Labour ministers “owe an apology” to everyone they dismissed over grooming gangs after Sir Keir Starmer’s U-turn on a national inquiry, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said.
The prime minister bowed to months of mounting pressure over the issue ahead of the publication of a new report by Louise Casey, who led the original review into the scandal, on Monday.
Sir Keir and a number of Labour ministers, including Jess Phillips, the minister for domestic abuse, have faced criticism for previously refusing to order such an probe.
The Labour leader initially pointed to previous work on the issue by Professor Alexis Jay, saying the public wanted action not another inquiry.
But after Ms Casey’s report backed the idea, the PM accepted the recommendation.
The issue hit the headlines again in January with a series of tweets by Donald Trump ally Elon Musk.
Sir Trevor Phillips said: “I think that ministers owe an apology to all of the people who they essentially said were talking rubbish, to all the people who to whom they said ‘you haven’t actually bothered to read the Jay Report and you don’t know actually what’s going on’. And to all of the people of whom it was suggested their interest and concern about this was motivated in some way by racial distaste or prejudice.”
Speaking on Times Radio he called specifically for an apology to the late Times reporter Andrew Norfolk “who did more than anyone else to expose this scandal and to keep it in the headlines… and who went to his grave feeling that people who should know better regarded him as a racist and a bigot.”
He added: “One minister said to me yesterday, it shouldn’t be about the hurt feelings of journalists and so on. Well let’s be clear about this. People like Andrew Norfolk were speaking on behalf of those who could not speak. This isn’t a matter of vanity. It isn’t a matter of journalists saying look at me. It is a matter of people like Norfolk, and there were others, who spoke out because the people who were the victims were not being heard and could not speak for themselves and I think they are owed an apology.”
In April, Sir Trevor condemned the government’s approach to grooming gangs as “utterly shameful”.
The inquiry is expected to examine whether fears over accusations of racism contributed to the failure to protect hundreds of girls from sexual abuse by grooming gangs.
It will be formally announced in the Commons by the home secretary Yvette Cooper, at the same time as the near 200-page Casey report, which reports suggest will warn that white British girls who were targeted were “institutionally ignored for fear of racism”.
Ministers are expected to hit out at the previouis Tory government and warn that a failure to act on previous findings has led to a lost decade for justice.
The new inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses, will oversee the small number of local investigations ministers announced earlier this year and have the power to start new ones, even over the heads of resistant councils.
A new National Crime Agency-led police operation is also expected to reopen more than 800 grooming gang cases.
The shadow home secretary Chris Philp defended the Conservatives’ record on the issue, saying Theresa May had set up original Rotherham inquiry.
He told GB News: “It was Rishi Sunak, a Conservative prime minister, who set up the grooming gangs task force, which in its first year led to 550 arrests. So that’s what the last government did.”
He also called for a “quick” inquiry. “Some public inquiries drag on for five or ten years. We can’t have that happening here. This needs to be a one- or two-year process, a very focused process,” he said.
At the start of the year Mr Musk even called on the King to step in and dissolve parliament after Labour rejected a call for a national inquiry.
The tech billionaire’s erratic request followed days of an explosive row over the PM’s handling of historic child abuse in Oldham after he suggested the Labour leader had failed to bring “rape gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions.
While the monarch does have the power to dissolve parliament, this power is a formality and is done so upon request of the prime minister.
Sir Keir condemned Mr Musk at the time suggesting his “lies and misinformation” on grooming gangs were amplifying the “poison” of the far right.
Mr Musk has engaged in a long-running war of words with Sir Keir’s administration which came to a head during last summer’s far-right riots when the social media boss claimed “civil war is inevitable” in the UK.
