The News Agents: Child grooming, 'political correctness' and dog whistle politics

We're going to talk about child grooming today. It's a really uncomfortable subject,

and the conviction rates for it in this country are shockingly low. But we're talking about

it specifically because our Prime Minister has pledged that political correctness about

ethnicity won't get in the way of a crackdown on grooming gangs. And he spelled out what

he means, which is specifically grooming gangs of British Pakistani origin, which he, his

government believes is at the heart of most of this crime.

So how does this make you feel? Obviously, anyone in their right minds wants the people

behind grooming gangs to be put on trial and if found guilty to go to prison for a very

long time. But when you inject the words political correctness into it, is that a bit of a dog

whistle? Are you politicising something that should be purely a matter of criminal justice

and what is the best way to get people behind bars who have done wrong?

So is it better to call it out if that's what the data is telling us and we'll come back

to that data in a moment? Or is Tory policy now being made by Tommy Robinson and the

English Defence League, who've been on about this since the Rotherham scandal over ten

years ago? Welcome to the news agents.

The news agents.

It's John.

It's Emily.

And we are at news agents HQ. Rotchdale, Rotherham, Telford. They all have something in common

for all the wrong reasons, which is the terrible stories of grooming gangs, abusing, raping,

young, vulnerable girls, often in care, that has led to something today where you've had

the Prime Minister and Home Secretary talking about how there has to be a fight back about

the political correctness that has prevented the government going after grooming gangs.

But why now? Why has this taken so long when the Conservatives have been in power for 13

years and some of these cases that we're talking about were 10, 11 years ago? And by using the

phrase political correctness as the reason why this hasn't happened in the past, are

you trying to make this too political when what is at stake is something so fundamental

to law and order?

So this morning, Rishi Sunak gave a pool interview. In other words, he said one thing

to one reporter that everyone else can carry. And this is what he had to say about that

whole question of his words, political correctness and grooming gangs.

Well, we've had inquiries, independent inquiries into the incidences at Rotchdale, Rotherham,

Telford. It is clear that when victims or whistleblowers raise concerns with people,

those concerns were ignored. And often the reasons that they were ignored were put down

to people wanting to be not culturally insensitive or because of political correctness. So that's

not right.

So that was the Prime Minister speaking in Rotchdale this morning. And today on the news

agents, we want to try and get a really honest nuanced debate or understanding about what

is going on. Why were those police failures so bad 11, 12 years ago in Rotherham, in Rotchdale?

And does calling it out, in his words, make things better? Or is it just a kind of dog

whistle to tell your supporters that you're on their side?

We're going to talk to a professor at UCL, first of all. She's an associate professor

who has studied child grooming very extensively. And she talks about her concerns over the

inconsistency of the data that we actually have. It doesn't really add up anyway.

Sajid Javid, when he was Home Secretary, commissioned the Home Office to do a piece of research around

ethnicity in so-called grooming gangs. And that was released in late 2020. And what it

found was two things. One, that the majority of offenders are white British. And yes, you

might well expect that given the demographics of the country. And that's why the second

finding is so important. And that is that there was no credible nationally representative

evidence of overrepresentation of any particular ethnic group within so-called grooming gangs.

So that was Ella Cobain there from UCL, talking about how the statistics, the numbers are

much more complicated than just a simple, dare I say it, black and white headline that

the people responsible for all of this are British Pakistanis. Because Suella Braverman

yesterday, when she spoke to Sky News, she talked about how almost all of these incidents

were carried out by British Pakistanis who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible

with British values. So the way it was framed was that this was a Pakistani problem and

white girls. And what the academic research seems to be saying is actually it is an awful

lot more complicated than that.

And we've been looking at a Home Office report that was commissioned in 2020 that actually

uses data that was nearly a decade old. And its specifications of what constitutes Asian

or what constitutes British or what constitutes white is very confused. And the numbers aren't

very large. And actually, you can take from that report virtually any headline you want,

which is why we wanted to just try and ask a little bit more thoroughly what the numbers

were telling us or couldn't tell us.

And we're going to go straight now to the Labour MP, Jess Phillips, who is Labour Party

spokesperson on equality and children's issues and women. Jess Phillips, thank you very much

indeed for being with us. I've seen a long thread that you have put out on Twitter about

this issue where you seem to argue fine to have these ambitions, but the failure that

there has been is about the criminal justice system and offering support to victims. So

do you think that what Rishi Sunak has announced today changes anything?

