What Lucy Powell’s Grooming Gang Comments Tell Us About Labour
It should be a political no-brainer. The ‘grooming gangs’ scandal is as grotesque and shameful a blight on any country’s legacy as could be envisaged. The Government should be eager to instigate an immediate inquiry into what went wrong. Any delay would surely be unfathomable. And yet here we are.
The report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 confirmed the extent of the rape and torture of young girls – more than 1,400 victims, and doubtless many more yet to be discovered – and that the fear of being branded as ‘racist’ had prevented those in authority from acting sooner. The Labour Party apparently wants us to forget all about it and move on. Worse still, it seems intent on repeating the same mistake that the report highlighted, by throwing around accusations of racism against those who raise concerns.
This attitude seemed to be encapsulated during an exchange between writer Tim Montgomerie and leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell on the last edition of Any Questions on BBC Radio 4. Montgomerie had asked Powell if she had seen the programme on Channel 4 about the abuse in the north of England, to which Powell replied: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, okay, let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we? Yeah.”
I have written previously about the notion of ‘dog-whistles’, and how the phrase is a rhetorical tool to make sinister insinuations on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. It is a form of amateur telepathy, a means to accuse someone of secretly thinking something that they never said. It’s the kind of strategy that sixth form debating clubs quickly learn to avoid, and certainly shouldn’t be used by elected politicians if they hope to keep their self-respect intact.
It is also, of course, a neat trick to avoid finding yourself drawn into difficult conversations. It’s reminiscent of the debate in the House of Lords last November when Jacqui Smith – now the Rt Hon the Baroness Smith of Malvern and the Government spokesperson for equalities – was asked whether the Government had a working definition of ‘gender identity’. The honest answer would have been: “No, because nobody knows what it means.” Instead, she accused her challenger of attempting to “catch her political opponents out”. Given that so much public policy has been formulated on the basis of this mystical notion of ‘gender identity’, the question of whether the Government can define it is surely relevant.
Others have claimed that the question ‘what is a woman?’ is a ‘transphobic dog-whistle’. In the tribunal of nurse Sandie Peggie, the male doctor who had insisted on sharing her changing facilities even described the phrase “biological sex” as a “nebulous dog whistle”. But this is no less ridiculous than the claim that discussions about the mass rape of children is a frivolous tune to be blown on a political “trumpet”.
Powell’s remarks would be easier to dismiss as a slip of the tongue were it not for the fact that they are entirely in keeping with the overtures we’ve been hearing from the Government for quite some time. Is there any real difference between Powell’s accusation of “dog whistling” and Keir Starmer’s view, expressed at a press conference in January, that politicians demanding a full-scale inquiry were jumping “on a bandwagon of the far Right”?
Does Powell deserve the benefit of the doubt? While it is true that any of us can misspeak, I am not convinced that this remark should simply be brushed off as a gauche moment in the heat of a debate. After all, she had been invited to participate in a BBC political discussion programme; it’s not as though she was blindsided by an over-zealous reporter doorstepping her for a scoop. Panellists on Any Questions know that they must choose their words with care. Elected politicians are hardly infallible, but they should be subjected to scrutiny when they make such flippant remarks in such a forum. This is particularly the case when the remarks pertain to a national scandal that the Government has continually failed to tackle.
Last week, Labour Minister Jess Phillips insisted that there would be more than the promised five local inquiries into grooming gangs, but of course this is inadequate. As Kemi Badenoch pointed out, “Local authorities don’t want to investigate themselves.” It seems obvious that a national inquiry is the only satisfactory option for such an egregious and horrific failure of authority. We already know of countless examples of police, social workers and journalists failing in their basic duties on this issue. There has to be a reckoning.
A few principled writers – most notably Julie Bindel – persisted in reporting on these cases in the early days, but most others were cowed into silence. When Labour MP Sarah Champion raised the alarm in Parliament, she was forced out of the shadow cabinet. Given the likelihood that further failures by those in power will be uncovered in the event of an inquiry, it is hardly surprising that the Government is, as Badenoch puts it, “dragging its heels”. Starmer is clearly more interested in sustaining the myth that multiculturalism has been a triumph rather than grappling with the grim reality.
I do not for one moment believe that Powell does not care about the sexual abuse of minors, or that her words should be taken to signify anything malevolent. Rather, they would seem to be an extension of Labour’s entire strategy on this issue. That is: to make unsavoury accusations as a method of distraction, and to undermine the integrity of those asking awkward questions in the hope that they will simply go away. But such accusations were precisely the reason why these grooming gangs were able to continue abusing their victims with impunity in the first place. One would have thought that this lesson would not be difficult to learn.
