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FINALLY! – politicalbetting.com
FINALLY! – politicalbetting.com
Finally – FINALLY – I have something to live for: reading the final national report on the statutory grooming gangs inquiry just announced by the PM (ahead of this week’s Casey report recommending this) which should be published ….ooh, I dunno …. anything from 7 to 10 years hence. Or longer. Starmer seems unable to think more than one step ahead. Bizarre for a lawyer.
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A good intro by Cyclefree, probably on the money as far as the outcome is concerned (not sure about item 5. On item 9 there have been a string of such convictions on the island recently).
I suspect Starmer has an aversion to performative politics and resisted calls for this as a consequence. But I agree that he's doing himself no favours with all these missteps followed by late u-turns.
The listed bans are welcome to avoid this becoming yet another thread wrecked by toxic bigotry and inability to think around all aspects of a question without descending into hyperbole, insult and abuse.
I would add to your list of guilty parties.
Where were our feminists ? Where were the people who take to vigils and street protests ?
MIA.
I am fine. Treatment plan started. Bemused at how despite all the screenings saying nothing was wrong I have managed to get to Stage 4 cancer without anyone noticing. It is not curable so I am living with it largely ignoring it & hoping that the treatment stops it getting worse.
Just doing things I enjoy really.
Yes, the numbers are smaller: estimates say 1 in 20 boys s experience child sexual abuse before the age of 16, whereas for girls it is 1 in 6 (1), but that does not mean that the abuse of boys should be ignored by the inquiry.
All too often, boys and men are seen only as the abusers, not as the abused.
I'd also point out that she's spot-on about the lack of care for the vulnerable in other communities. All too often, the talk becomes of "white girls" being the victims, instead of "children". The background of the child should be irrelevant: abuse is abuse.
(1) The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
She stands alone in a fairly empty field.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70601550rro
NCA to work with police forces alongside national inquiry.
So that's two more announcements not made to Parliament first.
This sort of thing is depressingly none too surprising.
Hope you're doing well, Miss Cyclefree.
I'd add another point: they hardly ever get mentioned but around 100+ victims in Rotherham were boys. This is often discussed as a crime only against women and girls and while they do comprise the vast majority of victims there are also many (albeit a minority) that are boys.
Society, the media, and politicians being content to see males as potential perpetrators of this sort of crime but utterly blind to them being potential victims is unhealthy, and some reporting is practically misleading by the repeated omission in this area.
Many thanks @Cyclefree for your header
Starmer and his ministers in the media are struggling to explain their screeching u turn on this
I thought it was interesting that Sam Coates on Sky just commented that whilst Starmer may try to deflect the decision using his much used 14 years etc, these crimes occurred to a large degree in labour controlled councils
Cooper's statement in the HOC later today will be difficult for her, but Labour have only themselves to blame
PB isn't the same without you!
Trump’s nominee to lead the FAA has for years claimed to have a ‘commercial’ pilot license he doesn’t have
Re point 9, this will only change if the Sentencing Council is persuaded to change the sentencing guidelines. If youi produce or distribute CSA images, you are going to prison. However, the starting point for possession of category A images (the worst category) is 1 year's custody with a range of 26 weeks to 3 years. The effect of that is that, unless there are aggravating factors pushing the sentence towards the top of the range, a first offender is likely to get a suspended sentence.
Thanks for the header - short, sharp and pointed. I recognise so many of these factors around culture, organisational inertia, penny wise pound foolish management, and ignorance around inaccessibiltiy questions.
Lots of cynical positional politics incoming, I think. Perhaps there will be more than we have seen already.
From a purely political perspective:
Our criminal justice system seems to have really struggled to move on from its talent pool of white men with petty bigotries at best and open racism/misogyny at worst. So we have police unable or unwilling to listen to WWC girls - balanced by social workers trying to even things out by ignoring the evidence in front of them.
What truly boggles the mind is the mess the Tory and now Labour governments have made of this. The Tories I have to assume were trying to protect the establishment by covering all this up. OK so some WWC got abused, so what, protect Britain. Make your reports if you must but we're too busy to implement you findings.
