Whitewash From Whitehall: National Grooming Gangs Inquiry

The Bandwagon That Became Policy

In January, Starmer accused those demanding a national inquiry of “amplifying” far-right demands and riding political bandwagons. His defence now that he was merely “calling out” politicians like Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who he suggests, while “in power, had said and done nothing”- reveals the shallow political calculation behind his original position.

Starmer’s criticism of the Tories rings hollow when his own response has been to resist, delay, and ultimately capitulate only under sustained pressure. Starmer’s journey from dismissing inquiry demands as far-right bandwagon-jumping to announcing exactly such an inquiry reveals the democratic deficit at the heart of modern British politics.

Public demands for accountability are initially dismissed as extremist, then reluctantly adopted when political pressure becomes unsustainable.

This pattern treats democratic accountability as something to be resisted rather than embraced. It suggests that public demands for investigation into institutional failures are inherently suspect unless they emerge from within the very institutions that failed.

The result is a system where victims wait years for justice while officials debate whether their suffering deserves investigation. Where campaigners are smeared as extremists for demanding exactly what government eventually admits is necessary.

The Prime Minister’s claim that commissioning Casey’s report represents “a practical, common sense way of doing politics” inadvertently exposes the problem: treating systematic child sexual abuse as a matter for political calculation rather than moral imperative.

The Whitehall Cover-Up Revealed

Sky News revelations about Whitehall’s attempt to suppress grooming gang reporting in 2011 expose the institutional rot that has characterized official responses to these scandals. Dominic Cummings’ account of Department for Education officials wanting to help Rotherham Council stop The Times from exposing the scandal reveals how deep the cover-up instinct runs within the civil service.

According to Cummings, officials approached him saying: “There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story.” The recommendation was for Michael Gove to support legal action that would have silenced Andrew Norfolk’s groundbreaking reporting.

That Gove rejected this advice and instead chose to “blow up” the council’s judicial review attempt represents one of the few moments of moral clarity in this entire sordid affair. But it also reveals how close Britain came to a successful institutional cover-up that would have buried these crimes for years longer.

Cummings’ description of officials wanting a “total cover-up” and being “on the side of the council” to suppress Times reporting should shock anyone who believes in press freedom and accountability. Instead, it merely confirms what victims and campaigners have long argued: the British establishment’s first instinct was protection, not justice.

Britain’s grooming gang scandals represent more than individual crimes or cultural failures; they expose systematic institutional breakdown that prioritised reputation management over child protection. Any inquiry that doesn’t acknowledge this fundamental reality will fail the victims it claims to serve.

Starmer’s conversion from sceptic to supporter of national inquiry might suggest political evolution, but it more likely represents political expedience. The question now is whether this inquiry will deliver the accountability that victims deserve or merely the appearance of justice that politicians require.

Starmer says we should “follow the evidence” in the new National Grooming Gang Inquiry.

But how can we follow the evidence when the very people who enabled, excused, and covered up these crimes, police officers, social workers, councillors, civil servants, are reportedly exempt from scrutiny? The fact remains you can’t expose the truth by shielding those who buried it. That’s not justice. It’s damage control.

If the state won’t hold its own institutions to account for one of the most grotesque betrayals of public trust in modern British history, then don’t be surprised when that anger spills onto the streets. And yet, when it does, it won’t be seen as the cry of a betrayed people; it’ll be smeared as far-right agitation. That’s the game now: label, dismiss, suppress. All to protect a system that covered up the most unspeakable of crimes… the organised abuse of our children.

The darkness that has shrouded these crimes for decades cannot be dispelled by half-measures and institutional self-protection. Real light requires the courage to illuminate uncomfortable truths about power, complicity, and the price of official silence.

Britain’s institutions have spent years proving they cannot police themselves. This inquiry represents perhaps the last chance to demonstrate that democratic accountability still means something in a system that has repeatedly failed its most vulnerable citizens.

The victims of grooming gang abuse have waited long enough for justice. They deserve better than another exercise in damage control disguised as moral clarity.

At this rate, a reckoning is coming.

Paul Knaggs

#CaseyReview #JusticeForVictims