Kemi Badenoch has sat down with GB News National Reporter Charlie Peters for an exclusive interview, as she declared the Conservatives have "done their job" as opposition in getting the grooming gangs scandal a national inquiry.Speaking to GB News, Badenoch branded Labour "dishonest", and made clear that the issue of rape gangs in Britain "needs national attention".WATCH ABOVE.
00:00Kimmy Baden-Ock, we won. That was the email you sent out on Saturday evening after news broke that there was going to be this National Grooming Gang's inquiry.
00:09Do you regret, in a sense, taking credit for this campaign crossing over the line? Is this not a victory for survivors, first and foremost?
00:16Yes, it is. But that campaign was about them. 400,000 people signed that petition.
00:21So the we was the 400,000 people who had signed our petition, signed our campaign, who were pushing for that.
00:29And I think it's very important to remind people that this did not happen easily.
00:34A lot of pressure was put on the government. We did our job as opposition.
00:39We held votes, making it impossible for a lot of Labour MPs to avoid this issue.
00:45We were actually going to have another vote this Wednesday.
00:47So the timing of it is particularly suspicious, given Keir Starmer is not going to be around for PMQs.
00:53This is our job. Politics requires us to actually hold the government to account, and we will do that in every possible way we can.
01:02And through that petition, which we organised, we made sure that those people knew which of the Labour MPs were not responding to the campaign.
01:10And I think all of that pressure, along with the work that you did, and in particular, what the survivors have been going through to tell their stories, has got us to this place.
01:20So this is not about me. It is not about the Conservative Party. This is about getting justice for these victims.
01:26The Tories never cared, and they have engaged with this issue as it's politically expedient.
01:31That's the charge of Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips last night. What's your response?
01:36Jess Phillips is the worst safeguarding minister we have ever had.
01:39I spoke about this issue during the leadership contest. I stood on a stage, and I made the point about this being something that I was going to campaign on long before all of the furore that we saw this year.
01:52This was something that I cared about even in government. I knew what was going on with the Gangs Task Force, for instance.
01:57That happened while I was in Cabinet. And colleagues of mine, from Theresa May to Sajid Javid to Suella Braverman, had taken a lot of time and did a lot of work.
02:07It still wasn't enough. I mean, the scale of it has really only come to light.
02:13We thought it was, you know, just a couple of towns here or there, but 50 towns.
02:17And we were actually putting a lot of work into a bill which Labour did not allow to pass when we went into wash up for the election.
02:24So that bill fell, and they have represented our work as their work.
02:29I think that's dishonest. So I'm not taking any lectures from Jess Phillips.
02:33She needs to sort of go sit down and look at how she has let down quite a lot of people, including survivors, who told me today that she let them down.
02:41Baroness Casey's audit is painful reading, almost 200 pages of appalling reports, much of it already in the public domain.
02:50But there was one new piece of analysis amongst that, which was looking back at the 2020 Home Office report when Priti Patel was Home Secretary.
02:59She released a report which found that there was not a disproportionate over-representation of British Pakistanis.
03:07Casey said that that claim is not evidenced in research or data.
03:12Is Priti Patel and the Conservatives to blame, then, for advancing this myth, this racial myth about the grooming gang scandal?
03:20I disagree. This was something that we raised before and after that.
03:24I don't know where the data for that report, what it was based on.
03:29There was a lack of data. That was a problem.
03:30There was only 30% gathered, but the Conservative Home Office still says there's no representation.
03:36I did a report after that as Minister for Equalities where I referenced this and talked about loads of integration issues,
03:41including the grooming gang one, and talked about ethnicity as well.
03:47So lots of different people were doing different bits of work.
03:50But the cumulative evidence that we have from the work that we did in government is that ethnicity was an issue.
03:57That's why Sajid Javid asked for ethnicity to be collected.
04:00He was called far-righted.
04:02He did that before in 2018. That was before Priti Patel's report came out in 2020.
04:06How are survivors going to trust your leadership at the Conservative Party?
04:10If you've got someone on your front bench who put out a report saying that actually Pakistanis weren't overrepresented,
04:16that most CSE being conducted by groups was white men, when that information just wasn't there.
04:21Do you think Priti Patel should clarify why she let that report come out?
