It has become almost a weekly event. Someone new from the ranks of girls and women abused in the UK’s grooming gangs scandal comes forward to tell their story.
Last weekend it was Steph, a woman who talked to the BBC without anonymity, to explain how she was abused by men from the age of 12. She believes one of her abusers was a policeman.
The issue is a running sore, not only in the towns where it is prevalent, but in national politics as well. Elon Musk picked up on it in the early days of US President Donald Trump’s second term, attacking the UK government from his privileged perch in Washington.
There was bewilderment in London’s power corridors that Mr Musk and other allies of Mr Trump had seized on the issue. But not so for one influential Labour party figure: Maurice Glasman, who heads the Blue Labour movement that seeks to promote blue-collar and culturally conservative values within the governing party.
Mr Glasman had attended Mr Trump’s inauguration in January and was in the Capitol Rotunda when the US President returned to office. Speaking last week, he explained how the failure to properly address the scandal was a fundamental reason populism was on the rise in the UK. “It is a festering wound. It is still going on and it has not been stopped,” he said.
This is one of a number of signature issues on which the Labour party, which has not even completed a year in power, has lost the public’s trust. At this rate, it will almost certainly face the same fate as the Conservative party, which suffered a blow in this month’s local elections amid the surge of the populist Reform UK party.
While the Labour government has claimed that it is tackling the issue in the towns concerned, its actions have not cut through. Victims like Steph want a national inquiry and want to see justice done.
One newspaper report, also at the weekend, went to three of the towns where the abuse – mostly perpetrated by groups of men of Pakistani heritage – took place and found parents still in fear of losing their daughters to these hidden dangers.
“I know grooming gangs are still operating because young girls and their parents are telling me about them,” Jane Senior, the original whistle-blower on the scandal in Rotherham, told the Sunday Times reporter.
To Mr Glasman, this exposes a fundamental flaw in the body politic itself.
When a cabinet minister, Lucy Powell, tried to dismiss the scandal as a “dog whistle” issue for the far right to exploit, she was roundly condemned. She has since apologised for her remark, yet there is still no confirmation that Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government will take deeper action on the issue.
The same dynamic has been at play in France, where the far-right National Front is challenging the political establishment led by French President Emmanuel Macron with unprecedented support.
In this regard, it was notable that Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin recently sought to address his poor handling of the 2022 European cup club football final in Saint-Denis. He apologised to Liverpool fans, who were attacked by the Paris police as well as organised local gangs.
The language used by Mr Darmanin at the time demonstrated how politicians are captured by the bureaucracy – something he appeared to acknowledge later. “Yes, it was a failure. Because I hadn’t checked what was happening properly, which was my mistake, and because I gave in to pre-conceived ideas,” he told a YouTube broadcaster. “The culprit was easy [to designate], and I apologise to Liverpool fans. I said what I was told, which was ‘Well, the English are causing mayhem’. It wasn’t true in the literal sense of the word.”
It is easy, then, to see why the mistrust of leaders by voters has swelled.
Mr Glasman’s critique of politicians and bureaucrats, who he described as the “lanyard class” – another term for the administrative state – has some resonance. The archetype is an overly busy government employee engaged in setting rules and administration that do not lead to a productive outcome for the end user.
Alienation stems from the introduction of processes and technological systems that appear to prevail over the common sense that voters want as their primary interface with government.
In its move to address the grooming gangs issue, the UK government has turned to Louise Casey, the author of several reports into administrative malpractice. This has further fuelled public unhappiness because these reports come and go without making any apparent difference to the system.
The men and women from this “lanyard class” are now set up to become political targets. In an echo of Mr Musk, Mr Glasman said he believes there can be an AI-run delivery of a new politics that “liberates what only humans can do”.
As with the Trump administration’s focus on rooting out diversity, equity and inclusion, Mr Glasman told the Policy Exchange think tank that he would root out the thought-policing instincts of government and the “progressive assumptions” that are often used as a checklist for actions inside the bureaucracy.
Now that populism has taken power in America and is on the rise in Europe, it has found a ready-made agenda courtesy of the failures of government to recognise that ordinary people are often victims of the state itself.
