Labour has dropped its plans for five local grooming gang inquiries that it promised in January when under pressure, saying it’s now up to local councils to decide how to spend the £5 million allocated. The Telegraph has the story.
In January, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, told MPs that the Government would provide £5 million to support up to five initial local inquiries modelled on the judge-led one into grooming gangs in Telford.
However, on Tuesday Jess Phillips, a Home Office Minister, announced that “following feedback” the Government would adopt a “flexible approach” where the money would be available for local councils to use as they wished to support grooming gang work.
She said that this could mean full independent local inquiries, but could also include “more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases”.
The Conservatives accused Labour of watering down its response to the grooming gangs inquiry in an announcement just 45 minutes before Parliament broke for recess.
Home Office sources insisted that the change did not necessarily mean that the five inquiries would not go ahead but rather Ministers had decided to not be prescriptive following the local consultation.
But Katie Lam, the shadow Home Office minister, said: “Local inquiries are not good enough – they can’t compel witnesses, they can’t look at themes across the country, and they can’t address national issues like deportation. Now the Government is watering them down even further. We won’t let them get away with it.”
A Home Office spokesman said it was “patently false” it was watering down its plans.
“The £5 million funding announced in January is being made available to local authorities to help strengthen local responses to child sexual exploitation, and all local authorities will be able to apply for funding for local inquiries or other work in this area,” the spokesman said.
“The Home Secretary has written to every local authority on our plans to support local inquiries, and after listening to local authorities about what they need, we made the decision to implement the fund in a flexible way.”
The Government announced the local inquiries in January after huge pressure for a new national inquiry, including from Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Labour dropped its plans for the local grooming gang inquiries for fear of offending its Pakistani voters, Sir Trevor Phillips has claimed. The former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said Labour’s response was “utterly shameful” because it was “so obviously political” to avoid offending a particular demographic of voters.
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Only Meatloaf will do: read it and weep
Indeed. Also, on long drive recently was thinking how Bruce Springsteen projects an anger and energy that perhaps we LS feel. Kept me awake, anyway!
It seems that supine compliance is a major characteristic of many of the British population. Leaving aside all of the questions relating to the coronavirus situation I have been able to gain satisfaction in having my worst opinions of a lot of people confirmed. The capitulation exemplified by the general attitude of unquestioning compliance is nicely contrasted by the actions of the previous couple of generations which faced far worse threats with courage and fortitude. The way in which I avoid feelings of despair is to regard the entire quasi religion of the coronavirus fiasco as a surreal charade that will play itself out. We can all then choreograph our own little self congratulatory TikTok dances whilst rehearsing the ritual of pointlessly hitting pots and pans simultaneous with chanting praise for the prophets of science and their political acolytes. I need coffee now.
A melancholic article all things felt by more than we think. The masks are what the government want to see, the symbol of compliance. We need to ditch them
Who was it who first said “3 weeks to flatten the curve” anyway? Anyone who thought much about the situation would have known straight away that it was a lie…
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/minutes-silence-flags-half-mast-5214310 am I the only one who feels this is wrong? There are parallels with the First World War, and not good ones either. Both had inept decision making by committees not directly involved. Impossible deadlines for it all “being over” were set. People who were against the event were prosecuted and reviled. No significant change in the situation at the end to that at the beginning other than a large number of collateral deaths and other damage.
I’ve also noticed a sinister propaganda attempt to compare our war time experience with this Plandemic. Its quite sickening!
Another honest, absolutely true to the heart thinking which rings true to the many who follow Lockdown Sceptics. We are in lockstep with you. Thank you to Lockdown Sceptics for keeping so many of us sane during a very disturbing year.
Can I also add my thanks to Toby and his team who have helped to keep us sane and updated about what’s really going on……difficult to find anywhere else. This series of articles is so good, I’ve printed them off for posterity!
Thanks again,
Peter.
I long for a group of like minded friends. Sadly mine have all bought into the nonsense and at every turn cowered, put their masks on, used credit cards only, stayed home, locked down, were first in line for experimental biologicals. I now find old friends don’t call as often. My narrative is the absolute opposite of theirs. Those friends that do call, I simply avoid any chat of COVID or if it comes, remain neutral. Looking for a few new friends.
I think that has been one of the worst aspects – the difficulty in having realistic and honest conversations with those who have bought into the propaganda narrative.
