by Kevin Meagher
By suspending four party members in Rotherham this morning, Labour is showing its intent to get tough with its councillors who, it suspects, have failed to protect vulnerable children in the public roles they held.
The four, Jahangir Akhtar (the council’s former deputy leader) and councillors Roger Stone (the council’s former leader), Gwendoline Russell (Rotherham’s former cabinet member for social services) and Shaukat Ali will now face investigation by the party.
A Labour party spokesman said: “As Ed Miliband made clear last week large numbers of young people in Rotherham were systematically abused and then let down by those who should have protected them. It cannot be allowed to stand.”
So far, so good. But Labour has to be ready to do the same in other local authorities, if the same failings are revealed elsewhere. Rotherham, depressingly, does not seem to be an isolated case.
The Mail on Sunday quoted a Greater Manchester Police source the other day who claimed they were close to a “day of reckoning” with the force poised to make a spate of arrests of gang members involved in child sexual exploitation:
“In Greater Manchester, 180 suspects have emerged from an operation codenamed Doublet, which has ranged across Rochdale, Oldham, Bolton and Bury.
“The operation is understood to cover offences that have taken place in the past six years.
Virtually all of the suspects are expected to face justice in up to a dozen separate trials. They are likely to be held at Manchester Crown Court next year.
“One detective said: ‘A lot of these guys have thought for years that they are above the law. They’re in for a very rude awakening.’”
Even allowing for a degree of hyperbole, the scale of this investigation is staggering. Meanwhile, the four towns named in the Mail piece are all Labour-controlled, yet none of the councils has publicly disowned the story.
The party needs to brace itself to hold any of its representatives – councillors and MPs alike – to account if they have allowed child sexual exploitation to take place, especially if they have done nothing about it, having been told it was going on. Today’s suspensions may just be the start of things.
Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut
Tags: child abuse, grooming, Kevin Meagher, Labour councils, Rotherham
“The party needs to brace itself to hold any of its representatives – councillors and MPs alike – to account if they have allowed child sexual exploitation to take place”
You really have no idea what you’re talking about, do you, Kevin. Think this one through.
And that’s just Greater Manchester. As well as the Yorkshire cases, there have been previous prosecutions for this in Lancashire (Blackburn, Preston) as well as in and around the Midlands (Derby, Telford, Peterborough) and parts of the south (Wycombe, Oxford). Is Birmingham likely to have been unaffected? London?
If there were 1,400 victims just in Rotherham then how many thousands (or even tens of thousands?) of victims might there be across the country as a whole?
Shaun Wright, Jahangir Akhtar and the others deserve the scrutiny they’re getting, but this is a national problem and we need to start asking questions about what national politicians knew and what they did during the 2000s when they could have intervened and prevented some of this abuse.
If the labour Party is going to hold members to account for their acts and omissions, then you are going to have investigations in all Labour councils then.
Far more widespread in Manchester than this article highlights. One could also discuss the brothels, the internal conflicts where males have literally caused terrible harm to their own mothers and sisters….you can find this in London as well as up north….and the midlands….etc
Well done Labour….
Interesting comments from the Rotherham politics blog site.
https://rotherhampolitics.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/at-last/
Utterly gutless and disgraceful
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rotherham-child-abuse-scandal-child-safety-officers-will-not-face-disciplinary-action-9709250.html