No, absolutely not. I think that what Rishi Sunak announced today is largely what many

people have been calling for for over a decade, actually, and without actual support for victims

put in place will make absolutely no difference. The major error that the government seem to

be making today in their announcements is not looking at the systems that they're in

charge of, that they're getting wrong, because the reality is that all these victims of grooming

currently have to go through the home office system of the national referral mechanism,

which currently takes most victims over 550 days to be even told they're a victim. And

if they're a British victim rather than a modern slave from another country, they cannot

access any housing support or any of the same support that they might get if you were to

be put into a refuge. There is no safe housing. So in the cases that I've handled, which

I'll handle immediately after this interview, ironically, I have nowhere to place these

people and nowhere. So when they come forward, there's no safety for them.

So Jess, this should be music to your ears then. If you hear Rishi Sunak talking about

a new task force made up of officers with extensive experience of grooming gang investigation

and providing crucial support, as you've said, if you called for it 10 years ago, you should

presumably be saying, great, it's here now.

Oh, absolutely. I want to see a nationwide task force that deals with grooming. However,

what it will be doing is dealing with grooming within the what we call the public protection

unit within police forces, which if you read the Casey review, you will see that regardless

of the fact that home secretary after home secretary and prime minister after prime minister

has stood in front of, you know, whatever lectern it is with whatever slogan they've

got on it this week and told us that they're prioritising violence against women and girls.

Actually, what the Casey review found was that public protection has not been prioritised.

It's been defunded across the board. And so, yes, a small task force that is going to go

in and help what is a broken system in almost every single police force in the country.

It will do something. And mandatory reporting is something that we've been calling for for

over a decade. So I'm pleased. But actually, what Rishi Sunak is focusing on here is the

headline rather than the front line. And I'm afraid to say that the home secretary and

Rishi Sunak, unlike myself, have absolutely no idea of the reality on the front line of

young girls propping out of the system, expecting less than like, you know, 2% of their charges

to be taken, dropping out because they're not safe in the system. And I have to walk

around the country knowing what I know about some of these groomers being completely free

to walk around amongst all of our children. It is horrifying the situation as it is today.

Does Labour have a problem with the government calling out the ethnicity of these gangs,

of groomers? Is that a helpful thing to do if you actually know who you're going after

and you're not scared to do it?

Oh, look, you know, I'm absolutely not scared to go after groomers regardless of the ethnicity.

And I have taken part in supporting victims. I'm currently doing it of some of the classic

grooming gangs that Suella Braverman likes to focus on the idea of it being exclusively

Pakistani men. What I think is dangerous from what Suella Braverman has said is to underestimate,

for example, the idea that black and Asian girls can also be victims of grooming and

certainly are not being spoken to by these particular women.

So you're not denying that there may be predominantly a larger problem with British Pakistani men?

No, there isn't a larger problem. In fact, the majority of cases of sexual abuse and

grooming that I come across are largely actually peer on peer and all the data would show you

that from decades gone by. I'm absolutely, I don't agree that most of these cases are

that and it's not whether I agree with it or not. I'm certainly not too afraid to challenge

it when it does have that profile. I'm absolutely fine with that. What I am against doing is

saying that that's the only issue. Last week in Bolton, there were 10 men arrested for child

sexual grooming. Not one of them fits the profile that Suella Braverman is talking

about today. Lots of the girls in Brotherham and Rochdale, for example, were not white.

I think lots of the victims in lots of the different places have come forward and said,

well, actually, this doesn't speak about me because I'm multi-ethnic. So we have to be

very, very careful. What I would like is the Home Office to collect any data on any of

this. We've been asking for data collection on the ethnicity, the immigration status of

victims of all these crimes, as well as perpetrators for decades. The Home Office doesn't collect

data on anything. It's useless.

So why do you think that Suella Braverman then comes out and says something like, the

British Pakistanis, they hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values?

Oh, I don't know why Suella Braverman does anything. She doesn't know what she's talking

about nine times out of 10. She certainly doesn't know anything about her own department.

She did. She might have sorted out the massive delay in making girls who've been groomed

for sex wait for so long. I can't speak for why Suella Braverman says anything. I mean,

I think she's probably chasing headlines rather than dealing with the front line, which is

the only thing her department is capable of. All it does is release statements. It doesn't

actually do any of the work on the ground that's going to solve any of this.

