Grooming gang deniers did more damage to race relations than a thousand Tommy Robinsons

Shockingly, the Casey report endorses much of what the "far right" has been saying for years about Asian rape gangs

Baroness Casey has blown the doors off

It is unfortunate that Andrew Norfolk, the intrepid Times journalist who broke the original Asian grooming gangs scandal in 2011, did not live to see the latest development in the story he exposed. He died last month, aged 60, weeks before Keir Starmer conducted the most dramatic and consequential U-turn yet in an administration which has become a byword for mind-changing.

The UK Labour government is now committed to conducting a full-scale, national public inquiry into the mass sexual abuse of young white girls by gangs of predominantly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men in English towns like Rochdale, Telford and Rotherham over the past three decades. Only four months ago, Sir Keir had suggested that those calling for a national inquest were “jumping on a far-right bandwagon”.

As the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, pointed out yesterday, Labour MPs repeatedly voted against precisely the inquiry the PM has now initiated. She claimed this was because the worst cases had taken place in Labour constituencies where MPs depend on Muslim votes. That may or may not be the case. But it has to be said that the Conservatives, during their fourteen years in office, never got round to doing what Keir Starmer has now, to his credit, actually done.

It’s not hard to understand why there has been a reluctance on the part of politicians of all parties to go down this road. This inquiry promises to be more momentous even than the Stephen Lawrence inquiry in 1999 into institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. That was about the failure to pursue and prosecute a handful of white thugs who murdered a black youth. The grooming gang scandal is about a different kind of institutional racism.

As Baroness Casey, whose audit of the grooming gang prosecutions prompted the Prime Minister’s U-turn, has said, the plight of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young white girls was: “ignored for fear of accusations of racism”. She confirms that Pakistani heritage men are over-represented in the the grooming gangs and dismisses the notion that this is a far right trope because, as commentators like the former Newsnight presenter, Emilie Maitlis, insist, the majority of grooming gangs are white. That she says that to use this as a way do diminish the ethnic dimension of grooming gangs is “misleading” and that the failure to address the Asian background of perpetrators is “appalling” and “a major failing”.

Baroness Louise Casey’s report is absolute doubly disturbing because it largely endorses what many right wing commentators, like the academic, Matthew Goodwin, have been saying for years. Until recently, it has been extremely difficult even to write about this issue without being accused of what the Labour minister, Lucy Powell, only two weeks ago called a racist “dog whistle” on BBC’s Any Questions. Well, if this is a dog whistle, it is going to be heard the length and breadth of the UK as this investigation rips through the fabric of UK society. This inquiry will be a watershed in UK community relations.