Tommy Robinson isn’t the story here

Elon Musk’s Twitter attack on Jess Phillips is certainly offensive. It may even deserve to be called a ‘disgraceful smear’, as Wes Streeting put it on the Laura Kuenssberg Show this morning. But the trouble is that every time government ministers bring up Musk’s spat with Phillips, the more they remind people of just how close Labour was to the scandal of rape gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford and other places. Much as Streeting and others might like to bat it away and plead that Phillips, Keir Starmer and everyone else in his government are ‘good people’, who have done masses during their careers to help put child abusers behind bars, the fact is that for years gangs of men were allowed to get away with the gang rape of teenage girls even though the criminal activity was known about by police and social services.

Moreover, these were social services departments in mostly Labour-run councils where key figures, it has already been established by Alexis Jay’s report in 2014, were motivated to turn a blind eye for fear of appearing to be racist.