Britain's Labour Party Needs to Listen to Its Social Conscience

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Progressives on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic have focused much of their energy and attention on championing minority rights and indulging in identity politics. Standing up for groups who've suffered historic discrimination is laudable; removing barriers to Black employment and giving gay people the right to marry are hard-fought achievements. Transgender people deserve protections too, with trade-offs necessary given the clashes of biological sex and gender ideology.
But whether by preference or distracted by such concerns, social evils which used to fire up the liberal-left conscience — class inequality, lack of economic opportunity and cohesive societies — have been in danger of being overlooked or even downgraded. In the UK, a horrific, decades-long scandal of grooming and rape gangs of mainly Pakistani Muslim men who preyed on young white women has revealed the pitfalls of this lopsided approach.
The story is distressing enough in itself, but it has wider resonance for Britain's governing Labour Party, which prides itself on caring for the less fortunate in society but has failed them — both under Tony Blair's administration when the crimes first became apparent, and due to a sluggish response under Keir Starmer.
This doesn't absolve the previous Conservative governments from carrying a large share of the blame. As the cross-party peer Baroness Louise Casey pointed out in an audit published this week, one of the main reasons for ducking the issue was oversensitivity about ethnic and religious groups from a Muslim background.
Starmer, an alumnus of London's top human rights legal chambers, is an exemplar of the progressive mindset. He also successfully prosecuted grooming gangs in his former role as head of the crown prosecution service. So the appalling detail isn't unknown to him.
And yet, in January, the prime minister accused opposition figures calling for a national inquiry into gangs who preyed on underage girls of 'jumping on the bandwagon of the far right,' Elon Musk had wrongly tweeted that millions of young women were being targeted by Asian gangs; in the social media echo chamber, the populists of Reform UK were taking up the cry. But that didn't invalidate the fact that the matter had been buried too quickly and with insufficient attention to the causes.
The PM's words have returned to haunt him – but the underlying omission is far more important. Across the country and in the areas where the gangs operated for years with impunity under the noses of Labour councils and indolent police forces, men of Pakistani descent have been vastly overrepresented among the gangs. This mix undoubtedly requires sensitive handling — but not downright evasion.
On Monday, however, the PM was forced to give way after Casey found that the authorities had 'shied away' from investigating the horrific crimes and avoided its ethnic and cultural character. The government finally agreed that a national inquiry was urgently required. The trouble is, it was urgently required a very long time ago.
Even Starmer's U-turn was couched in flat, emotionless language; he would 'accept' Casey's recommendation. His Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was more forthcoming: These rapes were 'a stain on our society' and she would initiate a new round of criminal investigations. But, in truth, none of this would have happened if it wasn't for pressure from those on the right of the political spectrum — and in some case the far-right — on a center-left government.
Many of the most notorious gangs operated in Labour-held areas, and the councils who 'shied away' were Labour too. Alarmed by the potential threat to a fragile social peace in areas where large groups of incomers are often living lives wholly separate to the White communities around them, Labour had another reason to downplay the matter — concern about the reaction of a substantial Muslim voting bloc. Local councils urged the police to play down the systematic nature of the abuse.
Overindulging group rights has also cornered the PM in the fierce debate over the rights of trans people and protections for women's spaces. When the Supreme Court ruled this year that 'sex' in Britain's Equality Act unequivocally meant 'biological sex,' Starmer's bloodless response was to welcome 'the clarity' of the judgment. We are none the wiser about what he really thinks about the issue.
I have firsthand experience as a journalist of this reluctance of a liberal mindset to face inconvenient truths. At the Sunday Times, we published a magazine article in 2007 by a feminist writer Julie Bindel, exclusively detailing the abuse of girls by groups of Pakistani-origin men in the northern counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The article had been offered first to the liberal-leaning Guardian newspaper, which turned it down. Andrew Norfolk, a journalist on our sister paper the Times, was also subsequently accused of racism when he investigated the ethnic gang phenomenon.
A few brave Labour MPs, mostly women, also tried to bring the problem to the attention of a wider audience but initially found little support from male colleagues in Parliament and local parties. And while a degree of discipline is necessary in politics, lack of curiosity about opposing or challenging views leads to problems getting parked and evils left to fester.
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington more than 60 years ago, Martin Luther King spoke of his dream that his children would 'one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' There's an enduring lesson here for all: The implication of the declaration is that wise progressives should not be blind to good and evil among Whites, Blacks and Asians, and steadfast in their willingness to confront the consequences. The price of ignoring wrongdoing, whoever the culprit, is much higher — and more painful for all concerned.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Previously, he was editor of the Sunday Times of London and its chief political commentator.
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