And now Labour, with people like Jess Phillips who genuinely give a shit about this issue, turning themselves inside out trying to defend an establishment line that no more enquiries are needed only to call an enquiry.
Men of Pakistani origin remain only a small percentage of offenders, but we've managed to create a scandal where covering up their crimes will cover up the crimes of the white majority. Justice for the victims of Pakistani gangs through a final (?) enquiry cannot be at the price of injustice of all the women and girls abused by whitey who aren't believed because of the social media narrative that whitey doesn't do that. We do, and in much larger numbers.
I see desperate not to be left out, Susan Dalgety (spectacular SLab dimwit and Hootsmon columnist) has written that because there are disproportionally fewer cases of grooming gangs in Scotland that this was in fact evidence that here must be a festering crisis of hidden grooming going on north of the border. On this basis I feel the absence of money in my bank account proves that I am being denied vast wealth, and I must be compensated NOW!
1 & 2 (above) shows a part of the problem - that the enquiry should just be another political football.
I have briefly and tangentially worked around the SCAI and it's extremely grim. I have no idea how those who work on it full time deal with what they are reading and hearing. And, as Cyclefree points out, white Scots are perfectly capable of this evil: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dxj570n21o
At the time that {the thing that can’t be discussed, but we are discussing) came out, there were calls within the Home Office and social care for extreme preparations and action.
It was assumed that The Thing would kick off murderous riots. That the army would need to be called in. Communities separated by Peace Walls (see Northern Ireland) - with people in “the wrong bits” removed from the homes. Martial law.
None of this happened.
Then a few years later we have people trying to set buildings on fire with people in them, over the issue of hotel accommodation for furriners. What is different? What changed?
On the “grooming scandal”. Despite all the scorn, just goes to show that Elon Musk has cuter political instincts than our PM, certainly in terms of basic thrust if not always the detail.
I am scratching my head at the Labour Party these days wondering what on Earth it’s actually for. A champion of the British working class it is certainly not. In 2024 they benefited from being the only viable vehicle for voters that wanted to kick out the incumbent.
As Cyclefree has alluded to, when did you last hear about Farage or Jenrick going on about the abuse scandals in the Catholic church, private schools, football clubs et al?
Working in Manchester the one big scandal that has been bubbling away is police officers strip searching (vulnerable) female suspects and when recordings were requested they were mysteriously deleted.
Strip-searched, naked and left fearing she'd been drugged and raped in a police cell: Inside mystery of woman's 40 hours in custody - and crucial two hours of missing CCTV
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13563129/Woman-drugged-raped-custody-GMP-mystery-CCTV.html
GMP takes no action against cops who arrested and strip searched woman 'based on almost nothing
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/gmp-takes-no-action-against-30019723
I agree with the general thrust of what you say but the reason this has turned into such a political football is because of people blithely ignore these factors.
Trying to make it party political will backfire in the simplest way - whoever generation that will find that his own party is on the shit as well.
The scandal “broke” when Teresa May mandated that all offences should be investigated and prosecuted. The gasp of horror at that, from the professionals, was interesting.
I think you will find the facts on actual convictions are something like this -
- white offenders make up the vast majority of prosecutions, convictions etc
- Pakistani men are a minority of prosecutions, but at higher percentage than their membership of the general population.
It can’t be long before this is applied again, in combination with the stark reality that the US is the only nation with the aerial capability to destroy the site in Fordow.
Good luck today, the rabid posters with a "taxi drivers" agenda, aren't even up and posting yet.
Fckwit Dalgety mentioned the Glasgow case and then had to go back to the 70s for an alleged paedo ring amongst Scottish lawyers which shows a pretty dire level of barrel scraping.
Humans are chaotic. Democracy is chaotic.
And change is required for evolution. Natural selection means we try to keep beneficial changes and discard bad ones.
The problem with Iran isn't too much change, its not enough of it. They've stagnated. They've had 2 Supreme Leaders in the time we've had 10 Prime Ministers.
