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Kemi Badenoch has said “peasants” from “sub-communities” in some countries are the ones in grooming and rape gangs, and that a national inquiry would seek to identify those in authority who did not act.
“There are some places where, when people behave in that way, a mob turns up and burns their homes down, and then they know that they can’t do that sort of thing,” the Conservative leader told GB News.
“What for me is most extraordinary about this case is that clearly these people thought that they could get away with it. That is the thing that we should be looking at.”
Her comments came as two more Labour MPs said they would back a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, who has been a longtime campaigner on the sexual abuse of women and girls, said she had been convinced of the need for a national investigation. The Labour MP for Rochdale, Paul Waugh, also said he was open to a new inquiry, as did the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.
The prime minister has faced calls from the Conservatives and Reform UK, among others, to launch a new inquiry after the tech billionaire Elon Musk seized on the longstanding scandal earlier this month. Starmer has said he instead plans to press ahead with implementing recommendations from the previous inquiry into child sexual abuse, which went beyond just grooming gangs, led by Prof Alexis Jay.
Badenoch, who last week said she had not met any victims of the grooming gangs, told GB News she had now spoken to some and heard their testimonies.
“The most shocking thing was how they had gone to the authorities, and multiple times to the police. In one particular case, the police actually handed a 12-year-old into the hands of abusers. That, I think, is extraordinary,” Badenoch said.
“So the failure of state bodies, whether it’s the police, social services, is one of the areas that I think needs to be looked at much more deeply.”
The Conservative leader said that she had previously believed, while in government, that the Jay inquiry and the local inquiries had been sufficient. “They are not enough. Let’s do more … And my view is that there are a lot of people who have to give an explanation for why they failed, why they failed a lot of these young girls.”
But Badenoch said it was also crucial that an inquiry looked at “cultural issues” and that, although there was “misinformation [and] a lot of generalisation”, there was also “a systematic pattern of behaviour, not even just from one country, but from sub-communities within those countries”.
She said the perpetrators came from “a very poor background, a sort of peasant background, very, very rural, almost cut off from even the home-origin countries that they might have been in”.
“They’re not necessarily first-generation. The jobs that they were doing, taxi drivers, jobs which allowed them to exhibit this predatory behaviour.”
She said a grooming inquiry should also address the culture in the police and local authorities to ignore the issue. “The culture of silence, the culture of ‘computer says no’, the culture of ‘move along, nothing to see here’, the culture of ‘this is not our problem’ which is on the side of the state.
“A national inquiry needs to look at these two cultural issues at the same time.”
Addressing the survivors, she said: “I know many of you will be nervous. I know many of you will be afraid. But having spoken to some of you, I know that you want justice and you feel let down, that the people who should have looked after you did not look after you.
“And that needs to change. And I’m going to do everything, and the Conservative party is going to do everything, to make sure that you get justice.”
As well as the Jay inquiry, a series of local reviews have been conducted into child sexual abuse in Manchester, Rochdale and Telford, focusing on the targeted grooming of children by predominantly men of Pakistani origin.
Champion said the problem with the local inquiries was that they did not force people to engage with them. “A lot of the problems that we’re seeing are police forces not taking cases seriously, local authorities not taking cases seriously, but the current model of inquiry, local inquiry, can’t make them come and give evidence,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Champion said she had changed her mind on a national inquiry over the weekend. “For me, abuse is always rooted in power and exploiting that power,” she said.
“I don’t think the public are satisfied that we do know what the motivations are, particularly when it comes to grooming gangs. I think that unless we are open and transparent and show that we are tackling this head-on, this question’s going to keep on coming back.”
