Labour rejects calls for Oldham grooming gang inquiry

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Are Labour right to push the responsibility for carrying out a public inquiry back onto Oldham Council?

I don't understand how it is considered acceptable for local authorities to carry out their own inquiries when they are often part of the institutional failure that allowed these crimes to be carried out on such a large scale over decades. Councils, police and social services were/are all implicated in the failure to act (or to actively obstruct) in some way or another.

"Phillips’ letter to Oldham Council, seen by GB News, claims it is for the the local authority ‘alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.’ Reports have previously been commissioned and produced in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford; Oldham now plans to launch its own Telford-style inquiry. Given the strength of feeling – which Phillips acknowledges in her letter – it seems inevitable that there will be questions or debate in the Commons when parliament returns next week."

"Yet for the hundreds of victims and those invested in bringing perpetrators to justice, this will seem pitifully inadequate. In each town where grooming gangs operated, similar patterns emerged: victims were ignored, law enforcement complicit and political officials more concerned about reputational damage than lives affected. Local authorities can hold their own inquiries, of course. But given the scale of these crimes, the fact they took place over decades, in many towns, suggests a level of institutional complicity requiring the attention of central government."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-rejects-calls-for-oldham-grooming-gang-inquiry/

Archive...

https://archive.ph/3greC#selection-1667.0-1759.570

He starts to get shut down when he says the girl was raped a thousand times.
Surely she's not objecting to a description of the actual crime?

Yet, I wouldn't be too startled if the woman in question would also consider it empowering and wholly appropriate for whichever Only Fans woman it is who plans to have sex with 1000 men within a very short timeframe. I wonder if she might argue that it's fine for that to be in newspapers and normalised in extraordinary detail as something that young people might consider if they wish to make substantial sums of money to set them up for life and notoriety.

U turn?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5l4vxv2qo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cyv43zpr4pjt

• Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced a new national-level "rapid audit" of grooming gangs, plus up to five new local inquiries
• The national three-month audit, led by Dame Louise Casey, will look at "cultural and societal drivers" of child sex abuse, Cooper says
• It will examine ethnicity data and the demographics of the gangs involved and their victims, Cooper adds
• The government will also support "victim-centred" local inquiries in Oldham and up to four other "pilot" areas
• Cooper says "effective local inquiries" can deliver more answers and change than a "lengthy nationwide inquiry"
• But shadow home secretary Chris Philp calls the plans "wholly inadequate", and reiterates the Conservatives' call for a "proper, full, national public inquiry"

Sadiq Khan making a complete tit of himself.

https://x.com/CDP1882/status/1879938803458281765

Comme d’habitude 🙄

I have grown to really dislike Khan as an inveterate pusher of divisive IDPol.

Isn't it the case that - inexplicably - police officers and other public servants can just refuse to cooperate with local enquiries but are compelled by law to do so in national ones?

So they're going to get a free pass again for the harm to those girls?

I read the minutes of the Oldham council meeting where they voted for a local inquiry.

There seem to be two votes - if I'm remembering right, one from some independent council group for a "voice for victims" inquiry and one from the Lib Dems for an inquiry explicitly into the behaviour of police and council workers. The second one got voted down...

I have read that this is the downside of a local council run inquiry. They do not have the power to force anyone to participate.

Is there not also the consideration that local councils, whose officers ( elected and unelected) may have had some involvement, might not be people to front an enquiry?

Andrew golds interview with Raja Miah highlights the political involvement.

I'm sure I've read somewhere that a government backed statutory local inquiry has the power to compel people to co-operate. Sarah Champion alludes to it in the BBC article up the page:

'Champion pressed the home secretary on whether the inquires would be able to summon witnesses to give evidence.
"What we need to do is make sure there have been no cover-ups, and it's only if it's on a statutory footing that we can do that," she said.
(My bold)

Cooper avoids giving a straight answer and waffles on about 'different approaches' but at least Champion's question is now on the record.

I'm going to choose to stay positive (until I'm given reason not to be).

The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry is an independent public statutory Inquiry and we've a good sample of what it's like when people testify although they can be compelled to attend, to produce documents, and to give evidence on oath.
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/frequently-asked-questions
The current Thirlwall Inquiry has compelled attendance of very senior NHS figures. They've had to put an enormous amount of effort into collating decades of enquiries, and the many thousands of recommendations, and rationalise them into what is now anachronistic, those that have been implemented, those that haven't been, and those that are relevant.
https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/
https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/help-and-information/faqs/

Both of these are examples of statutory inquiries (from Thirlwall FAQ).

