A council has joined calls for the government to launch a national inquiry into grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation. At a full council meeting, North Northamptonshire Council urged the government to address concerns about perceived institutional shortcomings in tackling the crimes.

You can almost smell the panic. Every Left-wing activist and pundit is frantically trying to defend Labour’s refusal to hold a full national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal.

The Reform UK leader repeated his demands for a national inquiry at his party’s north-west regional conference on Saturday.

The British are renowned for their class system, their tea-drinking, and, now that Elon Musk has told the world about it, the grooming, rape, trafficking, and torture of underage girls by gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim origin.

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.