And before anyone says it, yes we've only had two monarchs in the same time. But in the UK our monarch is a figurehead while politicians hold supreme power, while in Iran its the opposite way around.
The extrapolation that all Muslim males are predatory isn't applied to all Catholic Priests being deviants because a not insignificant number have been caught "fiddling".
It's also why delegation is one of the more important leadership skills.
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician. There was to be no inquiry because one was not needed after one national and several local inquiries. Instead the government was to move on the IICSA recommendations.
What changed is not the politics. What changed is the Casey review recommended a new inquiry and therefore there must be a new inquiry.
The other prong is reopening cold cases under the watchful eye of the NCA but this is Starmer as former head of the CPS, not Starmer the politician.
Thanks for your comments on this and generally your good wishes. The cancer is too far advanced for a cure but the doctors are reasonably hopeful that if I respond well to the treatment, it can be kept under control and maybe even shrunk so that I can live with it, for a good number of years (no number given). And if not there are more intrusive treatments available. There is obviously a risk that none of this will work. I have lived with dodgy lungs and peculiar blood all my life so this is just one more thing to add to the list. I am not belittling its seriousness but I am glad I am not being given false reassurance (unlike the screening programme - grrr!). And there are plenty of doctors in the family so yes I will ask questions etc but no I am not going in for snake oil miracle cures
And day to day I feel absolutely fine - no different to how I felt this time last year - so I am concentrating on living as well as possible, while the doctors and drugs do their stuff to the stalker unaccountably attached to my body. And, yes, I am eating well and taking exercise. But I've done this all my life so sometimes - despite that - shit happens.
I am focusing on things that are Important rather than Urgent as too often in life it becomes the other way around. So 5 roses bought this week!
Also I am doing a work webinar with the London Stock Exchange and AI experts on Surveillance in the Workplace on the 24th so if anyone wants a link let me know.
A thread that sums this up.
https://x.com/louiserawauthor/status/1934355851458052190?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
As far as this point is concerned - 3) the Terms of Reference and what is excluded (expect the Home Office to perform their dark arts here). - the briefing (FWIW) is that this will not be another 7 year long-grass enquiry.
The national enquiry will be given the job of overseeing existing (and likely additional) local enquiries - and presumably lend legal powers to summon reluctant witnesses.
We will have to wait and see if this either effective or speedy - and whether or not it's just a way to spin the reluctance to go beyond local enquiries - but it's not automatically a bad idea.
There are convictions, these days, up and down the U.K. for such groups, on a monthly basis. To the point that they don’t make front page news any more
It’s worth remembering that this whole thing entered the public consciousness because politician thought he could weaponise it against the opposing party & “Establishment”. Then Teresa May told the police to go after *everyone*.
What was found was not vast conspiracies, but, generally small groups of scumbags who made contact (sometimes) with other small groups of scumbags to form a wider, loose, associations. Bit like the spontaneous terrorist types we get these days, as well.
Notice how the label of 'Asian' grooming gangs has narrowed first to 'Muslim' grooming gangs and now increasingly to 'Pakistani' grooming gangs.
Why is this crime far more prevalent in one demographic than it is in outwardly similar demographics ?
What particular peccadilloes, mores and conventions do we need to abide by now to stay the right side of the OSA ?
Oh and I hope you keep as well as you can of course Cyclefree.
You need a confluence of things, I suspect,
- attitude towards reporting
- attitude towards the offence
- attitude towards the potential victims
When those hit a certain level, the probability of such offences soars, is my guess. You just need to add the hideous crime to the solution of the subculture to cause a crystallisation - to put it in chemistry terms.
In these days of instant gratification, a considered fact-based investigation is becoming a rarity. This investigation should be welcomed rather than used as a piñata for others.
Edit: I forgot to acknowledge @ Cyclefree's excellent overview of how this might progress.
So two questions:
1) Are some demographics more likely to tolerate crime, especially when the victims are outsiders, than others ? And if so why.
2) Are the authorities more likely to tolerate crime from some demographics than others ? And if so why.
That’s where the main problem stemmed from earlier on this year.
