Robert Jenrick should be shamed into withdrawing his remarks

Editorial: The former Conservative leadership contender has been busy spreading ill-judged ideas about grooming gangs being the fault of ‘people from alien cultures’ with ‘medieval attitudes’. Even if that were a remotely accurate summation, he is short on what to do about it

Aside from trying to revive his failed leadership campaign via other means, it is difficult to understand what practical point Robert Jenrick is trying to make when he argues, in effect, that grooming gangs are the fault of post-war immigration.

Mr Jenrick is shadow justice secretary and a senior figure in the Conservative Party, and as he sees things, “the scandal started with the onset of mass migration”: “Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here.”

More even than that, Mr Jenrick detects other disfigurements on British society: “After 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we now have entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this. This scandal shows why we must end it. The foreign nationals responsible must be deported – no ifs, no buts. And the officials that covered up must be sent to jail for their appalling cowardice.”

Yet even if that were all to be true – it is highly contentious, at best – the only “solution” offered up by Mr Jenrick is to deport the “foreign nationals” responsible. Presumably, those who are not foreign nationals and were born in the UK won’t be “deported” to Oldham, Rotherham, Telford, or any of the other places they committed their serious and sadistic crimes of sexual violence.

So we should be locking them up – which is what the authorities have, in fact, been doing, albeit after unforgivable delays and cover-ups.

Logically – because the alien culture he is referring to originates in Pakistan – Mr Jenrick should want to end all future migration of people, cargoed with their supposedly “medieval” mindsets, from Pakistan. But even here he draws back: only “some” people from Pakistan would be thus disqualified. Presumably, Imran Khan could reside in the UK, but one wonders how the parents of Sadiq Khan and Sajid Javid would have been greeted if they had had to have their applications back in the 1960s vetted by someone as zealous as Mr Jenrick.

Even on this, Mr Jenrick – a former minister, who aspires to be one again – has no policy to offer, just idle bashing of some notion of Muslim culture and “backwards attitudes to women”, as if mass child rape was an article of faith. It is as absurd as it is offensive, and Mr Jenrick should be shamed into withdrawing his remarks.

The “experiment” Mr Jenrick is really objecting to is the creation of a multicultural society, something he instinctively distrusts and thinks facilitated the grooming gangs. Again, he is keen to make the connection and press the charge that Britain’s multicultural society has failed, but he is short on what to do about it, even if it were a remotely accurate picture of Britain today.

He wants people to “integrate” more – but, once again, is short on specifics. On this, at least, he is at one with his current leader, Kemi Badenoch. Leveraging her Nigerian heritage, she too is disparaging about multiculturalism, preferring the term “multiracial society”, just as her predecessor, Rishi Sunak, did.

But the practicalities of such an approach are unexplored. To her credit, a few months ago Ms Badenoch did offer a specific example, but a flawed one. She wrote: “Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It’s also customs, which may be at odds with British values.

"We cannot be naive and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck, for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here.”

Yet Ms Badenoch must surely see that there are many Anglo-Saxons, shall we say, who hate the Israeli government or dispute the right of Israel to exist, or both, and whose right to live in the UK, wave flags, chant and protest accordingly is never questioned.

What exactly are the British values that today’s Conservative Party wishes the nation to abide by? And what happens if people, of any background, choose not to share those values, but to live their lives peaceably but differently? Tolerance is a British value that Mr Jenrick and Ms Badenoch seem distinctly indifferent about.

Mr Jenrick, always open to a media bid, was all over the airwaves again with his ill-judged ideas. He was most embarrassed, to the point of humiliation, when he tried to claim that the Conservatives’ sudden concern for the victims of the rape gangs was “nothing to do with Elon Musk” – like it was some cosmic coincidence. It is, in truth, no more or less, a cynical exercise in deploying Islamophobia and inciting racial and religious hatred for political advantage. That’s really not a very “British” thing to do.