Good morning. What is a news story in the UK? Whatever Elon Musk says it is. That is the conclusion you might draw, anyway, from the influence of the billionaire Trump adviser’s posts on X claiming that “a quarter-million little girls were – still are – being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain”, and demanding a new public inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere.
There is no reliable basis for the quarter-million figure. In any case, Prof Alexis Jay, the chair of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales that looked extensively at grooming gang scandals and published a series of recommendations in 2022, said yesterday that “we’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions”, and urged the government to instead implement more of her proposals. But the political energy is still around the idea of a new inquiry as some sort of panacea, and the Conservatives will try to force a vote on one in parliament today.