It's like the stories that the Mail likes to run, 'Food X makes you TEN TIMES more likely to get disease Y.' Ten times very unlikely is still very unlikely.
In the meantime, this feels like another triumph of shortish-term politics over government. Extra reviewing will chill useful actions, tell us little we don't already know and won't satisfy those who have called loudest for a National Review.
I'd say that the government is learning, but in this case I wish it wasn't.
But ofc don't get me started on the complete uselessness of the NHS around just about anything.
I've another friend in a similar position (different cancer, but stage 4) given much the same advice, who has responded very well to treatment (pretty brutal at the time), and is similarly just getting on with life now.
Well some did - Julie Bindel, for one. She is not just a feminist but is prepared to do the hard work ferreting out the stories and the evidence. That takes time and money and not many press publications were willing to publish the stories. Nor are many journalists or feminists willing to or able to do that work. Anna Hall made a documentary in 2004. Ann Cryer MP was raising this in 2003. So were social workers and policewomen.
But look at the response they got - either silence or attacked as being bigoted or anti-Muslim or on the far-right. Andrew Norfolk who did so much to bring this to national attention delayed writing about this precisely for this reason. Fellow Labour MPs attacked Ann Cryer. Naz Shah said that people should be quiet for the sake of good community relations etc. And some will have ignored it because their feminism was skin deep or only applied to middle class women or because they did not want to be trouble-makers or for the good of their careers etc etc
This is a wider point but whenever women raise issues affecting them, the responses have all too often been very personal vicious personalised attacks. And then later they get attacked for not having done more.
As for my prejudices showing, whoever raised that is showing his prejudices. I deliberately widened it out to make the point that our society is simply unwilling to take seriously the steps needed to prevent or limit opportunities for sexual harassment, one of which is the push for unisex facilities when there is loads of evidence that this increases such crimes. Hence also my reference to the broken promises about indecent exposure. If we cannot be bothered to take this seriously, we are not in a good position to lecture migrants about their failures to comply with our values. When we promote those who presided over decades of failure in local authorities on this (hello Mrs Hodge) what message does that send out?
One final point: we have as I have stated ad nauseam underfunded the criminal justice system for years. We do not need a multi-year inquiry to tell us that if we properly funded social work, police, prosecutors, forensic services, the courts etc., and expected high quality work from them, it would be easier to catch those who commit these appalling crimes.
Instead we do nothing, then have a moral panic, concentrate on finding someone politically expedient to blame, kick the whole thing into the long grass, ignore all recommendations and do precisely f*** all for the victims.
Another example of Labour being particularly flat-footed in their early months in office, coming back to haunt them.
Whatever the government's motivations (which I'm pretty sceptical about), at an absolute minimum, this will lend statutory powers to existing local enquiries, which currently lack them.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/15/keir-starmer-bows-to-pressure-to-launch-new-grooming-gangs-investigation
..The crackdown will also involve the child sexual exploitation taskforce and the tackling organised exploitation programme, working in partnership to strengthen local investigations and improve police handling of abuse cases.
The move comes alongside the formal launch of a statutory public inquiry, with powers to compel witnesses and direct local investigations, after a rapid review by Louise Casey concluded a new probe was necessary.
The inquiry will scrutinise how institutions – including local councils, police forces and elected officials – failed vulnerable girls across the UK, with a specific focus on mishandled or ignored complaints.
It will be able to “compel local deep-dive investigations” into historical cases and demand answers where complaints of wrongdoing or cover-ups have been made, under powers granted by the 2005 Inquiries Act...
But I do think it's needed in this case; the Covid inquiry should probably be over by now (Is it ?) and the Post Office/blood scandal compensations paid.
Any prosecutions should proceed in parallel tbh and not have to wait donkeys years before the inquiry is over.
But personally I am not looking back because there is no point. I am living in the moment.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/15/keir-starmer-bows-to-pressure-to-launch-new-grooming-gangs-investigation
..The NCA-led crackdown will run in parallel, targeting known offenders, re-examining cases closed prematurely, and supporting forces to improve how child sexual exploitation is investigated.
