Starmer agrees to grooming gangs inquiry
This evening, Keir Starmer has announced he does want a national inquiry on grooming gangs after all. The Prime Minister had tasked Baroness Casey to conduct a rapid review of the evidence available on the scale of these crimes committed by gangs – and her review is expected to conclude on Monday that there needs to be a full public inquiry.
Starmer said today that Casey had also changed her mind on whether such an investigation was necessary, arguing: 'She's come to the view there should be a national inquiry on the basis of what she's seen. I've read every single word of her report, and I'm going to accept her recommendation. I think that's the right thing to do, on the basis of what she has put in her audit. I asked her to do that job, to double-check on this.'
In the months after Starmer had commissioned Casey, ministers had dropped hints that a full public inquiry might still be on the cards, saying they wanted to do the best thing that would allow them to understand the full scale of grooming gangs, and to bring both the perpetrators and those who had looked the other way to justice. That had been a significant softening of the initial adamance from Starmer and other senior government figures that putting a national inquiry on a statutory footing would in fact slow down justice and accountability.
The reality is that whatever the format of an inquiry – whether locally focused, nationally focused, non-statutory, statutory, long-running or rapid – it is perfectly possible, in fact totally normal, for justice not to be served, and for the lessons that everyone fervently promises at the outset to learn to remain merely proposals. Nigel Farage pointed to this in his response when he said: 'A full statutory enquiry, done correctly, will expose the multiple failings of the British establishment. I repeat the words 'done correctly'– this cannot be a whitewash.'
'Whitewash' is a popular political word, but even truly revelatory inquiries can still quite easily be ignored by the establishment – or, if not ignored, then implemented so slowly that similar scandals end up occurring in the meantime. Starmer's U-turn is politically significant, particularly given it is another example of the government responding to pressure from Reform. But in policy terms it is still largely meaningless.
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The National
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In 2007, Alex Salmond nudged the SNP ahead of Scottish Labour by one Holyrood seat, establishing a minority government in Edinburgh for the first time by winning 47 seats to Labour's 46. Initially, the new regime wasn't given a snowball's chance in hell of lasting long. Having been ruled by Lib-Lab coalitions since 1999, general political wisdom was rooted to the majority-minded Westminster system, noting the inherent vulnerabilities of a minority government – by definition, always subject to being defeated or ousted by a determined and untied opposition. The 2008 by-election in Glasgow East – which saw the SNP pick up a 26% increase in support and beat the Labour party – suggested that the Holyrood outcome the previous year hadn't been an electoral fluke. It is difficult to understate the psychological impact. In 2007, Nicola Sturgeon was the solitary successful SNP candidate in Glasgow, winning Glasgow Govan from Gordon Jackson after umpteen runs at the constituency. When John Mason beat Margaret Curran in 2008, it demonstrated the old Labour hegemony in the beating heart of its historic heartlands in Scotland was not unassailable. But the UK general election result the following year seemed to scotch the notion the party was facing any more generalised revolt from its traditional political base in west central Scotland. And like all human organisations in denial, Labour were only to happy to seize on any reassuring evidence that everything was fine and that they weren't in the early stages of experiencing an involuntary shift in political gravity, whether they liked it or not. Under pressure in the rest of the UK from David Cameron's 'modernised' Tories, Scottish Labour claimed 42% of the general election vote and 41 of the 59 Scottish seats in Westminster, outpolling the SNP by almost 545,000 votes. Margaret Curran even won back Glasgow East for her party, taking 61.6% of the popular vote to Mason's 24.7%. Alexander Pope's observation – that 'even victors are by victories undone' – applies most powerfully to the aftermath of the 2014 referendum, but it also coloured Labour's attitudes as early as 2010. If you were looking for reassurance that ordinary service would shortly be resumed and that the old order of Scottish politics would be returning any day now – the results of the 2010 general election suggested that Labour could be intensely comfortable about its chances of ousting the Nats at the next Holyrood election. The case for complacency pointed at these strong electoral performances, and concluded the party didn't have to engage in any significant introspection about its future in order to convince a sufficient proportion of the population to 'come home to Labour' in the favoured formulation of the grand seigneurs of the People's Party. These victories were an analgesic, numbing nagging anxieties that any more fundamental might be afoot. It's a lesson that sometimes in politics, taking the pain is better for you. The Holyrood result in 2011 – delivering the single party majority for the SNP – rebuked these complacent assumptions, marking the point at which the more thoughtful people in Scottish Labour began to notice the sheer slope of the electoral declivity they were hurtling down, surfing over the independence referendum campaign before plunging into the electoral an abyss that lay beyond it in its aftermath. It was too late, of course. But you can understand why the party felt like the electorate were feeding them mixed messages. In political science writing of the time, scholars analysed the apparent volatility and flair for party disloyalty these diverse outcomes in Westminster and Holyrood votes pointed to. Scots were described as being 'most sophisticated electorate in the world' – happy to be represented by one party in Westminster and to back their principal opponents in Holyrood. This kind of political promiscuity is calculated to confuse politicians or party activists who imagine they have your vote or they don't. An SNP win in Hamilton would have been a morale boost – but like those Scottish Labour wins of the late 2000s, I wonder if it might also have been a spur to complacency at just the most perilous moment for the party to be complacent. Defeat underscores the existential insecurity party representatives must feel months out from the next Holyrood poll. How the party reacts is, to some extent, in its hands. Some thrive on confidence, finding the puff goes out of them when they experience setbacks and disappointments. Others come alive when they're on the back foot, fighting for survival rather than cruising towards easy victories. Old Tom Paine thought 'what we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.' Old SNP hands are more used to losing than winning, but there's a whole generation of younger party officials and activists who've only known the party in its pomp, in government. Like the Labour functionaires, lost in the new politics which emerged after 2007, they should brace themselves.
