Pandering to the far right: Chris Philp, Croydon’s only Conservative MP, appeared on the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme yesterday
Croydon’s only Conservative MP, Chris Philp, has waded in to the race row fuelled by far-right extremists including Elon Musk, Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon over “grooming gangs”.
Ever the opportunist, Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, used the BBC’s Sunday morning politics programme to call for action on what he calls “rape gangs”. The Labour government has refused to hold a public inquiry into allegations of child sexual abuse in Oldham, instead directing the council to do this itself.
Unfortunately for Philp, his criticisms only highlighted the failure by the Conservative government to make anything other than piecemeal responses to previous reports and inquiries.
Today, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, hit back at those who had criticised Jess Phillips, his minister for safeguarding and women. Musk had called Phillips an “evil witch” and a “rape genocide apologist”.
Starmer said: “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and wide as possible are not interested in victims.”
Decade as MP: Chris Philp is only now calling for an inquiry
And he might have had Croydon South MP Philp in mind when he said: “Once we lose the anchor that truth matters in the robust debate we must have, then we’re on a very slippery slope.
“And when politicians… who sat in government for many years, are casual about honesty, decency, truth and the rule of law, calling for inquiries because they want to jump on the bandwagon of the far right when that affects politics, because, a robust debate can only be based on the true facts.
“That’s why I want to call this out, because I think it really matters… It’s a sign of where the Tory party have got to that we’re even having this debate.”
There has been a series of scandals around widespread child abuse across several northern towns going back to the end of the last century. An estimated 1,400 children were sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, predominantly (but not exclusively) by British-Pakistani men. Similar outrages were committed in Huddersfield, Oldham and Rochdale. Numerous government inquiries were held and reports were published. But not much else.
Most recently, following an inspection of Rotherham Council by top civil servant, Louise Casey, she concluded that the council had a bullying, sexist culture of covering up information and silencing whistleblowers. As a result of fresh police inquiries, 19 men and two women were convicted in 2016 and 2017 of sexual offences dating back to the late 1980s. One of the ringleaders was jailed for 35 years. A former Labour councillor and life peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, was jailed for five years for attempted rape of a girl and a serious sexual assault upon a boy.
The offences, and the often lame inquiries into them, occurred under Labour and Conservative governments.
In 2022, the Conservatives’ Amanda Solloway MP, a predecessor of Jess Phillips as safeguarding minister, decided not to hold a public inquiry into what happened in Oldham – exactly the same decision that hypocrite Philp was so animated about on television yesterday.
The Tories had previously rejected calls for inquiries, most famously in 2019 when Boris Johnson said, “I think an awful lot of money and an awful lot of police time now goes into these historic offences and all this malarkey… £60million I saw was being spaffed up a wall on some investigation into historic child abuse and all this kind of thing.”
In fact, there has been a series of inquiries and serious case reviews into child sexual abuse, all conducted under Conservative governments: Rochdale 2013; Home Affairs Secet Committee 2013; Rotherham 2014; Rotherham 2015; Greater Manchester 2020; Oldham 2022; Telford 2022; and Rochdale 2024.
And in June 2022, there was a 468-page independent report published into child sexual abuse, the result of seven years’ work led by Professor Alexis Jay. A year later, Prof Jay and the victims and survivors consultative panel said: “We are deeply disappointed that the Conservative government has not accepted the full package of recommendations made in the final report.
“In some instances, the government has stated that a number of them will be subject to consultations, despite the extensive research and evidence-taking which the inquiry carried out over seven years.”
Chris Philp has been an MP for almost 10 years now, and so was around Westminster when most of these inquiries and reports were being conducted and published. He was even a junior minister in the Home Office for some of that time, and served as policing minister for a period, too.
Yet a search of Philp’s social media timeline finds not a single mention of the issue of child sexual abuse before the latest, Musk-driven spat in the past week.
But there were some choice replies to his social media comments on Twitter yesterday.
Recognised for his hypocrisy: Shadow Home Secretary Philp and his Tory colleagues’ previous lack of action over child sexual abuse has been outed by the public
Philp’s colleague Robert Jenrick, now the Tories’ shadow spokesperson on justice, doubled down on situation, using it as the chance to attack migrants, migration, multiculturalism – and Muslims.
The Conservatives’ report into Islamophobia in the party, finally released in 2021, acknowledged anti-Muslim views among members, but denied that the party was institutionally racist. That pretence is blown now.
Yet instead of appealing for calm and reason, Philp chose to use a national broadcast interview to try to stir up further division and dispute, as the Conservatives sink ever lower in their existential battle with Reform.
None of this is without risk to Philp’s increasingly tattered reputation.
There are photos of him, out campaigning in Croydon for the Tories, standing shoulder to shoulder with someone who was himself arrested and investigated for historic child sexual abuse allegations.
There have been hints from the Metropolitan Police that the case might come to trial some time soon. Let’s hope so. Justice delayed is justice denied, as the Shadow Home Secretary would surely agree…
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