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Last week, Lucy Powell, Leader of the Commons and Labour MP for Manchester Central, apologised to the House for dismissing a question from fellow panellist Tim Montgomerie on the BBC’s Any Questions about whether she had watched a recent Channel 4 documentary about grooming gangs.
In an extraordinary outburst, Ms Powell, right, snapped: ‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we?’
It was petulant, arrogant and above all shockingly dismissive, as if the victims of what is arguably one of the most widespread and horrific scandals of our time – the systematic rape of thousands of girls and women, including sadistic acts of torture and even murder – were just an annoyance, an inconvenience.
That was certainly how some of the survivors felt. Sarah Wilson, the sister of Laura Wilson, who was stabbed in the head and dumped in a Rotherham canal the day after one of her abusers told another he was ‘gonna send that kuffar b***h straight to Hell’, said Ms Powell’s comments showed what the victims have been ‘up against all these years’ and why they have not been ‘listened to – they never cared and never will’.
It’s hard to argue with that view. Ms Powell’s response spoke volumes about the level of denial in senior Labour circles.
It was without doubt a Gordon Brown ‘bigoted woman’ moment, a slip of the mask that will not be forgotten.
Her apology last week rang hollow because it is hollow. It still doesn’t give the victims what they deserve – a full inquiry. And after what she said, and the attitude she betrayed, we need it more than ever.
We need it not just for the sake of the girls but also because it’s high time we had a proper conversation about the social and cultural circumstances that allowed such abuses to take place, a conversation that inevitably will entail difficult but necessary and long overdue discussions around integration and cultural attitudes.
Wanting to confront the origins of the rape gangs is not ‘dog whistle’; it’s crucial to re-building trust in a functional multicultural society.
Indeed, we are arguably becoming less and less so, as the numbers arriving from countries with very different attitudes to ours continue to rise and politicians like Powell scoff at anyone who dares raise legitimate concerns.
At a time when immigration has never been more out of control, when the Government is spending £4million a day on housing new arrivals at the expense of taxpayers and pensioners, when it seems powerless to stop the influx of boats containing young men with undeniably non-Western attitudes towards women, these are issues that can no longer be ignored.
There is a wider question here about how the demographics of Britain are changing and why instead of this leading to more racial and religious harmony, the opposite seems to be true.
For multiculturalism to work, there must be positive integration. It’s essential: without it, differences don’t soften, they become entrenched. And yet in many parts of Britain integration has simply not happened. Imported attitudes and beliefs have been imposed, hollowing out the identities of whole communities, with dangerous and devastating consequences.
The rape gangs exemplify this. The assumption by some men of a certain ethnic group (Pakistani Muslims) that females of another ethnic group (white working-class) are less virtuous and more promiscuous than their own was the root cause of the abuse.
Such an assumption is, of course, a racist trope. But in the case of the rape gangs it was never challenged because it was felt that somehow the ethnicity of the perpetrators and the need to maintain ‘cultural relations’ trumped the safety and dignity of the victims.
In Rotherham, this cultural dimension was deliberately covered up. For example, in the case of Sarah Wilson’s sister, Laura, the case review was heavily redacted to conceal the ethnicity of the perpetrators. When an unredacted copy was leaked, the council instigated legal action to protect the guilty. It was only when my ex-husband, Michael Gove (then the Education Secretary), intervened that they stood down.
That is just one example of the attitude that has dominated in the past few decades of rising immigration. And now we have a Labour Government, many of whose members are an integral part of the problem.
That’s why they won’t grant a national inquiry: their prints are all over this mess. That and the fact that they face a political threat from Islamic independents, many of whom, as we have seen from social media posts, subscribe to deeply misogynistic beliefs.
It is because of all this that Britain is facing a political lurch to the hard Right similar to what we see in Europe and, recently, America.
And the responsibility for this lies with politicians, who have allowed certain communities to take our kindness as weakness.
People have had enough. The grooming gangs are an extreme case, but elsewhere they see their communities being eroded, their values undermined, their way of life threatened, and nothing
being done. That’s why you end up with overreactions like the Southport riots. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This is not dog whistle, Ms Powell. It’s people’s lives. And they deserve better than to be mocked by a liberal elite who prefer to victim-blame than acknowledge the inconvenient truth.
You’ll always be fab, Jo
Dame Joanna Lumley, above, laments that she ‘doesn’t have much time left’ as she celebrates her 79th birthday.
And yet it seems she’s never been more sought-after. She stole the show in the BBC’s Amandaland – and is soon to star in the hotly anticipated second series of Tim Burton’s Wednesday, the most streamed show in the history of Netflix, in which she plays Morticia’s mother as Patsy with a grey beehive. Absolutely Frightabulous!
I was struck by the story of beautician Kimberly Hall, 29, who is accused of trying to trick US agents into sending her back to the UK to avoid drug charges.
Hall’s police mugshot was laughably different from the heavily filtered snap of her on social media. Can’t make the police’s job any easier...
Poor Harry, a prince lost in London
Now we know why Prince Harry is so desperately keen to get his security detail back: he clearly has no idea how to get anywhere without a chauffeur, as demonstrated by the fact that he had to ring half the doorbells on a street in London before finding his mate’s house.
Classic ‘kerb to car’ spoilt celeb. Either that, or the poor boy is even thicker than he looks.
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