Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips may be on the brink of resignation over her handling of the grooming gangs national inquiry, but make no mistake, this is Sir Keir Starmer’s fault and not Jess Phillips.
Now, five grooming gang survivors have resigned from the inquiry panel, citing a proposed widening of the scope and downplaying of ethnicity and religion in preliminary proceedings.
It’s very clear this issue matters to Jess Phillips and has done really through her whole career, fighting for the victims of sexual violence has been her life’s work.
But I know as a former minister that sensitive political issues like this are not being decided by junior ministers.
Jacob Rees-Mogg says Keir Starmer is to blame for grooming gangs inquiry chaos
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GB NEWS
The decisions are being taken by Number 10 Downing Street, and it’s for that reason it’s no wonder things are descending into chaos.
A bandwagon of the far-right. That was what the Prime Minister called it. And after this, he had a dramatic change of heart, and put it slightly differently.
He didn’t really want the inquiry, did he? He rejects having had to do it, he felt under pressure.
Could we ever have really expected this inquiry to go well under the leadership of the man who thought its entire cause was far-right? He hasn’t suddenly become a far-right figure himself.
And so the chaos we now see unfolding is caused by the fact that there was never the political will from the very top of the Government.
And now Jess Phillips, the junior minister whose life has been defined by her work for victims of sexual abuse, gets wheeled out to clear up the mess caused by Sir Keir Starmer and his inner circle of rather incompetent advisers.
Phillips becomes the scapegoat for Number 10’s failures. Indeed, and any minister watching knows how this works, she has to defend things that were not her choice, that, had she had the choice, she would have chosen something different, and those choices would probably have been better, more effective and earlier.
It is Starmer’s inner circle that never wanted the inquiry in the first place, because it couldn’t face up for the political inconvenience of this scandal, the inconvenience that shattered the multicultural mass migration mythology.