Why Rupert Lowe’s Independent Enquiry Into The Rape Gangs Can Now Force Real Change

The official and crowd-funded enquiries will have a symbiotic relationship.

So, a national enquiry into the rape gangs at last. There is plenty of instant commentary out there about the what the enquiry will / will not reveal, divided between those who are elated and see it as a definitive turning point – like Matt Goodwin – to those who are deeply cynical and see it as an exercise in pure deflection. At the extreme there are those, like myself, who think that Labour always knew that a national enquiry would be necessary and were just stalling for as long as possible so that damage limitation strategies could be deployed and perhaps incriminating evidence destroyed or quietly buried.

After all, we all have reasons to be deeply cynical about national enquiries, whose chief outcomes seem to be to make lawyers and others within the great and good very rich indeed at the public’s expense: the system investigates the system and largely exonerates the system from blame, as happened most recently in the ridiculous scam of the enquiry into the handling of recent Covid pandemic.

There are number of well-known ways governments can essentially fix the results of the enquiry before it is even started. Firstly, it can set the terms of reference to be either too broad or too narrow. Make the terms too wide and the enquiry may not have the resources to look into key areas at any great depth. Make the terms too narrow – such as with the original Casey report – and you help to avoid those salient areas either partially or even entirely. Then there is the length of time the enquiry may take to come to its conclusions, which can take several years. By that time many of those found at fault may be retired or even dead. The public will have moved on and a new electoral cycle begun. Any attempt at criminal prosecutions would be made more difficult because of the waning reliability of witness and defendant testimony after so long a hiatus.

Finally, there is the trick of just making sure you appoint the right person to lead the enquiry in the first place. To a great many people, this was illuminated to spectacular degree by what many considered the disastrous Hutton enquiry into the Death of Dr. David Kelly and the alleged “sexing up” of intelligence by the government in the lead up to Iraq War, reported at the time by the journalist Andrew Gilligan for the BBC. Lord Hutton was s judge widely admired for his probity and his handling of the enquiry. It was widely expected – and hoped - that the evidence presented would damn the Prime Minister Tony Blair and his chief spin doctor Alistair Campbell, forcing both to resign. However, Labour party insiders were apparently much more sanguine, smirking that they had “appointed the right judge”. No one has ever suggested that Hutton was personally corrupt, but he was known to be an establishment small –c conservative and it was felt it was felt unlikely he would be too radical and disruptive in his conclusions. Sure enough, the Hutton report largely let the government off the hook, blaming the BBC for sloppy journalism instead.

Thus, the fact that Rupert Lowe’s independent, crowd-funded enquiry into the rape gangs is to continue in parallel is just as important as the news that an official enquiry is to be launched.

This is to my knowledge an unprecedented development in UK political life. Apart, the effect of both may be limited. Lowe’s enquiry would not of course have statuary powers and although it may yield revealing and damning witness testimony from those willing to testify (and a great many witnesses have apparently already come forward), it may struggle in other areas to make headway. For the reasons discussed above, a national enquiry alone was unlikely to reveal the whole sordid truth of this hideous stain on our national life. Even if it did, a great many would not believe it, such is the cynicism and distrust towards the Establishment.

Together, though, they may just get at something approaching the truth, with Lowe’s enquiry essentially keeping the official enquiry honest. The Establishment must know that it will not be able to fix the outcomes to those most congenial to the system and its inhabitants if these are seen to deviate too far from what Lowe's enquiry reveals.

So, in conclusion, we see yet again it is only mechanism of direct accountability and democracy that can hold our lumbering, unresponsive and deeply corrupt system of “Unrepresentative Shamocracy” to account. Left to itself, the system will continue to protect the system and those within it, as this terrible saga has demonstrated so cruelly and for so long. The purely representative model of governance is both discredited and finished. From the Brexit referendum to Lowe’s crowd-funded enquiry and beyond, it is this hybrid model of representative and direct mechanisms of transmission that is the way forward for all our dealings with the state in future.