Irrespective of Powell’s motives, it is political ineptitude of the highest order for the Government not to call for an immediate national inquiry. If there are any sound justifications for neglecting to do so, Labour has not yet successfully articulated them. For a failing Government, this should be an obvious course of action, one that would be both morally right and politically expedient. The inaction would be contemptible enough, but accusing those who want to see some kind of accountability as being ‘racist’ or ‘far Right’ is unlikely to be forgiven.
Andrew Doyle is a writer, comedian and broadcaster who hosts the GB News show Free Speech Nation. His latest book is The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution. This article was first published on his Substack. You can subscribe here.
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If you think about it, accusing someone of using a dog whistle is a dog whistle.
What the remark tells me about Labour is that they are like almost every other politician of the last half century, they are desperate to blame all the problems caused by mass immigration and multiculturalism on the indigenous populations of the countries being swamped. This is not a dog whistle!
A dog whistle is presumably intended to provoke an immediate and unthinking reaction of obedience. They haven’t met my dog.
Brilliant comment!
When I was a child, I had a dog and a dog whistle. Either the whistle didn’t work or my dog was deaf.
This here is horrifying, because Charlie Peters demonstrates the sheer scale of this ‘industry’, for want of a better word, because it really is much more widespread and organized than many of us thought. This is also why it’s a guarantee that this abuse on an industrial, highly-organized scale is still ongoing. You can see this when Peters mentions that only a tiny fraction of the rapists have been prosecuted;
”These are not isolated towns and cities dealing with this crisis. These are interlinked organised criminal gangs.’
In a GB News exclusive, @CDP1882
reveals the links between grooming gang networks that show just how widespread the crisis is across the UK.”
https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/1919662146176049521
Part of the reason this was allowed to go on so long is that many in positions of authority viewed this abuse as ‘child prostitution’ and the girls were ‘troublesome, willing participants’, despite the fact that children cannot consent to sex, especially not with adults, which is what all these men were, some girls being as young as 9yrs old. They were just ignored or even arrested themselves in some instances, their abuse enabled, rapists protected and empowered;
https://x.com/kwilliam111/status/1919366325161345233
Starmer promised to smash the gangs. These are the ones he should be smashing, and telling us he has a plan won’t cut it.
I’m still waiting in theory at least for an audible upswell of opinion from prominent Muslim members of the political class condemning the inaction of police and social workers, protesting forcibly that assuming Muslim voters are OK with industrial scale mass rape of minors (as Labour obviously do) is a disgusting slur on their integrity and clamouring for an urgent, statutory enquiry to stop it immediately and jail or deport the guilty.
Still waiting.
Child prostitution is illegal and I still marvel at the apparent fact that some people can have a so deranged world view that they consider the process of renting out underage girls as sex workers as “somehow normal”. It absolutely isn’t and prostitute, more so underage prostitute, is absolutely not the same as sexually promiscuous women. It’s someone who provides ‘sexual services’ in exchange for money and in the case of women below the age of 18, this is always illegal. Even in many cases of women above the age limit, abusive relationships, threats and violence are frequently involved. Poster child perpetrator Andrew Tate.
There are certainly various ‘flavours’ of misogyny but, for sure, any man who targets underage girls or young, naive and vulnerable women in order to groom them so he can treat them as a commodity in the sex industry, make money off their degradation and demoralize them by using coercion, financial control, as well as psychological and physical abuse to instill fear and keep them submissive, is a legitimate walking piece of human excrement. The evidence of what Tate is is plastered all over the internet for all to see, even if the willfully blind would rather live in denial. But nobody should be mistreating anybody else just to elevate their own status, let alone profit from their abuse.
100% in agreement. I’ve seen some pretty grueling things connected to this in the past. In my opinion, this is an unspeakable evil (I prefer to avoid thinking about because it hurts my soul, so to say).
I think it has been allowed to go on because the left are fine with paedophilia.
The madleft is in the grip of an incandescent rage towards the white working class (because the working class refused to give the bourgeois Left the revolution Marx promised the bourgeois Left). As a consequence the Labour Party has turned itself into a full-blown racialist party, and, if it was honest, it would call itself the Anti-White Party.
The Fake Conservatives are not much better. Ditto the other Uniparty parties.
