GB News hosts Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner were left outraged as Baroness Louise Casey admitted the grooming gangs national inquiry could take up to "five years" to complete.Speaking to GB News reporter Charlie Peters, Casey stated that the process of the inquiry is "looking at three to five years".FULL STORY HERE.
00:00I'll repeat with Charlie Peters. Ask Baroness Casey how long the National Enquiry is going to take.
00:05I think in relation to the National Enquiry, I think I would say you're looking at three to five years.
00:14I think I would start at three years because I think we need to inject some speed into this.
00:19I think some of the victims I have met in some of the areas have waited a long time for accountability locally in particular.
00:26And therefore, I think I've said to the government at the moment, I think it should be a three year National Enquiry with statutory powers, the same as any other inquiry and done on that basis.
00:38Well, Charlie, I'm sorry, we're both just groaning out loud. No, three to five years. So three to five years, that will mean seven.
00:45Yeah. Everything overruns it for anything to do with the government and the public sector.
00:49Well, most crucially, Reverend Andrew, it also means it wouldn't return in this parliament.
00:52Quite.
00:53Which I think is what a lot of people are concerned about.
00:55This could be now cooked into the long grass and pushed away from this parliament.
01:00The intro there is saying that Baroness Casey, as a lot of people are reporting today, she's revealed that this crime has got disproportionately a number of Pakistani offenders.
01:09It's not revealed that.
01:10It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, I think reading, reading all 200 pages of this last night, it's confirmed a lot of what we already know.
01:18Absolutely right.
01:18It's not revealing anything new.
01:20And that's the real problem, I think, for the government and also ministers and shadow ministers of all stripes, because it shows that this is a national scourge that has been out in the open for years.
01:31And they can't say that they're reacting on advice of Baroness Casey, that they're learning this for the first time.
01:36They're confirming and understanding.
01:37The media, frankly, has been putting this out into the open for a long time.
01:41Charlie, so Starmer, when he confirmed that there was going to be a full national inquiry, said, having read every word of Baroness Casey's report, come off it.
01:51He wrote about this in 2014 in The Guardian, where else, before he was an MP, all about the problems.
01:56He ducked the race issue.
01:58But the fact that there was this big problem with grooming gangs and it wasn't being taken seriously.
02:02He's known for decades.
02:04He's a former director of public prosecutions.
02:06Eleven years ago, he said, we've failed a generation of girls.
02:09Unfortunately, he's now failed, they have now failed generations of girls, because this is stretched on for so long.
02:15This is not confined to just one portion of our history.
02:18And we've long said this is possibly the worst race hate scandal since the Second World War in this country.
02:24But it's never understood in that terms because of how uncomfortable people are with engaging with that disproportionality that Baroness Casey is talking about yesterday.
02:33But, you know, while she's not necessarily revealing anything new, the confirmation and it coming from an authoritative Whitehall figure is unfortunately what it takes for a lot of these people to act.
02:42And it's powerful because what she's saying in her trademark stark and clear and direct language is going against years.
02:51And she told us in the press conference yesterday that people have been faffing around with reports that have obfuscated this issue for decades.
02:57She's actually taking aim at some government reports in it.
02:59She points in particular to the 2020 Home Office report, which claimed that white men were the majority of abusers in grooming gang cases,
03:09even though that report admitted, just as Casey has, that we only know about the ethnicity in a minority of cases.
03:16It was a ginormous leap.
03:18And I think, you know, while obviously there's a lot of fire for Labour at the moment about the far right bandwagon, Lucy Powell's comments about the dog whistle,
03:24the Conservative Party right now has Priti Patel on its front bench.
03:28She was the Home Secretary when that 2020 report came out, which I think misrepresented and perverted the course of justice, frankly,
03:35by framing this issue as not involving a disproportionate number of Pakistani offenders.
03:42Big questions for the Conservative Party today about why Priti Patel's never been made to answer for letting that report come out.
03:47And very briefly, she says in the report, too, that a number of ongoing investigations feature disproportionately foreign nationals and asylum seekers.
03:54That's going to outrage people.
03:55That's going to cause a lot of problems.
03:56And of course, she's not gone into great detail because there are so many live cases.
03:59But, you know, our Home and Security editor, Mark White, is repeating constantly about how we're having record arrivals,
04:05sometimes up to 1,500 people a day.
04:07That's very difficult for the government to accept that those gangs are asylum seekers, also possibly connected to this abuse.
