Maybe my father's Dickens tale wasn't fiction after all
James Thellusson is the author of 'School's Out: Truants, Troublemakers and Teachers' Pets.'
Charles Dickens despised the Victorian legal system. In 'Bleak House,' he invented the epic, decades-spanning Jarndyce v. Jarndyce legal battle over a family inheritance to expose the system's cruelty, cost and complexity. 'The one great principle of the English law,' he wrote in the novel, 'is to make business for itself.'
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Yahoo
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- Yahoo
Keir Starmer to launch national inquiry into grooming gangs
Keir Starmer will launch a national inquiry into grooming gangs after receiving the recommendations of an independent report on the scandal. The prime minister said a new statutory inquiry was 'the right thing to do' based on the findings submitted by Louise Casey, who has carried out a months-long inquiry into the abuse of young girls. Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the G7 summit in Canada, Starmer said Casey recommended 'a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen'. 'I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit,' he said. 'I shall now implement her recommendations.' Asked to set out a timeline for the inquiry, Starmer said: 'It will be statutory under the Inquiries Act. That will take a bit of time to sort out exactly how that works, and we will set that out in an orderly way.' Starmer has previously resisted pressure for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, and said earlier this year it would delay justice for victims. He called for ministers to instead focus on implementing the recommendations of previous reviews. Casey was asked to carry out a three-month national review on the scale and extent of grooming gangs in January after producing a report into sexual abuse in Rotherham. She was tasked with examining data not available to the initial national inquiry led by Alexis Jay, and to look into the ethnicity and demographics of abusers and victims, as well as 'the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending, including among different ethnic groups'. Starmer said on Saturday that Casey's 'position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry', but that she had changed her mind after reviewing the evidence. In parallel to Casey's review, the government asked Tom Crowther KC, who led an investigation in Telford, to help devise a model for a series of similar investigations in five towns where girls were abused, including Oldham. Ministers came under pressure over grooming gangs last year after Elon Musk spotlighted the government's decision to refuse Oldham council's request for a second national inquiry. The US billionaire's flurry of tweets on the subject brought the scandal back into public consciousness. On Friday, seven men who groomed two vulnerable teenage girls in Rochdale were found guilty of multiple sex offences after a long-running trial. The court heard the men subjected the girls to years of misery and expected them to have sex with them 'whenever and wherever they wanted'. Casey's 2015 review into the scandal in Rotherham said there had been an 'archaic culture of sexism, bullying and discomfort around race', with councillors and staff fearing being labelled racist if they mentioned the ethnicity of perpetrators. In response to the announcement of a new national inquiry, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, said: 'Keir Starmer doesn't know what he thinks unless an official report has told him so … I've been repeatedly calling for a full national inquiry since January. It's about time he recognised he made a mistake and apologise for six wasted months.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Public must ‘keep calm' over ethnicity of grooming gang offenders, says Louise Casey
The public must 'keep calm' over the ethnicity of grooming gang offenders, the author of a high-profile report has urged, saying police data from one region suggested that the race of child abuse suspects was proportional with the local population. The comments from Louise Casey came as Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, defended herself from claims that she was attempting to politicise the scandal of the organised rape of girls by men across dozens of towns over at least 25 years. Lady Casey's report on Monday found evidence of 'over-representation' of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects of 'group sexual exploitation' of children, according to data from three police forces. Related: Casey report forces Starmer's hand on issue that has haunted Labour for decades Casey told MPs on Tuesday that she was concerned that the limited data available on the race and ethnicity of offenders was not being used responsibly as part of the public debate on grooming gangs. She said the report examined data from Greater Manchester police (GMP), which covers towns including Rochdale and Oldham where convicted grooming gangs operated. 'If you look at the data on child exploitation, suspects and offenders, it is disproportionately Asian heritage,' she said. 'If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate and it is white men. 