Too many still won’t admit the truth about child grooming gangs
We must secure justice for thousands of girls and also ensure that this type of industrial-scale cover-up isn’t repeated.
Suella Braverman
16 September 2024
There are some people you never forget. For me, I’ll always remember that meeting in Rochdale with the brave women who had survived brutal sexual abuse. They told me how, as young girls, they had been preyed upon, trafficked and raped, mainly by Pakistani and Afghan men.
One woman told me how the violent sexual abuse had started when she was just 12 and how she had thereafter fallen pregnant. I heard how one woman had been raped by more than 150 men by the time she was 16.
They told me how police officers, social workers, teachers and councillors all knew about the paedophilia but turned a blind eye for fear of being called racist. They spoke angrily about how the authorities refused to believe them. The truth was covered up out of fear of inflaming racial tension.
They told me how grateful they were to the handful of professionals like Maggie Oliver – a policewoman whistle-blower – who saved their lives. The truth is that the Rochdale and Rotherham grooming scandals are one of the biggest injustices in our country and no one should ever forget what happened, and what still happens, in many parts of our country.
Last week, sentences totalling more than 100 years were handed down to seven Rotherham perpetrators. Credit must be given to the police and CPS for pursuing these investigations, eventually.
Child sexual abuse cases can take years to build, involve the handling of complex and sensitive evidence and depend on the courage of the victims who have to re-live the ordeal in court for convictions to be secured. The survivors have shown immense fortitude.
As Home Secretary I was passionate about making progress on this national scandal. Last year we set up a specialist task force, led by the National Crime Agency, to galvanise the investigative work with the police. I worked with the task force closely; it secured over 500 new arrests in its first year. Sadly, much was left undone by the time of the general election and so there is still a lot more to do. We must secure justice for thousands of girls and also ensure that this type of industrial-scale cover-up isn’t repeated.
A legal duty on professionals to report sexual abuse is needed to break through the inertia and fear that prevail in many of our organisations. This was one of the key recommendations in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and needs to come into force.
The police have been heavily criticised for their mishandling of the Rochdale cases for more than a decade – most recently in an independent report earlier this year. But have there been any consequences for their neglect? None. More accurate recording of the data is needed to smash the taboos around some incidents of child sexual abuse.
As the independent reports confirm, in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, the perpetrators were mainly Pakistani. This truth that dared not speak its name was a reason for the institutional silence and that’s why we need to keep talking about it now. This is not to smear a whole class of people but to be honest about a serious problem in some of our towns and cities.
And we need greater powers to deport foreign-born offenders after conviction. It cannot be right that a foreign criminal who has breached our values and rules in such an egregious way can still enjoy residency in our country.
It will require political courage to confront these problems if we are serious about securing justice for the survivors and protecting children in the future. This Labour Government must put child safety above political correctness, but I’m not so sure they will. I hope they prove me wrong. DT.
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This week, the Government published new figures confirming what everyone knows: Britain is paying far too much for its energy. According to the data, UK companies pay the highest electricity prices in the developed world, four times those in the US. No wonder our firms – especially our manufacturing firms – struggle to compete.
Labour’s answer to this is (surprise, surprise) a state-owned energy company: GB Energy.
There are two ways of looking at this initiative. Either it is an Ed Miliband vanity project, in which eco-fanaticism has been substituted for economic nous. Or otherwise it’s a way for Keir Starmer to keep Miliband and his fellow travellers firmly inside the tent. It may even be both at once.
What is not remotely plausible, however, is the idea that GB Energy will help to improve the UK’s energy security or to bring down those energy bills (by £300 per household, according to Miliband’s pre-election prognostications).
The rationale behind the new company seems to be as follows. In order to decarbonise Britain, we need more investment in green energy infrastructure. But private industry is unwilling to invest. So we need to de-risk and crowd-in private sector cash by putting the taxpayer’s money where the government’s mouth is. That means the government itself taking equity stakes in energy projects. GB Energy will therefore be a hybrid company, both energy generator and investment vehicle.
But the thinking behind GB Energy is completely at odds with reality.
First, it is predicated on the idea that the state is the solution to Britain’s chronic underinvestment. Yet as a brilliant new essay by Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes shows, weak investment is largely due to our sclerotic planning system. This makes it “almost impossible to build anything, anywhere”.
GB Energy and its projects are going to face the same barriers, unless we bring in planning reform. And if planning reform goes ahead, what is the need for GB Energy?
Second, the authors make a compelling case that the drive towards plugging renewables into the electricity grid is itself driving up costs. This is due to intermittency problems, and the costs of rewiring the grid to cope with more distributed energy generation. Once you factor in all the costs and constraints, renewables are “nowhere near commercially competitive”.
This may well change in the near future, as technology improves and costs come down. But under a liberalised system, you might expect to see a lot more investment flowing towards nuclear power too.
Already, however, it is apparent that on nuclear and other energy sources, Miliband is prioritising ideology over market reality. For example, if Labour genuinely cared about cheap and reliable energy, it wouldn’t be gleefully pummelling the North Sea oil and gas sector. The Energy Profits Levy (EPL) imposed by the Tories was already disastrous for investment. Labour have not only increased it but extended it.
Miliband has also ruled out granting new exploration licences, and seems more than happy for legal challenges against new developments, notably Rosebank, to succeed. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that Grangemouth refinery is closing down, shedding 200 jobs. But with the North Sea oil and gas sector supporting around 200,000 jobs, that could be just the start.
Labour activists are fond of talking of a “just energy transition”, with oil and gas workers moving into comparable green engineering jobs. But to paraphrase Adam Smith, people are not pieces to be moved around on a chessboard. Given the age profile of the offshore workforce, many will just take early retirement. Younger workers will move abroad. Jobs and money will leave.
For those in Aberdeen, it might be some consolation that GB Energy will be headquartered there. But swapping high-productivity, high-wage jobs for public sector pen-pushing seems like a pretty poor trade.
Of course, for Labour, economic sense probably doesn’t really come into it. On reflection, there is in fact a third possible explanation for GB Energy: it’s a piece of socialist nostalgia for the high tide of British collectivism – a throwback to when the commanding heights of the economy were nationalised, rationing was extended and Britons shivered through the 1947 winter fuel crisis.
Miliband warned ‘absurd’ net zero electricity pricing will force factori...
Carve-up of UK energy market risks disastrous consequences for jobs and investment, say trade bodies
With Miliband intent on using GB Energy to decarbonise the grid by 2030 – a date energy experts regard as terrifyingly unrealistic – you’d be a fool to discount the possibility of another icy winter. DT.