It’s Keir’s drear new year — a January which sees the Prime Minister on the back foot from attacks from a (clearly bored) Elon Musk, stirring up trouble over the UK’s record on ethnically-based sexual crime and dragging the government into arguments about how its institutions addressed Asian grooming gangs. This is reactive territory: Starmer is not really the main culprit in a long story of many blind-eyes turned to the fate of thousands of vulnerable young women, abused in the 1990s and 2000s.
In a similar manner to the Southport riots in summer however, it is a firefight testing a new leader’s ability to speak to the country in times of fear and anxiety. In truth, the PM had a better record over prosecuting child sexual abuse as head of the CPS than his ill-intentioned critics claim. But politics can be an unfair contact sport and sounding tetchy or defensive is not a good response to incendiary accusations. When Starmer talked about critics “jumping on the bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-Right is saying”, the net result sounded more resentful than purposeful.