'So just a note to everybody, outside here rather than in here, let's just keep calm about how you interrogate data and what you get from it.' According to the report, GMP's figures showed that 52% of suspects involved in multi-victim/multi-offender cases of child sexual exploitation over a three-year period were Asian, compared with 38% who were white. When examining suspects for all child sex abuse crimes, not just grooming, the same force's data shows that 16% were Asian and 44% were white, while 32% of suspects were of 'unknown' ethnicity. The last census figures show that 57% of Greater Manchester is white and 21% is Asian, according to the report. Related: UK grooming gangs inquiry 'must confront uncomfortable truths' Keir Starmer said later on Tuesday that Badenoch had done about grooming gangs when the Tories were in power and asked why she had not brought forward a mandatory duty for authorities to report child sexual exploitation when she was a minister. 'Why didn't you do it? Why didn't you say one word about it?' the prime minister asked in a direct message to Badenoch as he spoke to reporters at the G7 summit in Canada. Starmer also defended his record, saying he brought about the first prosecutions of grooming gang members while director of public prosecutions, changed the rules to make gang prosecution easier and called for mandatory reporting, which the Conservatives rejected. 'I'm now the prime minister who has passed into law mandatory reporting, who has taken forward the unique identifier for children, because I've always been really worried that children falling outside of school are not being picked up, and they are very vulnerable to exploitation,' he said. 'And obviously now [I have] announced this national inquiry.' Casey told the BBC's Newsnight on Monday that she was 'disappointed' by the Conservatives' response to her review of the grooming gangs scandal. 'We need to change some laws, we need to do a national criminal investigation, we need to get on with a national inquiry with local footprint in it, and ideally wouldn't it be great if everybody came behind that and backed you?' she said. 'I felt the opposition could have just been a bit, you know, 'Yes we will all come together behind you.' Maybe there's still time to do that. I think it's just so important that they do.' At a hastily arranged press conference, Badenoch said she was 'not doing politics now' but criticised people who sought to 'tone police those who are pointing out when something has gone wrong'. 'I do think that we should take the politics out of it. But who was it that said when we raised this issue that we were pandering to the far right? That's what brought the politics into it,' she said. Badenoch said her party backed a national inquiry into the scandal and had been calling for one 'for six months'.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Emma Raducanu's stalker blocked by Wimbledon after name found in ballot
Emma Raducanu's stalker has been blocked from buying tickets for the Wimbledon Championships this month in the public ballot, it has emerged. Security staff at the All England Club discovered that the man, who has never been named, was on the waiting list when they did a re-sweep of the ballot, after he was given a restraining order in Dubai in February. Related: 'She's going to be the boss': Alcaraz reveals US Open request for Raducanu The authorities in Dubai acted after the British No 1 was forced to hide in tears behind the umpire's chair when the 'fixated' admirer was removed from the stands and detained by police during her second-round match against Karolina Muchova. The previous day the man had given Raducanu a letter and asked for a photograph in a coffee shop. The 22-year-old had also been aware of his presence at tournaments in Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Doha in preceding weeks. Speaking after the incident, Raducanu told reporters: 'I saw him in the first game of the match and I was like: 'I don't know how I'm going to finish.' I literally couldn't see the ball through tears. I could barely breathe. I was like: 'I need to just take a breather.' I'm always with someone and always being watched.' Raducanu, who shot to global fame when she won the US Open as an 18-year-old in 2021, said that her behaviour had changed since the incident in Dubai. 'I'm obviously wary when I go out,' she said. 'I try not to be careless about it because you only realise how much of a problem it is when you're in that situation and I don't necessarily want to be in that situation again.' Raducanu has previously been the victim of a stalker, with another man given a five-year restraining order in 2022 after he walked 23 miles to her home. On Tuesday the British No 2, Katie Boulter, said that she had received abuse and death threats on social media and had been followed around London by an unknown vehicle. Sally Bolton, chief executive of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, said that security measures would be tight at Wimbledon this year. 'We're liaising with the tours, with the Met police, with other security agencies right through the year to think about the types of risks we need to look at and adjusting what we put in place,' she said. 'I would say to them [players] they should have confidence when they're here and if they are concerned on any basis they should come and talk to us about that because we can put bespoke arrangements in place.' Wimbledon will also have police and military personnel in the grounds, as well a team of fixated threat specialists