So if this is not about a long-term solution, I mean, look, we've got local councillors

elections coming up. You want to create the best political environment you can in those

Redwall constituencies, Rochdale, Rotherham, all those sort of places. Do you think this

is more about some dog whistle politics to get the Tory base out? I mean, what is it?

Well, I just think it's a government in the last row is not having done nothing for the

past 13 years to tackle this particular crisis, wanting to get headlines. Look, I can't speak

for why the Conservatives behave in a certain way. What I would want to say is that the

Labour Party, I've spent the last year, I have personally spent the last year working

with partners and victims of grooming, which I will do again today and every other day

to find out what is stopping us prosecuting these groomers, what is stopping the victims

coming forward. And the Labour Party has been working on policy around that for the last

year. This is the actual work. This is the actual work. I'm not interested in the headlines.

I'm not interested in being popular and more retweeted. But when you look back at the

failure over Rotherham, what you hear is the government saying, spelling out that the police

were too scared to prosecute because of ethnic questions of the perpetrators. Yeah, well,

that's disgusting. You accept that? Yeah, of course, 100% accept that. And that's disgusting.

That's absolutely despicable. And that should never, ever, ever come into it. So he's right.

I mean, from that perspective, yeah, you can call it chasing the headlines. But fundamentally,

Rishi Sunak is right then to say, hang on a second, if that was stopping police from

prosecuting when they should have been holding these people to account, then we've got to

get over that. He's right.

But I mean, he, Rishi Sunak is from the government that's been in charge for 13 years. What has

he done about it? He's done absolutely nothing about it. Women are routinely still, especially

working class women, routinely not believed by police forces across the country. How many

reviews do I have to see? What has Rishi Sunak done about the standards in policing in this?

But if his message now is to the police forces, you'd say, great. Thank God, right? You'd

say yes.

I think he's arguing a 10 year ago case for the situation we face now. This and these

grooming gangs of all different types still exist today. In fact, if you read the independent

sexual child abuse inquiry, what it says is it's worse today than it was in the days of

Rochdale and Rotherham. It's got worse. That's the thing he should be focusing on. I don't

care if it's your claiming cultural background for the abuses that you have against women.

I will come for you regardless. I do not care. I have no truck with it whatsoever. So that's

why I've worked, for example, with Sammy Woodhouse, one of the Rotherham victims, to try and say

that rapists, for example, in cases of grooming, should never be able to have access to their

children. Like in her case, that happened. We tried to pass that law five years ago.

It's still not even in the government's victims bill that they put forward. Funnily enough,

the things that the government are saying they're going to do today, they didn't put

in their own victims bill. Anyone would think that that might be because they're chasing

headlines rather than getting on with legislating about mandatory reporting. Why isn't it in

the victims bill? Why isn't it there? Maybe I'll lay an amendment to the victims bill

and maybe the government then will have to vote for a Labour amendment for the thing

they're saying they care about. Where are they? They're nowhere to be seen on this.

In my office today, I will see victim after victim. I will speak to them all day tomorrow.

I will be, because of all this attention, I am getting hundreds of emails. There are

cases and cases piling up and the government has done nothing about it.

Jess Phillips, thank you so much. We'll let you get on with your work there. Thank you

very much. Bigger work than us. Thanks, Jess.

No worries. Now, Jess Phillips knows what she's talking

about when it comes to the questions of child grooming. You heard what she was telling us

about the numbers of people that she's seeing, young women, girls, who she is dealing with

on a case basis, on a victim basis. But what I thought was really interesting was when

I asked her if she would criticise Rishi Sunak for saying that the police failings were

about political correctness, she didn't want to talk about dog whistle politics. She didn't

deny that that might have been the root cause of police failures in Rotherham and in Rochdale.

In fact, it seemed to me that Labour is very keen to stay out of this culture war and carry

on talking about the victims first and not the perpetrators. I mean, you heard Jess say

she would go after a perpetrator, whatever colour, whatever race, all the rest of it.

