On March 31, the United Kingdom’s Home Office posted the following message on social media:
The grooming gangs scandal is one of the darkest moments in our country’s history — where the most vulnerable were abused and exploited by evil child rapists.
The independent national Inquiry will now begin its work to uncover how these crimes were allowed to happen and root out failure wherever it occurred.
The Inquiry will be laser‑focused on grooming gangs and will explicitly examine the role of ethnicity, religion and culture — including how institutions responded.
There will be no hiding place for the predatory monsters who committed these vile crimes.
Such sentiments from the Labour government are so uncharacteristic that I genuinely wondered if the account had been hacked by a right-wing troll. Since the beginning of 2025, there have been plenty of high-profile Labour members who readily dismissed concerns about grooming gangs. When Elon Musk brought the scandals to the forefront of global discourse by posting about them, Prime Minister Keir Starmer accused Tory members of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” for the sake of attention. Starmer further suggested that “those who are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims, they’re interested in themselves,” although he didn’t clarify which claims specifically constituted “lies” or “misinformation.” Member of Parliament Lucy Powell — currently the deputy leader of the Labour Party — referred to the grooming-gangs scandals as a “dog whistle.” (She later apologized.) London Mayor Sadiq Khan pretended to not understand what the terms “grooming gangs” or “rape gangs” meant when he was questioned about their presence in his city. In fact, just days before the Home Office posted the above statement on social media, Baroness Ayesha Hazarika — who was nominated to life peerage by Starmer — joked about “grooming” and seemingly mocked related inquiries.
Although the Home Office’s recent post suggests that the new grooming-gangs inquiry will be rigorous and thorough, the project seems to have failed before it has even begun. In just the past week, the BBC reported that “key documents” may have been lost because of the Home Office’s mistakes. And don’t forget that previous efforts were disastrous. For example, four members resigned from a panel of victims. One survivor said that she felt the process amounted to a “cover-up,” while another said that the government appeared to be widening the inquiry’s scope to “downplay the racial and religious motivations” behind their abuse.