Three in Four Britons Want New Inquiry Into Grooming Gangs

The public have joined survivors to put pressure on Keir Starmer for a new inquiry into grooming gangs.

Three in four people (76 per cent) support a national independent investigation into the sexual abuse and rape of children by men, a survey found.

Even two-thirds (65 per cent) of those who voted for Labour at the General Election backed the growing demand for a new probe despite the Prime Minister’s insistence that there is no need for one. In addition, 77 per cent of the 2,533 adults polled say that anyone with dual nationality who is convicted of abusing a child should be stripped of their British citizenship and deported.

Paola Diana, of the Women’s Policy Centre, which commissioned the YouGov survey, said: ‘For too long, women’s rights have been overlooked and sacrificed in the name of indiscriminate multiculturalism and misogyny and have been diminished due to policymakers and people responsible for safeguarding children’s fear of being labelled racist and Islamophobic.

‘Women’s rights are the pillar of our democracy and should be protected… and if that means the deportation of rapists and the drastic reduction of male immigration from certain countries, so be it.’ Two grooming gang survivors have also called for a further inquiry.

A mother of two, who was repeatedly raped after being groomed as a teenager, told the Telegraph: ‘We know how many people were killed in Grenfell. We know how many people died at Hillsborough. We don’t know how many survived this.’

The 38-year-old, who wrote a book about her ordeal under the pen name Gaia Cooper, said: ‘It’s in each town in our country. It’s on a national scale.’

Samantha Walker-Roberts, who was gang raped in Oldham, Greater Manchester, when she was 12, also told LBC radio that there should be a ‘Government-led inquiry, solely focused on Oldham’.

She said: ‘I feel there’s a lot of victim-blaming… But you need to find out what led to them being so vulnerable… and social services didn’t safeguard them at the time.’

Ex-Cabinet minister Baroness Harman told Sky News there was ‘no point’ in re-running the lengthy public inquiry into child abuse led by Professor Alexis Jay, which published its findings in 2022. But she said the Government should be open to a ‘mini inquiry’ into the reluctance of public bodies to take action for fear of appearing racist.

Her comments came after Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham said a fresh national inquiry could improve on previous local reviews by drawing on their evidence and forcing witnesses to take part.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘Victims, independent-minded Labour figures such as Andy Burnham and now the public all are saying the same thing.

‘Starmer and the Labour Government should listen and hold the proper national inquiry we need.’

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said she would not ‘ever rule out any further inquiries’ but insisted that the Government was focusing on implementing the recommendations of the Jay report.

She told Sky News: ‘I think it would be very hard to say to victims we are doing another inquiry when we haven’t implemented a single recommendation from the last.’