‘Brainwashing’ has previously been a distanced, theoretical concept, along with the related notion of government through Fear. Basic concepts of liberty and democracy have never been straightforward – but we’ve always known the territory within which the debate about such things takes place.
I now have a much clearer grasp of how the horrors of the Third Reich came about. Not a far-off land, with atypical warped tendencies, at all. As Europe has dug up the graves and resurrected the twin ghosts of Goebbels and Mengele, those ghouls of the 20th century have crept much more close than the ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ of myth would conceive.
I can so relate this this comment and the article overall.
Oh,how that resonates with me. Please leave a message if you’d like to get in touch.
To all the people who have commented on this lovely but sad piece keep the faith keep strong. We are all in this together and thank goodness for lockdown sceptics marvellous team. There’s a lot of things happening at the moment papers being served on the Government the other day. We keep emailing keep lobbying your MP we do think she’s probably fed up with us but as I tell her that’s what she’s there for. Keep Exercising it’s so good for the mind. Ignore the idiots although I know there are plenty of them. I asked one MP not ours when is someone going to do something about this. Part of a bigger plan. I could say a lot more but it would be an essay……..
This is a fine collection. I think it is a pity that Lockdown Sceptics have taken so long to grasp the sinister (global) institutional forces at play, but it seems finally that this may struck him.
…struck home.
Fear has a lot to answer for.
If that was removed their would be a silent majority
I do think people are beginning to realise that freedoms are gone.
So I’m hopeful .
Thankyou for the site ,I’ve crawled here many a time when tge madness was particularly bad.
The Precautionary Principle has been discussed recently in relation to lockdown.
Most will remember the Icelandic volcano of 2010 which in some ways can be seen as a dress rehearsal for lockdown a decade later.
It was claimed that the I’llfockingkillyouall volcano caused thousands of flights to be cancelled and the airline industry to be closed down for weeks on end.
The volcano did nothing, it was the worldwide co-ordinated governmental response that caused the damage and that response was predicated on a computer algorithm that decided flying was unsafe because the computer said so even though reality proved otherwise.
If I recall correctly it took the CEO of Ryan Air to fly through the Hazard to make governments see sense. Sadly Tim Martin and Richard Branson are unable to make such a sacrifice at this time.
Dr David McGrogan’s piece resonated strongly with my own feelings on the subject, in particular his comment “As the weeks passed, I began to think that probably the Government knew it had overreacted and made a mistake, but that it didn’t want to admit it, and would slowly wind everything down over summer as a face-saving exercise.” That was my initial assessment too, but over the ensuing months I have come to believe that the reason why the second half of that sentence never came to pass was that the Prime Minister couldn’t let that happen, not yet anyway. Why not?
December 2019 saw Boris Johnson elected on a wave of popular enthusiasm, someone widely seen as a new broom to sweep away the old type of politics, someone who would be innately on the side of the people. This is an image which the PM obviously likes and wishes to encourage us to believe in. Within weeks of his administration being formed, it faced its first big test when SARS-CoV-2 arrived on the scene. In desperation to be seen to be doing something and acting decisively, the government overreacted to flawed modelling. As Dr McGrogan says, I think it came to realise this, and probably quite quickly, but by then, even that early on, the toll of damage to peoples’ lives and the economy was already mounting and I think the PM realised that it was already too late to tell the population that in actual fact the virus wasn’t anywhere near the plague it had been portrayed as: To do so would have been an open invitation to them to ask why… “What about my job, Boris? What about my career, my business, my family, the plans we’d made, the terminal illnesses which weren’t spotted soon enough, the life-saving operations which weren’t performed in time, what about the wreckage of the economy Boris? Why?”
We read that Boris Johnson has always felt the hand of history upon him; that he expects his place in the history books to count him among the greats. Faced with the prospect of those history books telling of a spectacular fall at the first hurdle and confining his name to a footnote entitled “unfulfilled promise” or “historic failures”, he has only one option: To spin out the plague narrative until such time as he can make it appear that he and his government have been the ones to save us, hence the all-consuming desperation to vaccinate the entire population. A government which controls the narrative can end that narrative when it chooses, at a time when the population will be suitably grateful, and less inclined to scrutinize the manifold serious flaws in the management of the situation. Case numbers falling too quickly and too soon to be attributed only to the vaccination programme? Simply deploy more tests… Seek and ye shall find; the limitations of the PCR test, especially at high CT values, can be your friend if you’re trying to spread fear among the citizenry. Or perhaps discover a new variant of the virus. Need case numbers to fall a bit more? Lateral flow’s your man.