• Statutory public inquiries run according to the rules in the Inquiries Act 2005 and Inquiry Rules 2006.
• Inquiries are always established by a Government minister but, once established, are independent of Government. Inquiries must be fearless in looking for the truth and make findings of fact. If appropriate these will include identifying those at fault; however, the law does not allow an Inquiry to make findings of criminal or civil liability.
• Inquiries always have a chair, often a judge, appointed by the minister.
• Any person or organisation can be made to produce relevant documents. It is a criminal offence to intentionally withhold a document required by the Inquiry or deliberately to obstruct its work. Inquiries enable people with a particular interest to be Core Participants. They have certain rights.
• All relevant evidence will be shared in advance of hearings with Core Participants.
• Core Participants can suggest lines of questioning they wish to be pursued by the Inquiry.
• Inquiries hold hearings and any person or relevant organisation can be called as a witness to give evidence.
• Witnesses can be asked questions by Counsel to the Inquiry or by legal representatives of Core Participants (with the Chair’s permission).
• Inquiries are public. In general, the Chair must take reasonable steps to ensure that the public can watch hearings and view the record of evidence. The Chair must not depart from that rule unless there is very good reason.
• Inquiries must produce a written report with their findings and recommendations. Under the Act, this must be made public.

Igood article in The Critic. Alastair Campbell & Rory Stewart should be ashamed … https://thecritic.co.uk/ignore-the-grooming-gangs-deniers/

Some straight talking at last! If the likes of Stewart and Campbell think they are helping to maintain racial and social cohesion, they are surely kidding themselves; they are doing the reverse.

Andrew Gold interview with Raja Miah. It's hard to believe some of this stuff. Can there really be so much corruption?

The scenario of politicians cosying up to 'community leaders' and giving grants and turning a blind eye to crimes for block votes, that getting out of hand and turning into blackmail makes more sense to me then any other.

It does.

Well if I was Minister of State Jim McMahon, I'd be straight on to m'learned friends for a libel case against these disgraceful calumnies. Unless, of course, there's truth in what Raja Miah says.

And Andy Burnham comes out only a little better. Things are hotting up, it seems.

https://x.com/recusantraja/status/1880397887793766893?s=46&t=WHoOZZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

The allegation of voter fraud via postal voting is worrying. Naively I had never considered that it could be systemically abused in this way. If there is a suspicion that this is happening within certain communities would it need to be investigated?

https://x.com/robbiemoore/status/1880657336668139803?s=46&t=WHoOZZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

Excellent article by Kishwer Falkner in the Times.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/d42492e4-c0ed-4459-ba3b-cf9488c164b1?shareToken=77cf864ec6b572ef439285a38768ed27

Falkner's article expresses perspectives and ideas in a very clear manner with a good helping of gravitas.

The “warped ideas of community relations”, as the prime minister describes it, the acceptance of parallel lives and community self-policing and the acquiescence in the weaponisation of racism and victimhood — that too is a cultural pathology, a bastard child of well-meaning anti-racism, that needs to be held up to the light and banished from our institutions.
Liberal, multiethnic societies are a permanent balancing act between accommodating difference and embracing common norms. What to do when some groups become too inward-looking and stray too far from the common norms?

Archive version for future use: https://archive.is/qft3G

I came across this article offering an analysis of the grooming & rape gang scandals. A lot of the analysis applies to our politics in Ireland too. Thought I’d post it here as being of interest to the thread:

https://thecritic.co.uk/britain-at-closing-time/

'For there is no managerial solution to this kind of crime. There is no manual for how to handle it. The response has to be human and rooted in a shared sense of who we are and how we collectively react to this kind of horror. In other words, it has to be informed by culture. Britain has always been a divided society. But even at the apogee of the class system a common culture helped bridge otherwise intractable social divides. The nation gave the state legitimacy.

Having unmoored themselves from the people they rule, our rulers now stand before us like aliens. For their part, they also feel alienated from the populace. After all, their lackadaisical attitude towards big questions of culture, nationhood, and belonging works inside the Circle Line — but it has bred monsters beyond it.'

Superb. They can’t possibly accuse Baroness Falker of jumping on the far right bandwagon can they? This might hasten them terminating her position at the EHRC though.