“I don’t pay any attention to Elon Musk” opined the politician turned talking head, adopting the de haut en bas tones of Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. He is, of course, only a politician turned talking head because he lost his seat at the election, which leads to the perhaps surprising implication that the views of a failed politician are more worthy of notice and more likely to be correct than those of possibly the most successful entrepreneur in history. This may certainly, on occasion, be true but I do not think we would want to assume it was generally or even often true.
I will not shame the former politician by naming him – shame is not, it appears, an emotion with which members of his trade are generally familiar, nor is self-awareness one of their defining features. More than that, however, he was not really saying anything with which his peers would disagree. For the overwhelming sensation given by the reactions of the administrative class to the flare-up of the child grooming scandal is a desire that the tiresome business should all just go away.
To the Prime Minister, calls for a further inquiry were “jump[ing] on a far-right bandwagon”. He is, of course, not averse to this in principle, having run on a manifesto in 2019 which promised (like the BNP’s) to nationalise key national infrastructure, but he is, it appears, opposed to it in this particular instance. Baroness Jay was also opposed to further investigation, arguing that people should just “get on with” implementing the recommendations in her own report. There really is, as Leslie Nielsen claimed in Naked Gun, nothing to see here.
Many have perceived an element of political calculation in the government’s response. The Labour Party has often been seen as having the “Muslim Vote” (to the extent there is such a thing) locked up. Why do something which might be perceived as biting the hand which puts a cross in your box? Many Labour MPs (including not a few cabinet ministers) have wafer-thin majorities. I am not, I think, being unkind when I suggest it is unlikely that many of them would be able to find another job which pays ninety grand plus generous expenses for their “skills”.
This may be true, this may not be true. None of us can tell. But, even if politics does play a role, it probably does not play the only role. The Conservatives may now see the need for an Inquiry, but the Prime Minister is entirely fair to point out that, for their fourteen years in office, they were curiously blind to it. A former Tory MP has recounted being warned off the topic by a sitting Tory MP and minister before being “summoned” by a Tory peer “to explain myself”. Neither party’s hands, it seems, are as clean as they would have the electorate believe.
At its heart, I suspect, is a class issue and not purely in the sense that the secure, educated middle class have little instinctive sympathy with the less well-educated whose lives are, as a consequence, less secure. For both parties are part of the same administrative class and it is that class whose inadequacies any Inquiry will reveal.
Almost exactly a year ago, as the nation was raging about the Post Office, I wrote a piece arguing that all of Britain’s scandals lead back to the state. Tug at the threads of any large-scale impropriety and soon enough you will discover that some agent of the government failed to do their job or actively intervened to allow wrong-doing to persist. Enough is already in the public domain for us to conclude that the grooming scandal was “enabled” at the least by the police and local councils failing to bend every sinew to see justice done and the vulnerable protected.
If the Post Office was a scandal, it was a scandal of a different order of magnitude to the grooming gangs – a teenager in care is vulnerable in a far different and more extreme way to a fully grown postmaster. Some of the latter spent time in prison, some of the former died. If, through some combination of passive indifference and active malevolence, the state failed in its most basic duty, why, having already failed so often, should we rely on it to perform its duties to us? Why, if it appears to have traded the rights of some for the vicious pleasures of others, should we expect it always to act in our interests?
What, however, is the state for, if it is not serving the interests of its citizens? Why should they pay for an organisation which will not, in all cases, help them, and in some, may actively hurt them? Community cohesion and good race relations are, as the historian Tom Holland argued “noble goals” – worthy of government consideration – but so is justice, and they are not sufficiently noble that they must be pursued at the expense of all others. Not only is “mercy to the guilty […] cruelty to the innocent” but taking one for the team is only rational if you think that, in turn, the team will take one for you.
A social contract in which one side pays its taxes and votes for its politicians who then use those taxes for their own ends is not a good contract, and bad contracts tend to get voided. Perhaps not immediately, perhaps not quickly, but inevitably as the iniquities pile up. After a “long train of iniquities and usurpations”, all it takes is “a touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”
In the run up to the election, I posted the famous century-old cartoon of the Powers of Europe sitting on top of a cauldron marked, “the Balkans”, suggesting that the vote was really no more than an exercise in choosing who would get to spend the next five years on top. I really meant it as an analogy for the parlous state of Britain’s finances. But more than money makes the world go around. The grooming scandal and what it reveals about the state have the potential to make the cauldron blow. Those on top are often the last to realise. And the first to get hurt.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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If they wanted good race relations, they shouldn’t have allowed mass immigration. Britons have always welcomed foreigners in reasonable numbers, and those foreigners who came adapted to fit in. We are not a ‘racist’ nation.
The indignation that those who, not us labelled as ‘far-right’ obviously, feel for the intervention of Musk and the now rather distasteful using of the rape scandal (still without acknowledgement that the victims are real people, just like MPs own more privileged offspring) to attempt to bring down Starmer & his motley crew reminds me of the WASPI decision – right course of action but for entirely the wrong reasons. Still any port in a storm, as long as it’s understood that Musk and Trump are not ‘normal’ and that Farage won’t live up to inflated expectations or indeed save the UK.
As one of those labelled ‘Far-right’ by Starmer, a tag I wear proudly BTW, are you perhaps expecting Starmer to pull his roasting chestnuts out of an increasingly large political conflagration?
Yes it will inevitably be so, clearing the way for the swamp to throw up another (approved by the overlords) monster from the depths to replace him.
Lucy Allan MP for Telford at the time: ”I was summoned by Conservative Peer Baroness Warsi”
I’m afraid I would have had to tell the trumped up, overblown, DEI harridan to go shove her head up her arse. But that’s just me. I don’t react well to those who seek to impose their imagined authority over me.
If only MPs were as in awe/fear of their constituents and their salary and perks paying employers, but clearly the Party comes first no matter what.