It must surely rank as one of the least sincere apologies of all time. Lucy Powell, the embattled leader of the House of Commons, has claimed that her recent remarks dismissing concern about the grooming-gangs scandal as a ‘dogwhistle’ do not really ‘reflect her views on the issue’. UK prime minister Keir Starmer has accepted her apology and has resisted the growing calls for her sacking.
The trouble is, we all know full well that Powell’s outburst last week reflected her views perfectly. And they certainly reflected the views of her party. On BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, she struggled to hide her dripping contempt for those who are angry about the rape gangs. When the issue was raised by Reform-supporting journalist Tim Montgomerie, she immediately tried to shout him down. ‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Let’s get that dogwhistle out, shall we?’, she snapped, before he had barely got a word out.
‘That little trumpet’? ‘That dogwhistle’? It is impossible to interpret Powell’s comments as anything other than a sneering dismissal of the abuse endured by thousands of working-class girls at the hands of mainly Pakistani Muslim men. Girls have been raped, tortured, trafficked and, in some cases, murdered. For decades, these crimes were routinely ignored and often actively covered up by the authorities. Yet if you say you want something done about this, whether that means jailing the perpetrators or holding police and local authorities to account, then the likes of Powell will assume you must be racist or engaging in some sort of far-right rabblerousing.
Powell has since claimed she misspoke. She has tried to ‘clarify’ that she views ‘child exploitation’ with ‘utmost seriousness’. But it is obvious to just about everyone that Labour does not view this particular child-exploitation scandal with the gravity it deserves. Indeed, Powell’s dismissal of the grooming-gangs discussion as a ‘dogwhistle’ are a near-exact echo of Starmer’s own remarks made in January this year, when he accused opposition MPs of ‘jumping on a bandwagon’ and ‘amplifying the far right’ by calling for a national inquiry into the scandal.
Time and again, senior Labour figures struggle to hide their exasperation at having to talk about the rape gangs. Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has not only resisted calls for a national statutory inquiry, but she also announced last month that five local inquiries she had promised would no longer be led by independent judges, but by councils themselves. This is despite local authorities often having played a role in the cover-ups. When Conservative MP Katie Lam took Phillips to task in the Commons for this, reminding her of the scale of the abuse suffered, Phillips’s body language betrayed her: she could only huff, gurn and fidget. She then demanded to know why Lam was apparently so overly concerned with only ‘one sort of child-abuse victim’ – a not-so-subtle suggestion that to care about these crimes is racist and suspect.
It has been more than 20 years since Labour MP Ann Cryer was branded a racist for drawing attention to the industrial-scale abuse of girls in her Keighley constituency. It has been more than 10 years since Alexis Jay’s report highlighted how fears of a racist backlash from the white working classes paralysed authorities in Rotherham from taking action to protect vulnerable girls. The inquiry into Telford’s rape gangs noted that ‘a concern about racism, and being seen to be racist, permeated the minds of [local] police’. The view that it is somehow racist, or far right, to want to put a stop to these sickening crimes is precisely what allowed the abuse to go unchecked for so long. Yet it clearly remains the view of the Labour Party, from the prime minister downwards.
Lucy Powell’s comments confirm that Labour has learnt nothing at all from the rape-gangs scandal. It still views discussion about these crimes as unsavoury, uncouth and unwarranted – as something to be avoided and swept under the carpet. Powell’s real regret is that she said the quiet part out loud.
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