04:24They can trust me because they have seen me speak not just on this issue, but on many other issues.
04:30What I have repeatedly said, and I put out my own report, that's a report on race and ethnic disparities,
04:36that we need to actually call things as they are and not succumb to this fear of this political correctness
04:44that means that you can't call, you can't speak the truth.
04:47That's why people can trust me.
04:49I don't know about the report that was put out by Priti Patel.
04:51I do know about the work that was done by Sajid Javid, by Suella Braverman, by Theresa May,
04:57all Home Secretaries who are Conservative.
04:59I know about the gang's task force.
05:00And all Home Secretaries that aren't in your front bench, of course.
05:02Yeah, so that's fine, but I'm the person leading my party now.
05:05And it's either we spend time trying to prosecute reports that have gone on in the past
05:10or actually look at the people who actually covered things up.
05:14That's really where the scandal is.
05:15That's what the survivors are talking about.
05:17I don't think many people even saw this particular report.
05:20I can look into it.
05:21But right now, I am saying on my own record that this is an issue I've always cared about.
05:26I made it a flagship of my leadership bid last year.
05:29And I have not let it go since January, even when a lot of people were saying,
05:33why do you keep talking about this?
05:34I would say a lot of people have seen that report.
05:36And it's been used a lot by the media and by politicians to quieten discussion on it.
05:40But let's move on from that now.
05:42Because in that review, there was a lot of criticism of previous efforts.
05:47And speaking to reporters last night, Baroness Casey told us that successive governments
05:53had faffed about for so many years.
05:55Now, you say that only recently the full national scale of this crisis has come to light.
06:00Certainly from my perspective.
06:02Right.
06:02Certainly from my perspective.
06:03Because we had commissioned Baroness Casey to do some work right back in 2015.
06:08Specifically on Rotherham.
06:09Yes.
06:09But that's what I mean.
06:10That we were hearing about individual cases.
06:13What I'm saying now is that there's so much happening across that someone needs to join
06:18the dots.
06:20We always looked into things in isolation.
06:24The child sexual abuse inquiry was the thing that was supposed to bring it all together.
06:27But it brought in sexual abuse in the church, in private schools.
06:30And it didn't go in depth into the rape gang scandal.
06:33But it was published in 2022.
06:35Yes, and we saw that those recommendations would not deal with gangs.
06:39So we set up the gangs task force, which caught 807 perpetrators, found many more new victims.
06:46And that's when, that was just last year that that happened.
06:48And that's when we started putting in more detail into bills.
06:51That's why we're talking about a national inquiry now.
06:54This has been an ongoing thing.
06:55Nobody stopped any work.
06:56This has been ongoing.
06:57What's changed is that we're not in government anymore.
06:59Baroness Casey is calling for two separate inquiries, really.
07:02One's going to be a police command, the National Crime Agency leading that investigation right
07:06across the country.
07:08Are you concerned that they haven't got the resources to deal with this issue?
07:12And separately on the justice system, we've got people being released from prison for
07:16appalling offences much earlier than what they expected to be behind bars for when they
07:20were sentenced.
07:21The prison population is absolutely at its limit.
07:25Is this country ready to take on this task?
07:29Does there need to be a serious upgrade of our justice capabilities to deal with tackling
07:34these groomers?
07:35We need to make ourselves ready.
07:37This is there are no excuses that will be acceptable this time.
07:40We need to make ourselves ready.
07:41This is one of the things that Fiona Goddard said in the press conference that hearing about
07:46Bradford, that is.
07:47Yes, that's right.
07:48That hearing perpetrators getting sentences of 20 years and then hearing that they may only
07:53serve a third.
07:54I mean, that's outrageous.
07:55So we need to make sure that the police are properly resourced and that these are not the
07:59people who are getting let out of prison early.
08:01This scandal is something that needs national attention.
08:04It is one of the worst scandals our country has ever seen.
08:07And also onto that more broader civil inquiry.
08:10Details need to be put forward on what's actually going to happen there.
08:12We do know it's been accepted by the prime minister.
08:15But questions remain on where it will look.
08:17We're hearing about local inquiries with statutory powers feeding into a national commission.
08:22Does that sound sufficient to you?
