We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

The first exchange in Parliament on child sex gangs since the matter gained fresh prominence in the public mind saw the Tory leader say that the country still doesn’t know truly how bad things are because the research simply hasn’t been done.

The UK’s legacy parties of government, Labour and the Conservatives, continued to bicker bitterly over who is to blame for the decades-long scandal of industrial-scale child rape by migrant heritage gangs. Yet Tory leader Kemi Badenoch made an important point in a clash in Parliament on Wednesday, underlining the case for a fresh national inquiry into child sex grooming gangs.

Responding to the Prime Minister, whose position remains there is a binary choice between acting on recommendations already made by past, less comprehensive reports, or having a fresh years-long investigation and that doing both is somehow impossible, Badenoch said: “There is still work to be done.

“In Rotherham alone, there have been more than 1,400 victims. Across Oldham, Bradford, Bristol, Rochdale and dozens more towns, there have been thousands more victims, but no one has joined the dots. No one has the total picture, and it is almost certainly still going on.”

Indeed, there is no agreement on how many victims there are or even on how many towns and cities are impacted. Speaking in the chamber later, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage cited research that posits there could be as many as 50 towns and cities with grooming gang abusers. While Farage said he would be backing Badenoch’s vote this evening as a matter of expediency, he nevertheless called Badenoch’s strident words on the matter “insincere”, noting during her stint as the Minister for Women and Equalities she “didn’t meet a single victim of these rapes, never raised the issue once”.

Reform colleague Rupert Lowe articulated these points in his own demands of the government, among them that Pakistani nationals involved in the abuse should be deported immediately. Expressing in detail just a few of the questions that an inquiry should investigate, the MP asked of the Labour government: “How many girls are estimated to have been raped? Is there a tally for the over number of rapes? Horrifyingly it may be in the millions, we just don’t know. How many vulnerable young girls are estimated to still be involved in these gangs? If there is no estimate, then why not?”.

Left-wing MPs shook their heads in apparent despair as Lowe spoke, and one Labour MP responding castigated him for speaking frankly.

Nevertheless, the discussion over the child sex gangs, now it has made it out of the organic conversation space of social media up to Parliament, has devolved into interminable rounds of deflection and blame. Labour criticised the Conservatives because they did nothing while in power, while the Conservatives blame Labour because now they are in power, they are blocking a full inquiry to figure out just how deep the grooming gang rot really goes.

They’re both right in a sense. If the systematic rape of very young children by what has now been accepted as “predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs” has been going on for 40 years now, then Labour or the Conservatives have been in power for every one of those years, when the abuse took place, and when the cover-ups took place.

The present Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, a top lawyer who was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the first grooming gang cases were brought, has desperately moved in recent days to claim credit for making those prosecutions possible. Yet this no doubt laudable work is totally overshadowed now by the apparent attitude that looking any closer into the grooming gang phenomenon — and certainly scrutinising how it came to be that police forces and social services across the country came to look the other way time and time again, and even bringing consequences to those pubic servants who did — would be a waste of time.