Cooper added: “More than 800 grooming gang cases have already been identified by police after I asked them to look again at cases which had closed too early.
“Now we are asking the National Crime Agency to lead a major nationwide operation to track down more perpetrators and bring them to justice.”..
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8kpmpq
This is not a point about this particular culture. If you do this to any group, this is what will inevitably happen. No-one, no group, no ideology should ever be beyond challenge. No-one should be afraid to challenge. And no-one should ever think themselves beyond challenge.
Now - look around you - do you think we have such a society? Or is it one where we are busy doing everything we can to stop people raising awkward challenges and questions?
Yuk.
Isn't this the standardised Process (see The Process State) for dealing with scandals?
As to your header, I think there a lot of influential people whose social liberalism is something that exists purely in the abstract, but which does not survive contact with people of lower social status.
They love humanity, but not humans.
In terms of Starmers announcement, we await the detail, but the absolute brass neck of Labour politicians on this over the last day is quite sickening. Reeves dismissing calls for an apology because they're only concerned with victims, not hurt feelings, is utterly tin eared to the fury out there. Labour will pay a heavy heavy price for this but, of course, the important thing us that pressure is applied to Starmer to ensure the enquiry is robust and satisfactorily framed.
Acknowledgement of the mishandling of this should come, in the very least, in the dismissal or resignation of Phillips and/or Cooper and Lucy Powell ought to be considering her position over her comments- not appropriate for her to Lead the House now.
It all needs swift movement with maximum contrition. There's a very very hostile audience out there and tempers are very frayed.
Similarly, a close friend was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer five years ago, and given little chance of surviving. He's had gruelling treatment and surgery, but is still in pretty good shape.
All the best - fingers crossed for you too.
And this Government simply wasn’t prepared, about 3 weeks after getting elected I saw a rabbit in the headlights look of panic and it really hasn’t disappeared yet
There's a certain proportion of people who would be willing to break a law under any circumstance - this proportion may vary between different demographics.
But there's a greater, possibly much greater, proportion who would be willing to break a law if they think they're at no risk from doing so.
The first step is to acknowledge "It can happen here". It probably is, unless you are *actively working against it*.
See the Leander and Oxford Brooks rowing scandals. I raised them at my rowing club and got a range of reactions, which was interesting. I would say that the reactions were healthy
- this is shit
- tour safeguarding rules are here, smaller incidents have occurred and been dealt with
- we have clearly delineated reporting. contacts here
- all staff have received training on "seeing, not ignoring"
etc....
From talking to the women in the club, they feel that it is taken seriously and the club is "onside".
Maybe there is some hope.
Starmer was pretty obviously useless from 2020 onwards, indeed before that as he was quite prepared to sell himself out for a shadow gig under magic grandpa.
In a functioning polity, the PM should be able to tell someone "Do Big Task X. You are responsible." and be receiving updates every so often. Instead, it seems that politics is sticking your nose into everything all the time.
A British scandal usually involves the following:
1. A good chap or chapess, or someone politically influential does something very wrong (eg abusing children, prosecuting people they know to be innocent, ignoring the dangers of a slag heap on the point of wiping out a mining village).
2. A blind eye is turned.
3. When a blind eye can no longer be turned, operation cover-up begins. The miscreant is moved sideways, or pensioned off.
4. When the cover up is exposed, announce a public enquiry.
5. Years later, the enquiry reports. Lessons have, inevitably been learned. Compensation is promised, but many victims are dead, by this point. In any event, the process of claiming compensation is made hideously complicated.
6. If a scapegoat is needed, it’s usually one of the small fry.
I always thought Daenerys’ approach in Game of Thrones - nailing up slave drivers - was really
rather refreshing by comparison
But
"I always thought Daenerys’ approach in Game of Thrones - nailing up slave drivers - was really rather refreshing by comparison"
The whole point of GoT was that this was just another corruption. While the Just Absolute Ruler is a nice fantasy, the reality is that they go mad and you get The Mad King. Or Queen.