The appalling scandal of the grooming gangs in English towns - well known already, but brought to attention once again thanks to Elon Musk - demands a proper national inquiry, which Kemi Badenoch is calling for but the Government is resisting, and the implementation of recommendations arising from previous reviews.
Justice for victims means accountability for those people and institutions who failed to address this decades long scandal. Anyone who worked to suppress these crimes, or who looked the other way in the line of duty must face criminal sanction. We are not just addressing one injustice here, but two.
We also need a transformation in the way we think about integration, and the work of social services in respect of girls in the care system. We see in this scandal the colliding of two bad things: a barbaric culture, imported from the subcontinent, that sees vulnerable British girls as unclaimed property to be acquired and used for the gratification of men; and a perverted liberalism among social workers and council leaders which caused them to tolerate sexual relations between ‘consenting’ children and adults from an ethnic minority.
For too long we have believed that these issues - sex and race - are outside politics. That’s a good conservative instinct: these things are properly nothing to do with the government. But the liberal model only works when the public broadly conforms to expectations of conduct that allow for liberalism - when men are expected to respect women and girls whatever their ethnicity, and when adults are expected not to have sex with children. These basic lessons, it appears, now have to be imparted deliberately to certain immigrant groups and to the public sector.
