Keir Starmer’s response to Elon Musk is tone deaf
Rather than face up to the racial and religious dimension of the rape gangs scandal, Starmer continues to tell himself comfortable myths about the success of our multicultural society, says James Price
Over the last week, the rest of the world has been introduced to one of Britain’s greatest – and ongoing – shames. Young girls have been systematically targeted and raped by predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs of men in as many as 50 towns and cities up and down the country.
If parents tried to intervene, police often threatened them with arrest for being racist, and police and other local authorities suppressed the details in the name of ‘community cohesion’ and downplaying racial tensions. Having read some of the details, I do not have the stomach to repeat them here. Suffice to say it is too awful to imagine what has been done to huge numbers of young British girls. And the cover-up, as is becoming ever more apparent, is shocking to the core.
We need to face up to the racial and religious dimension to these crimes. White girls were called “white trash” and some of those gang members who were actually tried in court declared proudly that it didn’t matter what happened to white girls. Hindu girls and others were also targeted, but these gangs specifically and explicitly left young Muslim girls alone. That is not to say that young Muslim girls are immune from problems – but the whole shocking scandal explodes some of the myths we have tried to tell ourselves about the apparent success of our multicultural society. What’s required is nothing short of a cri de coeur from the government; it is moments like these that define premierships and make or break leaders.
“Amplifying the far right”
Yet instead of rising to the occasion, Prime Minister Keir Starmer chose to attack X owner Elon Musk and opposition politicians for raising awareness, accusing them of “amplifying the far right” . Beyond being so completely tone deaf that it has made my ears ring, Starmer’s response also shows why we are in the mess we are as a country.
Rather than explicitly acknowledging the ethnic elements at play in this scandal, too many have found it easier to play politics. This is the default response to anything – from rape gangs to military action overseas to the social care crisis – from a political class that is incapable of moral seriousness or going against the prevailing consensus.
I was guilty of this failure in government. I tried to prevent mandatory face masks for children in schools over the omicron Covid variant. But when I brought up conservative concepts like individual freedom or a limited government response, I was shouted down by ‘grown ups in the room’ who said that masks were a zero-harm intervention and only nutters could be against them. I relented. But the report I managed to get the DfE to produce afterwards confirmed that masks did indeed have a damaging effect on children and their learning.
The structural reasons for this weakness are those expounded best by Dominic Cummings: “the government isn’t really the government”. It is stymied by a blob that doesn’t optimise for good national outcomes so much as the whims of much of the media and chattering classes.
Starmer and his team think they, as good left-wingers, should be afforded a greater benefit of the doubt than the evil right wingers
This is why things are already going so badly for the government: Labour’s overriding instinct is that the state is the master and the people the ungrateful servants. As hapless as the last administration too often was, there were at least enough good sound conservatives who tried to push the brakes on the worst things.
Starmer and his team are fundamentally incapable of understanding these structural problems. They think they, as good left-wingers, should be afforded a greater benefit of the doubt than the evil right wingers. This moral failing renders them incapable of processing an issue like the rape gangs, where they assume that the benevolent state has already done all it can, and anyone criticising it or them must by definition be far-right, a synonym for morally reprehensible and evil.
Until Whitehall breaks out of thinking that the state is naturally good, that ministers and civil servants are naturally moral, and that issues of religion, immigration and social cohesion can’t be addressed, they will continue to fail. And as we have seen, the consequences for this failure are worse than you can imagine.
James Price is a former government adviser