For fourteen years the Conservatives sat on their hands while girls were raped, trafficked, and abandoned – then, having done nothing, they now have the gall to point at Jess Phillips and cry “resign!”
It would be funny if it weren’t grotesque.
Let’s start with the record. Between 2010 and 2024, Britain was run by a conveyor belt of Tory Home Secretaries – Theresa May, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly – each promising action, each delivering a new press release instead of a policy. They could have launched a national statutory inquiry at any time. They didn’t.
When the Rotherham report exploded in 2014, exposing 1,400 victims and police who looked the other way, May called it “shocking” and did absolutely nothing beyond convening another review. Her Home Office even suppressed its own research because it found no neat ethnic villain to blame. That report – inconveniently for the tabloids – concluded there was no single ethnic pattern. May buried it. The myth of the “Asian grooming gang” was born, and the truth suffocated beneath it.
Meanwhile, council after council – Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, Oldham, Bradford – commissioned their own investigations. They found the same story everywhere: broken safeguarding, ignored victims, underfunded social services, police inertia. The pattern screamed national crisis. Westminster heard the alarm and shut the door.
By 2020, under Johnson and Patel, the farce deepened. The Home Office finally published its long-awaited review – quietly, with no press release – confirming what experts already knew: most child sexual abuse occurs within families, not “gangs” at all. Again, inconvenient. So the government pretended it hadn’t read its own findings and moved on to photo ops about “cracking down on woke policing.”
All this time, local safeguarding teams were being gutted by austerity. Twenty thousand police officers gone. A quarter of child-protection budgets wiped out. Rape conviction rates collapsed to the lowest in recorded history – barely one in sixty cases leading to charge. That wasn’t “political correctness.” It was political cruelty, dressed up as fiscal prudence.
Then came the final insult. Elon Musk vomits out a tweet about “Muslim rape gangs” and suddenly the very same politicians who ignored victims for a decade rediscover their outrage. GB News turns it into an open sewer of race-baiting. Reform UK demands “justice for white girls.” Tory MPs start bleating about cover-ups – by Labour, of course – as though Theresa May, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman had never existed.
And now, into this swamp, step a handful of survivors demanding Jess Phillips’ resignation. Some are undoubtedly sincere, furious at years of betrayal. Others are being used, their pain co-opted by the same populist machine that ignored them for fourteen years. Phillips, who spent her life working with abuse victims, is suddenly branded the villain – by the people who cut the budgets, burned the files, and buried the truth.
The right calls it accountability. I call it arsonists pointing at the ruins and blaming the smoke.
Yes, the grooming-gang survivors deserve trust and justice. But that will not come from the likes of Lee Anderson, who can barely pronounce “inquiry” without turning it into a culture war. Nor from the same tabloids that profited from printing their pain while voting for the governments that caused it.
The plain fact is this: Jess Phillips may have mishandled the optics – brusque tone, defensive letters, poor communication – but she’s the first minister actually trying to do the job. She’s building the statutory inquiry the Tories ducked for fourteen years. For that, she’s being pilloried by the very people who created the vacuum she’s trying to fill.
And those vaunted “local inquiries” the Tories hide behind? They existed because of government failure, not instead of it. Brave local councils – often Labour-run, incidentally – exposed what Westminster ignored. The Conservatives cherry-picked their findings for soundbites about “Asian gangs” while defunding the very services trying to stop all child exploitation, regardless of race.
The truth is both uglier and simpler than the populists admit: grooming gangs flourished because the state stopped caring. Not because the perpetrators were Pakistani, but because the victims were working-class girls – expendable under austerity, invisible in a system obsessed with spreadsheets and headlines.
And now those same moral pygmies have the audacity to point their trembling fingers at a minister who actually gives a damn.
So no – Jess Phillips shouldn’t resign. The ones who should are the ghosts of governments past. The Home Secretaries who smirked, delayed, and silenced research. The commentators who sold fear for clicks. The MPs who turned child rape into a political football.
This isn’t about justice for survivors anymore. It’s about a right-wing establishment desperate to rewrite history before the inquiry it never wanted reveals just how completely it failed.
When the final report lands, it won’t be Jess Phillips who stands accused. It’ll be fourteen years of Conservative complicity – the longest, most shameful silence in modern British politics.
And now the inquiry itself is unravelling – not by accident, but by design. The Conservatives have made it so toxic that no one of integrity dares lead it, which suits them perfectly. Every resignation, every row, every leaked letter keeps the spotlight off their own record and on Labour instead. They don’t need to stop the inquiry – only to make it unworkable. The chaos is the cover-up.
No comments:
Post a Comment