Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch clash over grooming gangs scandal in first Prime Minister's Questions of 2025
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Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch clashed over the grooming gangs scandal in the first Prime Minister’s Questions of 2025. The PM accused the Tory leader of “jumping on the bandwagon” and urged her to drop her call for a national inquiry into the mass rape and sexual assault of children in dozens of towns across Britain.
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Conservative MPs have laid an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill being discussed in the Commons on Wednesday, along with a call for a statutory inquiry into grooming gangs. But if MPs backed the call it would prevent the legislation making progress.
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It follows a new wave of interest in the scandal after a slew of social media posts by tech billionaire Elon Musk over the Christmas period. A new child sexual exploitation inquiry could look at a "racial and cultural motivation to some of these crimes", Ms Badenoch told MPs.
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She said:"It is very possible to have shorter inquiries, especially if they are covering areas that have not been looked at yet. We don't need to repeat the work that has already been done. "Let's look at new areas.". She added: "A national inquiry would ask if there was a racial and cultural motivation to some of these crimes where white girls were seen, as Jack Straw said, as 'easy meat'.”.
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Sir Keir argued that any further inquiry could delay action on tackling child sexual abuse, pointing out that recommendations from a seven-year investigation which reported in 2022 had not yet been implemented. He replied: “I'm very happy to call out anybody who hasn't acted properly in relation to these cases. I've done it many, many times before and it doesn't matter to me which political party they're in.