08:24Because we've heard from a lot of survivors and campaigners that they want more areas
08:27to be assessed, in particular Whitehall and government and Westminster, because there's
08:33compelling evidence of civil servants covering up this abuse, of the CPS criminalising children
08:39and decisions being made internally to go after them rather than the predators.
08:44Do we need Westminster to be dragged in front of this commission as well?
08:47Well, Charlie, you would have heard the survivors say in the press conference that they don't
08:51want to see just a few towns.
08:52They want to see all the towns looked at.
08:54And I said, you know, on that platform that wherever the evidence takes us, we should
08:59be looking.
09:00No stone should be left unturned.
09:01And it doesn't matter whether it's local or national government.
09:03Westminster isn't a town, though.
09:05Yeah, but that's my point.
09:06That no one should, nothing should be left unturned.
09:09All institutions, whether it's the CPS, whether it's Whitehall, wherever it is, where there is
09:14evidence, follow the evidence and go and look at where there might be cover-ups.
09:18Because the cover-ups are what have meant that this has taken so long.
09:21It's very hard to investigate things if the local authority that has the evidence is not
09:26providing it, is sending victims away, if the police are not taking down evidence, if
09:31they're calling 10-year-olds child prostitutes and so on and so forth.
09:34That's where the real scandal is.
09:35Now, Tukir Starmer and the Labour government say they want to smash the gangs, want to
09:40deal with the illegal crossings over the English Channel.
09:42But we also heard from Baroness Casey's report that there is a link between asylum seekers
09:49in some live cases and grooming gang offences.
09:54Is the grooming gangs crisis now a border security issue?
09:57And are you nervous that group-based child sexual exploitation could be being fuelled by
10:04the small boats crisis?
10:05So it is absolutely correct for Baroness Casey to link these two issues together.
10:10We heard that in some instances it was asylum seekers, people who sought sanctuary in our
10:15country who actually were committing these crimes.
10:18And this is why I say that Britain is being mugged.
10:20People are exploiting our kindness and we need to put a stop to it.
10:23So you would know that we've come out with new policies.
10:25The Conservative Party has very strong, tougher policies on migration, not allowing people
10:30to use the Human Rights Act to avoid deportation.
10:32But these things are linked.
10:34And yes, I am worried about all the people who are coming into the country.
10:37Labour haven't smashed any gangs.
10:39The small boats crossings are higher now than they ever were when we were in government.
10:44We've seen the largest increases under Labour because people feel that they are a soft touch.
10:49When we have the Rwanda plan, the third country deterrent, we saw numbers drop.
10:53You know, we saw evidence that people were going straight to Ireland because they were worried
10:57about being sent to Rwanda.
10:59Keir Starmer scrapped that plan.
11:01He's got no alternative.
11:02We saw him go to Albania and be sent back by the Albanian president or prime minister who
11:08said that he wasn't interested in being the third country deterrent there.
11:11So they've got no plan right now.
11:12They're not smashing anything.
11:14And that's another area that we're going to continue putting the pressure on.
11:16Finally, we saw the Labour MP for Telford, Sean Davis, stand up in Parliament yesterday
11:22and accuse the previous Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, of rejecting a request for an investigation
11:28in Telford.
11:30It transpires actually that he had written a letter to her saying that that investigation
11:34shouldn't take place.
11:36Do you think there'll be a lot of Labour MPs around the country a bit nervous about what
11:40this inquiry might find about actions they might have taken previously while in local
11:45authorities around grooming gangs?
11:48Yes.
11:48And he is the classic example.
11:50If he had said what he said outside Parliament, I think that he would he could have been done
11:54for libel or slander.
11:56Certainly this is the kind of problem that we are seeing.
11:59The people who knew what was going on or who tried to dampen it down, suddenly pretending
12:04that they were on the side of the angels all along.
12:06He is one of the people who voted three times against the national inquiry.
12:10There is a letter, evidence, that shows that he rejected a national inquiry when he was
12:16a council leader and asked that the government not get involved.
12:19I remember Lucy Allen, who was the Conservative MP for Telford, asking for an inquiry.
12:24He was the person who was arguing against her and talking her down.
12:28So he has a lot of questions to answer.
12:30And what he did in Parliament yesterday was absolutely disgraceful.
