Inquiring Minds

Jess Phillips is on course to lose her seat to the Muslim candidate of the Workers Party, which has called for an inquiry into the grooming gangs. You may not know much about Birmingham from Dubai, but you really should know something about Muslims. It is true that Phillips's Commons statement was sparsely attended. Those who did turn up included neither Rupert Lowe nor any member of Reform UK.

Yet who is a grooming gang, and who is not? Underage groupies have always been integral to rock 'n' roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers were known to sleep with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties back in the day. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

White men who commit certain offences are "lone wolves", black men who do so are "gang members", and brown men who do so are "homegrown Islamist terrorists", yet the crimes are the same. Likewise, a certain type of organised crime syndicate is a "grooming gang" or a "rape gang" when the members are South Asian, or Muslim, or both, but a "paedophile ring" when they are not, and most emphatically when they are all white and non-Muslim. But again, they are the same thing.

Earlier this year, Radio Four broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a story known to readers of this blog throughout the 19 years of existence. If PIE was not a grooming gang and a rape gang, then what ever has been or could be? It was at the very heart of the Establishment, and this year, it will be 40 years since the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence.

The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no authority that is apparent to anyone. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. And if there were to be an inquiry into the grooming gangs, then Victoria Gillick should be on it, along with Lisa McKenzie and the distinguished criminologists in the Workers Party, for a start. But we all know that British inquiries take years on end to exonerate the lifelong friends who had appointed them.