Latest news with #groomingScandal
Sky News
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Was there a Whitehall cover-up of the grooming gangs scandal?
👉 Listen to Sky News Daily on your podcast app 👈 Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, according to Dominic Cummings, who was working for him at the time. In an interview with Sky's political correspondent Liz Bates, Mr Cummings has revealed how officials in the Department for Education wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal. On the Sky News Daily, Mark Austin speaks to Liz Bates about the scandal and what Mr Cummings told her.
The Independent
8 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
The victims of grooming gangs deserve justice – at long last, they may get it
Whether or not it counts as a U-turn, as it's been called, is somewhat beside the point: the government's announcement of a full statutory national inquiry into the way the grooming scandal was mishandled by the authorities is long overdue and highly welcome. The prime minister and the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, are showing the kind of determination to secure justice that has been absent for an inexplicable run of time. Perhaps even more heartening, showing that it is actually possible for ministers to take control of events and not wait for lengthy inquiries, is the news that there will be a nationwide policing operation to bring any known or suspected historic grooming gang members to justice. Led by the National Crime Agency rather than the local forces sometimes discredited by past behaviour, more than 800 older cases – an astounding figure suggestive of a vast backlog of organised, predatory child cruelty – are being reopened. A new police model of investigating these gangs will help prevent future shortcomings. Baroness Casey, true to her past record of cutting through bureaucratic inertia, has set out the extent to which the victims of these evil men were let down by the few people they could turn to when they needed help – and thus the assistance and, indeed, justice to which they were entitled. The government is right to say that the issue has not been completely ignored until now. Certainly, it arose at the start of the year when Elon Musk made false claims that Home Office guidance supposedly issued in 2008 had asked police not to intervene in child grooming cases. There have been prosecutions and convictions, the particular and striking racial dimension to some of the gangs' modus operandi has been well recognised, there has already been one overarching national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay, and some in-depth local investigations, such as in Rotherham. Indeed, the press began reporting on the way gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin or heritage had been preying upon white girls and young white women as long ago as 2011. So it was not a case of complete inaction and a scandal erupting even now. But what has also been long apparent is that what has been achieved so far has not been enough – and there is no excuse for the failures and the neglect of many victims. It is unforgivable. That is the point of the Casey review, which has looked at the facts and the sorry history of the predators in unflinching detail. These were rape gangs, and they engaged in sadistic and life-changing abuse. They acted in concert, and without conscience. The racial aspect, where there was one, is disturbing. Calls for a proper resolution of the crimes had become irresistible. It is thus time to find out, on a comprehensive basis, what went wrong and why, and to identify, in as fair and dispassionate a manner as possible, those institutions and those individuals who have questions to answer. The victims – all of them, without exception – deserve nothing less than this. The cost, once so publicly resented by Boris Johnson when he was prime minister, is immaterial. For too long, because they were young, because they were girls, because they sometimes were lured from care homes or unhappy lives (but by no means exclusively), or were not from families that had the knowledge and confidence to challenge the system, they were abandoned, left defenceless and even blamed. Some were pregnant and having to face their abusers as if they were in some sort of romantic relationship. The consequences of those encounters in the streets and chicken shops will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Healing is itself painful. With everything else they were subjected to, the wall of official complacency is unfathomable. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that class, as well as race, played its part in these events – and indubitably so when their perpetrators were predominantly or entirely white. Physical or mental disability was no barrier to being a victim of depravity. In any case, these were emotionally and physically devastating experiences for children, and have an obscenely, almost Victorian, quality to them. Yet they were committed only a few years ago, almost in plain sight, with something like collusion in parts of local government and the police, and the victims, even now, are still young. Plainly, the country needs to have an accurate and a balanced accounting for this. The racial and class dimensions have to be faced up to and set in proper perspective. There should be no slide into a toxic Islamophobia. Not all child rapists are men of Pakistani origin and heritage, and, even more important to stress, not all Pakistani men, by origin or heritage, are abusers – indeed, they are as decent and as appalled as anyone else. The danger – and it is a real one – is that these tragedies do become politicised and abused by those with ulterior, twisted motives, part of a grotesque narrative that sees all migrants, and particularly Muslim people, as sinister sexual predators. This is one reason why the riots last summer in England, and now again in Northern Ireland, have broken out. The attitude of the far-right extremists is as if no white person had ever conspired to sexually abuse a child, as if Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, Fred and Rose West, Ian Huntley, Jimmy Savile, and countless other notorious paedophiles – some so-called VIPs – had never lived. Each and every one of these cases of child sexual abuse is a crime against a vulnerable person, and then too often exacerbated by indifference shown by carers, social workers, police officers, prosecutors and, yes, the media generally, which didn't take the issues seriously enough, early enough. Whereas in the past, British official inquiries have rightly focused on 'institutional racism', Ms Casey's work suggests that institutional fear of racism – ie, accusations of it – can also be a problem. If there were 'cover-ups', or else a non-conspiratorial oversensitivity about political correctness, then they should be exposed, the reasons identified, and appropriate reforms implemented. The recommendations of previous reviews have to be enforced. Whether Sir Keir Starmer, Ms Cooper and their colleagues will ever be given political credit for doing the right thing – identifying the crimes committed by people and organisations in the past, and delivering a measure of justice and restitution – we shall see. But as a nation, Britain is now doing the right thing by the victims. At last.
Sky News
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Whitehall officials tried to cover up grooming scandal in 2011, Dominic Cummings says
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal. Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal. In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a "total cover-up". The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal. In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper's then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham. The council went to Lord Gove's Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove's office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story. Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings' account. Mr Cummings told Sky News: "Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: 'There's this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story'. "So I went to Michael Gove and said: 'This council is trying to actually stop this and they're going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council's JR (judicial review).' "Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council... "They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times' reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran." 3:18 The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times' publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain. A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain. One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain. There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases. Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort. Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson's right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government. He said the inquiry, announced today, "will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing." He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a "moron' for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been "spaffed up the wall". Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence. "There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis," he said.
Sky News
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up grooming scandal in 2011
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal. Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal. In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a "total cover-up". The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal. In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper's then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham. The council went to Lord Gove's Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove's office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story. Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings' account. Mr Cummings told Sky News: "Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: 'There's this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story'. "So I went to Michael Gove and said: 'This council is trying to actually stop this and they're going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council's JR (judicial review).' "Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council... "They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times' reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran." 3:18 The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times' publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain. A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain. One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain. There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases. Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort. Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson's right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government. He said the inquiry, announced today, "will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing." He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a "moron' for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been "spaffed up the wall". Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence. "There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis," he said.
Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Starmer leads tributes to Andrew Norfolk, who exposed grooming gangs
Andrew Norfolk, the Times reporter who exposed the grooming scandal, has been remembered as one of the great journalists of his generation after his death aged 60. Sir Keir Starmer led tributes to Norfolk as a brave and tenacious journalist who uncovered the widespread abuse of girls by predominantly Pakistani men and the failure of the authorities to stop it. Norfolk, who received journalism's most prestigious awards for his reporting of the scandal in Rotherham and Rochdale, retired in November after a 24-year career at The Times. He had suffered ill health and died on May 8 after collapsing while attending a routine medical appointment. Starmer was director of public prosecutions when Norfolk revealed the scandal and changed the rules so that more charges were
