A Labour MP has broke ranks to back Andy Burnham’s call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
Liverpool MP Dan Carden followed the Greater Manchester mayor in calling for a wider examination into historical child sexual abuse. But a government minister was quick to dismiss Mr Burnham’s support for such an inquiry.
Earlier this week, the mayor said that he is ‘not opposed’ to a national review. The Labour mayor told BBC Radio Manchester that he thinks there is a case for a ‘limited national inquiry’ following the local reviews he first commissioned back in 2017.
Ministers have said their priority is acting on the 2022 recommendations of a seven-year inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay into child sexual abuse, which have not yet been implemented. Asked about Mr Burnham’s intervention on ITV’s Good Morning Britain yesterday, Ms Nandy told: “I get the point that Andy’s making.
“He said that there was a case for a smaller, more limited national inquiry into the specific issues that the inquiry that he instigated could not pick up. I do understand that because the inquiry that we had here in Greater Manchester, astonishingly, some of the Greater Manchester Police officers refused to even take part, and the local inquiry couldn’t compel them to do so.”
She added: “But I do disagree with Andy actually. The reason that the Theresa May government set up a national inquiry, which ran for seven years and took evidence from thousands of victims, is precisely because of the points that Andy made.”
Dan Carden MP
(Image: Liverpool Echo)
Now Mr Carden, who represents the Liverpool Walton constituency, told the Echo of his belief that a national inquiry should be held. He said: “The public compassion for the victims, thousands of young British working-class girls and children is real. The public call for justice must be heeded.
“It is shocking that people in positions of power could have covered up and refused to act to avoid confronting racial or cultural issues or because victims were poor and working class. We must question and challenge the orthodoxy of progressive liberal multiculturalism that led to authorities failing to act.
“We need a new doctrine to take our multi-ethnic society into the future.” Insisting that the issue was “not an obsession of the far-right”, he said he was speaking out as “over the decades there have been far too few Labour voices expressing clear disgust and outrage at these heinous crimes, their cover-up and the lack of action.”