00:00I'll repeat with Charlie Peters. Ask Baroness Casey how long the National Enquiry is going to take.
00:05I think in relation to the National Enquiry, I think I would say you're looking at three to five years.
00:14I think I would start at three years because I think we need to inject some speed into this.
00:19I think some of the victims I have met in some of the areas have waited a long time for accountability locally in particular.
00:26And therefore, I think I've said to the government at the moment, I think it should be a three year National Enquiry with statutory powers, the same as any other inquiry and done on that basis.
00:38Well, Charlie, I'm sorry, we're both just groaning out loud. No, three to five years. So three to five years, that will mean seven.
00:45Yeah. Everything overruns it for anything to do with the government and the public sector.
00:49Well, most crucially, Reverend Andrew, it also means it wouldn't return in this parliament.
00:52Quite.
00:53Which I think is what a lot of people are concerned about.
00:55This could be now cooked into the long grass and pushed away from this parliament.
01:00The intro there is saying that Baroness Casey, as a lot of people are reporting today, she's revealed that this crime has got disproportionately a number of Pakistani offenders.
01:09It's not revealed that.
01:10It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, I think reading, reading all 200 pages of this last night, it's confirmed a lot of what we already know.
01:18Absolutely right.
01:18It's not revealing anything new.
01:20And that's the real problem, I think, for the government and also ministers and shadow ministers of all stripes, because it shows that this is a national scourge that has been out in the open for years.
01:31And they can't say that they're reacting on advice of Baroness Casey, that they're learning this for the first time.
01:36They're confirming and understanding.
01:37The media, frankly, has been putting this out into the open for a long time.
01:41Charlie, so Starmer, when he confirmed that there was going to be a full national inquiry, said, having read every word of Baroness Casey's report, come off it.
01:51He wrote about this in 2014 in The Guardian, where else, before he was an MP, all about the problems.
01:56He ducked the race issue.
01:58But the fact that there was this big problem with grooming gangs and it wasn't being taken seriously.
02:02He's known for decades.
02:04He's a former director of public prosecutions.
02:06Eleven years ago, he said, we've failed a generation of girls.
02:09Unfortunately, he's now failed, they have now failed generations of girls, because this is stretched on for so long.
02:15This is not confined to just one portion of our history.
02:18And we've long said this is possibly the worst race hate scandal since the Second World War in this country.
02:24But it's never understood in that terms because of how uncomfortable people are with engaging with that disproportionality that Baroness Casey is talking about yesterday.
02:33But, you know, while she's not necessarily revealing anything new, the confirmation and it coming from an authoritative Whitehall figure is unfortunately what it takes for a lot of these people to act.
02:42And it's powerful because what she's saying in her trademark stark and clear and direct language is going against years.
02:51And she told us in the press conference yesterday that people have been faffing around with reports that have obfuscated this issue for decades.
02:57She's actually taking aim at some government reports in it.
02:59She points in particular to the 2020 Home Office report, which claimed that white men were the majority of abusers in grooming gang cases,
03:09even though that report admitted, just as Casey has, that we only know about the ethnicity in a minority of cases.
03:16It was a ginormous leap.
03:18And I think, you know, while obviously there's a lot of fire for Labour at the moment about the far right bandwagon, Lucy Powell's comments about the dog whistle,
03:24the Conservative Party right now has Priti Patel on its front bench.
03:28She was the Home Secretary when that 2020 report came out, which I think misrepresented and perverted the course of justice, frankly,
03:35by framing this issue as not involving a disproportionate number of Pakistani offenders.
03:42Big questions for the Conservative Party today about why Priti Patel's never been made to answer for letting that report come out.
03:47And very briefly, she says in the report, too, that a number of ongoing investigations feature disproportionately foreign nationals and asylum seekers.
03:54That's going to outrage people.
03:55That's going to cause a lot of problems.
03:56And of course, she's not gone into great detail because there are so many live cases.
03:59But, you know, our Home and Security editor, Mark White, is repeating constantly about how we're having record arrivals,
04:05sometimes up to 1,500 people a day.
04:07That's very difficult for the government to accept that those gangs are asylum seekers, also possibly connected to this abuse.
04:13Absolutely.
Comments