If you came into 2025 hoping for a return to politics as normal, whatever that means, you’ll have been sorely disappointed by this week at Westminster. The new year in politics has picked up where we left off in 2024, with the unedifying sight of an ever-more opportunistic and craven radical right seeking to polarise the public and poison political discourse.

The exact issue over which this culture war is fought hardly matters to those fighting it. Any issue that can be wielded as a weapon to divide us is as good as any other, something the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, amply demonstrated amid her horrendous showing at Prime Minister’s Questions.

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Silence of the left over grooming gangs is a gift to right wing rabble

In response to the Prime Minister’s assertion that she had never raised the issue of “grooming gangs” in Parliament, she asserted that she had raised other issues like trans rights as if the two are remotely related in the minds of anyone who doesn’t see both as political means to the same ends.

Tragically, the exploitation of the grooming gangs scandal by the Conservatives, Reform UK, and radical right figures like Elon Musk, who have used it to attack government ministers and minority communities with a barrage of disinformation, has obfuscated the very real issues here.

They have relegated the importance in public discourse of the suffering of the victims of these gangs, the work already done to tackle them, the work that still needs doing to understand the extent of the problem, and the work that must be done to........

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