But she didn't say this is a dog whistle or this is the far right. And I wonder if that's

because Labour is positioning itself very carefully on this one, actually, in terms

of the language they respond with. Well, I think that there are two things there. I think

one is that Labour Party can spot an elephant trap when it sees one and there is an elephant

trap saying, come this way and fall into it, please, which is you kind of act like you're

the defence of this. And so I don't think that Jess Phillips wanted to go anywhere near

that. I thought that was interesting. I thought she was pretty critical of Soella Braverman

and her motivations. And this was about headlines. It wasn't about sorting out the problem and

also the language. But each time she said, there are a decade late. Yes, we'd like the

task force. Yes, we'd like these measures. There are a decade late, which is a very different

thing to saying this is appalling language and it's racist. Yeah, although I think she

did distance herself from the language about British Pakistanis and their culture. And

I didn't think she did subscribe to that. Look, I think Labour recognised there is a

real serious problem that needs to be grappled with. And I think that they see this. You

know, why are you only doing this now? Yeah, why is it taken so long? We've been campaigning

about this. Why are you so slow to the party to the whatever on all of this when there

was an 11% conviction rates, which is obviously greater than, let's say, rape more generally

amongst the female population, but still incredibly low. And I think that Emily, we've

on the podcast before talked about the terrible conviction rate for rape victims. And we have

covered that extensively. And I think that Jess Phillips wants this to be a more generalised

critique of Tory failure over criminal justice. Labour is not going to have the debate defined

for it by Rishi Sunak or Suella Braverman. And if they want to use political correctness

as a term, fine, you can use it. But we're not getting into that battle. We've got a

bigger battle to fight with you. That's right. Well, we're on the subject of Suella Braverman.

If you spent 24 hours sitting in a coach at Dover this weekend, you'll be reassured to

know that Suella Braverman thinks it had nothing to do with Brexit. There seems to be an awful

lot of evidence. To the contrary, we'll be back in a second.

This is The News Agents.

Welcome back. Yesterday, the Home Secretary did the rounds on the Sunday shows and she

was asked about those long queues at Dover, particularly the coaches, particularly school

kids who've been sitting there for 12, 15 hours trying to get out of the country through

the border crossing and had been stuck there. And she was asked if it was to do with Brexit.

This is what she said. I don't think that's fair to say this has

been an adverse effect of Brexit. I think we've had many years now sitting in the European

Union and there's been, on the whole, very good operations and processes at the border.

But what I would say is at acute times when there's a lot of pressure crossing the channel,

whether that's on the tunnel or on ferries, then I think that there's always going to

be a backup and I just urge everybody to be a bit patient while the ferry companies

work their way through the backlog. And this was the response from Doug Bannister,

the Chief Executive of the Doverport Authority.

The difference of being in a post-Brexit environment means that every passport needs

to be checked before a vehicle or a passenger can cross into the European Union through

France and that happens here in Dover. So it does make processing more challenging.

Now it's interesting that you've got a very firm rejection of the Home Secretary there.

And in Europe, this is the headline that La Repubblica, the Italian paper, is carrying

today Brexit Codi di 15 ore per i Britannici a Dover e a Novembre sarà ancora peggio.

So in other words, they're saying Brexit, that's their opening line, 15 hours' worth

of queues for Britons at Dover and it's going to get worse in November.

So there seems to be no discussion about whether or not it's Brexit in the EU. You might say,

well they would say that, wouldn't they? Of course they want to blame Brexit. But in

your opinion, and you've sort of done this journey on a British passport quite a few

times now, each time you travel, it is noticeably worse, right?

It's a bloody nightmare. I mean, it depends where you go. I mean, there are some countries

in the EU that will accept the electronic gates. And of course Britain was never part

of Schengen, true. But you know, I've been to Geneva twice this year for different reasons,

neither reason sadly to go skiing. And it has been held each time with very, very long

queues for British passport holders. And if you're an EU passport holder or Swiss passport

holder, you just use the e-gates. Now, there's always been checks on your passport, but they

would just have a cursory look so that the face matched the picture and away you go.

Now they have to stamp the passport, because as a result of the hard Brexit, you can now

only, if you're a European coming to the UK, you can only spend 90 days in the UK. And

likewise, at a time, if you're going from Britain, and the one way you can guarantee

that is to check passport stamps, so that your passport stamp in will be next to your

passport stamp out. And if it's more than 90 days, they can check on it, which means

that if you have a coach load of 50 people, and every person has to get off and have their

passport stamp, it may only take an extra 45 seconds per person. But times that by 50,

and times that by 50 coaches, and you have got a bloody long tail back and a 15 hour

commute. The only place that I remember having to get off a coach to have my passport stamped

in that way was when I was at the border between Moldova and Transnistria, which is still

a sort of Soviet enclave. But that's what I mean. It was quite weird. There were people

in those Russian greatcoats, and the bearskin hats, and all the sort of gold toggles, and

we had to literally get off. And I remember thinking, wow, this is a sign of something

seriously from another age, seriously from another era, because we actually had to get

off the coach, hand over our passport, wait for it to come back. And it is extraordinary

that, yeah, you're right, it's only 10 seconds. But that's a lot of 10 seconds in one go.

