𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

You could have heard the screams of “stitch up” coming from living rooms up and down the land when Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced –without the slightest embarrassment –that the chair of the rape gang inquiry would be Labour peer, Anne Longfield, and fellow panel members would be Labour Party member Zoe Billingham and Labour sympathiser, Eleanor Kelly.

Worse still, Billingham is chair of the police remuneration body and of the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, while Kelly is a former chief executive of Southwark Council. The victims expressly said they did not want any people connected to the very institutions under investigation by the panel, namely the police, the NHS, local government and social services (not to mention Labour politicians) and was the very reason two potential chairs withdrew their candidacy.

It’s all rather peculiar why Labour even announced this last week given the terms of reference are still being consulted on until the end of March 2026, uncertainty hangs over whether the “victims and survivors panel” will itself survive and the inquiry timeline is questionable – and probably won’t conclude before the next general election.

I believe the reason they rushed out this half-baked announcement was not because it had anything worthwhile to say, but because Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe’s independent inquiry had just published its hearing dates, starting in February 2026.

Rupert’s small independent rape gang inquiry is shaming the Government. Already it has a chair, barrister Graham Smith, and terms of reference. It was set up from the donations of 20,000 members of the public who raised in short order £600,000.

This government has money galore – billions for those on benefits and illegal migrants – but never wanted to cough up money for an investigation into the wide scale rape of white working-class British girls disproportionately perpetrated by Pakistani heritage Muslim men.

They have an army of civil servants to use and yet Rupert, – with his small, dedicated team including Sammy Wood-house (a victim who has a child by her rapist) – has done more than them in just nine months.

Rupert has also promised that any money left over from this “people’s inquiry” will go towards taking out private prosecutions against the police, social services, local government and the NHS in the most egregious cases.

No wonder when he asked for a meeting with the Home Secretary last week to discuss his inquiry he received the most curt of replies: “There is only one statutory inquiry, and that is the one that this Government has initiated, the chair and panel of which I have announced today.”

It’s clear this government is engaging in a slow, backside covering, farce of an inquiry. Thank goodness we have Rupert to hold the hordes of guilty individuals and institutions to account – it’s why I’ve joined forces with him. More power to his elbow.