True enough.
She has achieved the result Labour needed. Her half hearted apology means the MSM has an excuse not to crucify her while the original comment told a certain part of society where their views really lay. Unless there is a Gaza candidate they will have solidified their support among a certain demographic and in North London generally.
Andrew Doyle writes:
I think Mr Doyle is being far too kind. I think her motivation was purely political. It reflects the relative importance of politics vs child rape and abuse in her mind; political point-scoring being far more important. As such, I do believe that Powell does not care… and that that is malevolent.
Exactly – she really doesn’t care. But the reason she doesn’t care is that the victims are white. She would care very much if the victims were brown.
I’m not convinced the concern for all these “victim groups” is at all genuine in most cases. Are they not just a means to an end?
Of course, an opportunity for virtue signalling and getting rich.
And power
“Rubs hands with glee”
Totally agree and see my comment .
The political class don’t care about children – see what they did to torment and torture children, inflict unnecessary vaccination on them, brand them as a health risk, how they are frightening them with tales of climate doom, and the useless, education system they now have to endure until age 18 in order to reduce youth unemployment figures.
Here’s the rub for Lucy and her colleagues on either side of the House. What if any enquiry revealed that nothing went wrong. That is, if it were found that the public bodies and institutions acted in this matter as might be expected of them in a system of governance known as diversity; the one Ben Cobley described in a recent Daily Sceptic interview. In short, that diversity was the strength of the rape gangs; and for a very particular reason. The function of the Liberal State, in its role as night-watchman, is to remain quiescent until there is a compelling reason for active intervention. This function normally operates between private individuals. And here is the rub. In a Left-wing arrangement where there are defined groups (ethnic community, humanity, women, gender), and in particular in this system of governance over ‘a community of communities’, communities which take the place of the individual for the night-watchman, the latter’s intervention is on behalf of such a community or other. Yet the victims of the ‘grooming’ gang scandal were not of a recognised community, and thus could have no intervention as such by the servants of the state. The state could not intervene… Read more »
What if any enquiry revealed that nothing went wrong.
For anti-whitists like Lucy Powell the third-world rape gangs rampaging through Britain are indeed as sign that all is well.
You are too kind.
As a psychopath she really doesn’t give a shit what happens to people who are not useful to her and these unfortunate girls living in Muslim dominated constituencies to her are useless mouths.
Plus politicians are supposed to be intelligent and words are their stock in trade (lies mostly of course, but words).
Mis-speaking is not an excuse for such as her, and cannot be.
Hideous hideous person.
Imo it would be much better to wait until Farrage is PM and can set the terms of an inquiry into rape gangs. He’d make sure the inquiry looked into why most of the gang members are Muslims whereas Labour would ignore this to appease their supporters.
I thought he and Tice were going to fund their own inquiry. Odd how we never hear anything more about that.
I don’t think she, or the rest of the Establishment, gives a 4X about the thousands of poor, vulnerable white British girls who were gang raped, tortured and some even killed by the vile excuses for human beings who participated in the predominantly Pakistani Rape Gangs.
But they DO care that many of the people who allegedly turned a blind eye and allowed the abuse to continue for decades, or in some cases participated in the crimes, were “public servants” who have very, very close links to the Labour Party…. some at a very senior level.
Powell let the mask slip; the same way Emily Thornberry did. And then you see the ugliness beneath, and when you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
Labour are totally DISGUSTING people. —When is the VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE COMING?
Another example of not answering the question.
Can someone explain to me why the Speaker does not intervene or why a follow up question cannot be asked?
https://x.com/LeeAndersonMP_/status/1917184184679907556
What it tells us is that as Labour has thought from the beginning of their distorted victory, that they can’t upset the Islamists, because they need their votes to avoid being wiped out at the next general election. Those who voted Labour last time should now realise the traitors they voted for and the mess they have left our country in.
“But such accusations were precisely the reason why these grooming gangs were able to continue abusing their victims with impunity in the first place.”
I saw a clip of Tim Montgomerie interviewed on GB News and he said he was addressing a question asked about why Reform UK getting rid of DEI. The point he wished to make – similar to the quote above – was that it provided the climate in which the rape gangs were left unchecked, but he never got to finish his point because of the comments made by Powel – diversion and distraction to avoid the issue.
“I do not for one moment believe that Powell does not care about the sexual abuse of minors, or that her words should be taken to signify anything malevolent.”
I do.