Tory leadership hopeful Rishi Sunak says rape gangs are still not being properly addressed because of political correctness, and that he would establish a task force to deal with the issue.
Pressed on the issue of so-called grooming gangs by fellow Tory politicians Esther McVey and Philip Davies on GB News, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer said that “[w]e all know the reason that people don’t focus on it, it’s because of political correctness.”
“They’re scared of calling out the fact that there’s a particular group of people that are perpetuating these crimes and I think that’s wrong,” he said — ironically proving his own point by himself by describing the perpetrators as “a particular group of people” rather than stating clearly that they are predominantly Muslims of South Asian, usually Pakistani heritage, and their victims predominantly white girls.
“A Conservative government should not be letting political correctness stand in the way of keeping people safe,” he went on, conceding that the rape gangs are “far more pervasive across the country than we all realise” and saying that, as Prime Minister, he would introduce a new life sentence “with very limited options for parole” for rape gang members, a National Crime Agency task force dedicated to investigating them, and a requirement that police prioritise groomers and record their ethnicity “which currently is not done, because people don’t want to do that”.
The Tories have claimed they would make the police record grooming gnag members’ ethnicity without following through for a long time, however, with Home Secretary Priti Patel — the government minister responsible for policing — having promised to make it mandatory in January, for example.
Maggie Oliver, a Greater Manchester Police detective turned grooming gangs whistleblower, was unimpressed by Sunak “jumping on the bandwagon”, as she put it, describing his plan to deal with them as “a soundbite… more empty words that actually don’t convert into action.”
On his proposed new task force, she pointed out that “we’ve got [police watchdog] the IOPC now, we’ve got internal investigation departments in police forces — and yet they are consistently failing to hold senior officers to account for failing to deal with this problem.”
Oliver, who now heads a foundation which supports grooming gang victims, argued that what is really needed is a full-scale royal commission to address the fact that policing “has collapsed” in the United Kingdom.
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