When is a U-turn not officially a U-turn? When it is less a change of direction than one of speed and extent. And on those terms, the announcement of a review into grooming gangs is Keir Starmer’s second such policy shuffle this week alone.
On Tuesday, the Treasury minister, Tulip Siddiq, departed over her links to much-disputed claims of family corruption centred on her aunt, the former president of Bangladesh. Downing Street had insisted for days that the facts must first be established.
And in a similar way, after more than a week of government arguments that a second national inquiry into grooming gangs would simply waste time and delay meaningful action, a national “audit” of the problem has been unveiled – albeit one that will last three months rather than some years.
It’s common for governments to deflect the reality of a situation before the political pressure becomes overwhelming and a change of tack becomes inevitable. The quirk of Starmer’s approach is for this to happen as part of an insistence on proper procedure.
Thus, as Siddiq’s demise was delayed pending an inquiry by Starmer’s ethics adviser, the concessions on grooming gangs have come as part of a carefully curated series of measures, with luminaries including Louise Casey wheeled out to helm them.
Some at the centre of Starmer’s government had argued that, such is the public worry about grooming gangs and possible cover-ups connected to them, a full national inquiry was inevitable.
This has not been done: Casey’s review is more of a rapid roundup of the available existing evidence. It will be up to a series of smaller local inquiries, without the power to compel witnesses to give evidence, to look into how and why so many victims were failed by those in authority.
Will this be enough? The response in the Commons to the statement by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, outlining the new plans, suggests probably not.
Chris Philp, Cooper’s Conservative shadow, condemned the plans as “wholly inadequate”, while MPs from Reform UK, who have campaigned even more loudly on the issue, expressed worry at the lack of statutory powers.
Much could depend on a force outside the control of either Cooper or her opponents: Elon Musk. It is a distasteful fact that no one in government will want to acknowledge, but without the billionaire’s vigorous and often misleading and abusive interventions on the subject via his own X platform, it seems unlikely we would have got so much action, and certainly not as quickly.
Much like other well-acknowledged but long-running and knotty scandals such as the infected blood inquiry and the Post Office’s Horizon IT fiasco, dealing with grooming gangs was something Cooper and her team would have done – and probably more quickly than the last government – but not as a priority.
With the inauguration of Donald Trump, for whom Musk hopes to serve as a key aide, just days away, his attention could wander. But after Thursday’s statement, this may not matter. Cooper seems likely to be dealing with questions about grooming gangs for a long time to come.
