Kemi Badenoch’s remark this morning calling for a full nationwide inquiry into what she describes because the “rape gangs scandal” is clearly supposed to assert ethical management over an appalling stain on our latest nationwide historical past.
However as a substitute of seizing the political excessive floor she dangers wanting like she’s scrambling to meet up with Nigel Farage – and dancing to Elon Musk’s tune.
Mr Musk had spent all night time posting inflammatory feedback on X – suggesting that the Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips ought to go to jail after denying Oldham Council’s request for a authorities backed public inquiry within the situation. Ms Phillips had argued it might be higher for an inquiry to be commissioned domestically.
The billionaire American businessman went on to put up in help of the Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe’s requires an inquiry, in addition to urging his followers “Vote Reform. It’s the only Hope.”
For the reason that final common election the Conservatives have been underneath big and rising stress from Mr Farage’s social gathering, as highlighted by final week’s row over membership figures.
Picture:
Nigel Farage with Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of Donald Trump. Pic: PA
However with this most delicate of points, Ms Badenoch appears perilously near leaping on the Reform bandwagon.
It is a dangerous enterprise – Mr Farage is set to not be muscled out, and has hit again on the Tories’ failure to launch an inquiry throughout their 14 years in workplace: “Talk is Cheap.”
It is a criticism additionally pointedly levelled at Ms Badenoch by Sammy Woodhouse, one of many survivors of sexual abuse in Rotherham, who posted that regardless of many conferences through the Conservatives’ years in energy “none of you cared”.
Reasonably embarrassingly a letter to Oldham Council has emerged this afternoon written by the then Conservative minister of safeguarding, Amanda Solloway MP, again in 2022.
Within the letter – written in strikingly comparable phrases to her Labour successor’s – she rejects a earlier request from the native authority for the federal government to arrange a public inquiry. As a substitute, like Ms Phillips, she argued in favour of a domestically commissioned inquiry.
That is exactly the place the shadow residence secretary Chris Philp and present shadow safeguarding minister, Alicia Kearns, have criticised in a stinging public letter to the house secretary revealed immediately.
For the victims searching for a critical response, the political mudslinging is a degrading spectacle.
It is all of the extra irritating given the delay in implementing the suggestions of the general public inquiry which has already examined a few of these points – the Unbiased Inquiry into Little one Sexual Abuse.
Labour say they’re working urgently to take action.
