readers will be struggling to remember this case, even though those hefty sentences were dished out less than two years ago. Oldham, yes. Rochdale, Rotherham, Huddersfield of course… but Walsall? If it’s ringing no bells with you, we’re not surprised. Even on more or less politically neutral Wikipedia, the list of nearly 40 “Notable incidents” in its pretty comprehensive article on “Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom” does not mention Walsall.
That might well be because, although some serious news outlets gave the case a responsible amount of coverage, the populist media didn’t create their usual three-ring circus, nor did social media, and the usual suspects on the hard and far right spared us their customary bloviation on the subject.
An answer is probably already forming in your minds. These are all white faces, with Anglo Celtic names attached. There’s not a nominally Islamic or dermatologically Asian individual among them. How different is that from the right’s preferred narrative?
Would bastards like these be focused on by the national public inquiry that is being called for? We rather suspect that some way would be found of excluding them. Perhaps the terms of the imagined inquiry would be limited to ‘grooming gangs’ and then ‘grooming’ restricted by definition to the recruitment of vulnerable teenagers. That would quickly erase the Walsall convicts from the picture, because they committed all of their offences against children aged 12 and under.
The problem with the Walsall 21 – and the rest of the almost 90 per cent of all people in prison for committing child sex offences who describe themselves as ‘White British’ – is that when you include them the ‘joining the dots’ that Badenoch claims to want ends up drawing a rather different picture to the one that she, Philp, Musk, the tabloids, Reform UK, nazi splinter groups and thousands of far-right randos on social media would prefer.
Don’t get us wrong. Everyone at Searchlight hates child sex offenders – perhaps no one more fervently than our senior Muslim researcher-writer – and we do not object at all to a major review of child abuse criminality. We have our doubts that a public inquiry is the best way of doing it. These tend to be long, drawn-out and expensive at the best of times, and in the case of a national review covering several decades, would surely be interminable and exorbitant.
Putting that qualm aside for a moment, by all means let us have some serious government-level research into child sex abuse, with the findings made public. But let’s ensure that it’s comprehensive, and not cherry-picked to facilitate politicos and apparatchiks smearing all of Britain’s Muslim communities. Let it be part of a campaign to reduce all such crime, and to catch all of those who persist in committing it – and not part of a panicky, hysterical Tory tactic to recover votes they have haemorrhaged to Reform.
Only a few days before the Walsall sentences were handed down, Suella Braverman wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Mail in which she alleged that “almost all” grooming gang members were British Pakistanis. As home secretary she would have known that the Walsall trials were active, and that all of the accused were white, but she took advantage of a media blackout to make this bizarre and unsupportable claim.
In view of Braverman’s outburst, West Midlands Police chief constable Craig Guildford held his fire until the 21 had been sentenced, and then made the statement: “It is important to remain open-minded about who can commit these offences. They know no social or religious boundaries and it is important to remind the public and professionals to report their concerns to the police, regardless.”
Mr Guildford was right in what he said, and right to express those points publicly. If we are to stamp out child sex criminality, we need to stick to the facts, and not use the subject as an easy opportunity to spread lies and bigotry.
For those who never saw any coverage of the Walsall case, the Guardian made a proper, professional job of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/05/twenty-one-convicted-in-west-midlands-child-sexual-abuse-inquiry