Why would SAGE go along with it? I assume because – human nature being what it is – no scientist whose job it is to advise a government will ever assess that the best-case scenario is more likely than the worst case; they’re making sure their backsides are covered.
“We read that Boris Johnson has always felt the hand of history upon him; that he expects his place in the history books to count him among the greats. “
===========================
A legend in his own mind for sure! I am sure history will proclaim him as one of the greats, the Greatest Disaster ever to have befallen us!
Lockdown cost 817,000 lost life times in the UK alone. One year on from the start of Lockdown and associated restrictions, means 66.6 million years of lost life experience (one year for each of the 66.6 million inhabitants of the UK). Given a life expectancy of 81.5 years this equates to about 817,000 lost lifetimes (66.6 million divided by 81.5). Now at the start it was supposed to be just 3 weeks not 52 weeks (3 on 52 is “just” about 6% of a year lost) so if they stuck to that then only about 6% of 817,000 lifetimes would have been lost, or just under 50,000; bad but not as devastating as the 817,000 lifetimes lost just because of Lockdown and other restrictions.
BoZo was reported to have said he thought that a vaccine would never come, then how on earth does his plan to lockdown make any sense at all?!?
Apparently the country marked 12 months since the start of lockdown with a minutes silence this morning.
Telegraph readers not inspired and, despite being in hospital, I can’t say that I noticed.
Yes,time to keep fighting but it’s very lonely out there when there’s hardly anyone to
stand with you. I spend a lot of the day sending informative video clips and exchanging information and reading up on things but I seem to have less and less to say because my thoughts don’t tally with many people any more.It’s also exhausting fighting back with family members who apparently think I’m off the wall. Instead I discuss everything with the dog,she understands and we can take off at any time into the fields and enjoy our freedom there. It’s been a long year and by the looks of it things are not going to improve. I feel a lull before the storm and another lockdown coming in September, perhaps sooner or why has Sunak extended the furlough?Most of the shops in my nearest town have gone and the
city high street looks like a war zone.How on earth are business and hospitality to revive when they have no idea what is happening.And yet we know and are helpless, this has been planned for a very long time.
Opt out of the NHS sharing your medical history with all and sundry.
https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/manage-your-choice/
Thank you Toby and contributors for this amazingly touching and reflective collection. Like some of the other readers, David McGrogan closely sums up my experience of the past year. I have been more fortunate than some in that I have a core group of like-minded friends but nevertheless this website and its readers have kept me sane. May we prevail in the end.
Dear Mr Young
Thank you for your efforts to bring some sanity to the public debate.
The lockup of the entire country was a criminal enterprise from the start. The Diamond Princess provided ample evidence that most people were resistant to the virus, and that the elderly and sick were most at risk. An analysis on Mr Anthony Watt’s blog was posted a full week before the lockup was inflicted upon us:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/
Our government would have had access to that data weeks before. It’s failure to act proportionately is inexcusable.
I have been tracking excess mortality by age group using ONS data for England and Wales:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/189200946@N04/50998039340/in/dateposted-public/
The 85+ and 75-84 age group are now below the average for the previous 5 years, with only the 45-64 group above it. Newer graphs show that 2021 is pretty much back to normal in terms of excess and total deaths.
All-cause mortality for 52 weeks of 2020 is 65,000 (12%) higher compared with the last bad flu year – 2018. Almost all of those who died were over 45, and by far the greater number over 75, and had co-morbidities. There are no compelling reasons why the entire country should have been locked up for a year, and forced to wear “face coverings” for most of that time.
The economic damage is trifling compared with the social and cultural costs of the lockup. As an experiment on the public to discover how far they can be pushed, it has been a resounding success. The answer is: as far as the government likes.
The vaccine is another huge experiment upon entire populations, with long term ramifications which we will have to wait to discover.
Freeborn Englishmen and women have morphed into sheeple. An Englishman’s home is now his prison.
Thanks again.
DP
Agree so much with this. It is so the way I recall feeling about the Covid madness. I was discussing it around 18 March 2020 before the last flight out of Dominican Republic by chance with a UK epidemiologist who was very much of the Sweden opinion so I had the unexpected advantage of a useful knowledgeable perspective that supported my own purely logical opinion.