And it doesn't work on the way back. So if you're French coming into the UK, I think

the British have said, oh, it's fine, we'll waive the passport, so we're not going to

do that as checks.

Well, remember, it was about taking back control of our borders. And what the British have

said is, well, you can still come in and we're not going to stamp your passport. The French,

other European countries have said, well, if you're going to take back control, we are

going to take back control. And so these are the regulations. But there's another point

to it. And it's a tedious point. It's about infrastructure. The port of Dover is not built

for huge, complicated French passport checks. It is built for us being part of the European

Union and free movement, likewise the Channel Tunnel.

Yeah, you could literally say they probably wouldn't have done an infrastructure that

literally linked our two countries underground if they were expecting Brexit.

So when Brexit was happening, one of the things that was discussed for Dover was that they

should build more French passport kiosks so that they could process more people more quickly.

And that was ruled out by the British government. So there are only a few French kiosks. Now,

I thought the coverage this weekend saying it was because of French border checks that

people were not getting through or the weather or the wind was misleading, because you get

the impression, oh, the bloody French, they haven't turned up for work again. And I don't

think that was anything to do with it. All the French border checkpoints were manned,

were staffed.

Well, it does seem to be a recurring pattern. I mean, we had it last July with the school

holidays. We've had it at Easter. I mean, we had all the chaos anyway at Christmas because

of the strikes and the flights that were disrupted. But you have to start wondering if you're

going to see every single holiday where you can carry on blaming French sickness or the

weather.

And at some point in the future, the European Union will introduce a visa system whereby

you will pay seven or eight euros for a visa. It will be very similar to what you get when

you travel to the United States, where you are on an ester and that you will be able

to use.

It's electronic.

Yeah, electronic.

It spells it out already in your passport.

But it is, it knows you've got a visa. You will not need a stamp because you'll be able

to use electronic gates. And that will speed up certainly airports like at Geneva Airport,

where there is one queue for kind of non-EU, non-Swiss citizens, which the British are

the main party, and the rest. And that will ease once that visa system introduces. But

to say that it has nothing to do with Brexit, and you can say, well, it's a very small price

to pay if you're in convenience for half an hour at an airport, fine, who cares. See,

when you're in convenience to have to spend 24 hours sitting on a couch, that wouldn't

be my idea of the ideal start to a holiday, I have to be honest. But there's clearly

a causal link between one thing and the other.

So some conservatives like Tobias Elwood, we should say, we're calling it out and say,

of course it's Brexit, let's not be stupid about it. I didn't hear actually much from

Labour about that causality at all. And it's interesting because we just talked about Labour

trying to navigate their pathway through the question of child grooming and the question

of whether talking about ethnicity is dog whistle politics or not. This is somewhere

where probably they could be a lot bolder in terms of saying the thing that most people

are actually thinking, but they still choose not to, a month out from the local elections.

Well, Emily, you and me, in January, we again went to Switzerland to interview Keir Starmer,

the Davos World Economic Forum, where we pushed him very hard on Europe, and it's absolutely

clear that that is another subject, that the Labour Party doesn't want to go anywhere near

and doesn't want to get into that fight because it doesn't want to look like it is relitigating

the argument over Brexit, good or bad. It just says we want to make Brexit work.

Relitigating is such an interesting word because relitigating, which was used actually

by the Chancellor when he came in to us, suggests that you are talking about undoing stuff in

the past, whereas I think this is focusing very much on the present and indeed the future.

And how you just want to be able to travel a bit more easily, a little less encumbered,

and not have to spend 24 hours sitting on a bus.

We'll be back in a moment.

Tomorrow we'll be on Trump Watch. It should be an interesting few hours when Donald Trump

makes that flight from Mar-a-Lago into New York City and appears before the New York

judge on charges of, well, we don't know yet. They haven't opened the indictment yet.

Still yet to be unsealed. We know it is in connection with the payment to adult film

star, porn star, Stormy Daniels, payment there. It's possible there's another payment

as well involving another former playboy model. We don't know the details of this yet, but

Donald Trump will be doing some version of a perp walk. He has to appear in court, mug

shot taken, fingerprints taken. Donald Trump's trajectory has changed, and maybe with it,

the 2024 presidential election. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.

This has been a global player original podcast and a Persephoneka production.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.