Tonight, Sandwell Council will debate a Labour motion claiming to “make Sandwell a safe borough for women and girls.”
And tonight — with depressing predictability — Labour will once again refuse to name the crimes that actually devastated girls in towns just like ours.
Not a single reference to:
Child Sexual Exploitation
Grooming gangs
Organised rape of minors
Historic multi-agency failures
National safeguarding inquiries or findings
Instead, we get white ribbons, awareness campaigns and all the usual PR packaging that looks good on leaflets but avoids the uncomfortable truth.
This isn’t leadership.
It’s stage-managed political theatre.
🔥 The Core Hypocrisy: Labour Rejected a National Inquiry
Earlier this year, Sandwell Labour councillors voted against supporting a national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs.
Read that again.
The very inquiry designed to expose failings, uncover the truth and finally deliver justice for survivors — Labour rejected it.
And now they want applause for a motion that pretends to protect girls while refusing to even mention the abuse that shaped national safeguarding reform for over a decade.
This is cowardice masquerading as concern.
This is hypocrisy wrapped in PR.
🧾 What Labour’s Motion Includes (All the Safe Stuff)
The motion lists:
domestic abuse
harassment
coercive control
forced marriage
hate crime
male allyship charters
intersectionality workshops
16 Days of Action branding
All valid topics.
All politically convenient.
All risk-free.
What’s missing?
Only the one thing that actually matters if you are sincere about protecting girls.
❌ What Labour Deliberately Leaves Out
No mention of:
CSE
grooming
trafficking
rape of minors
Jay Report
Casey Review
IICSA
survivor testimonies
learning from past failings
accountability
transparency
This isn’t an oversight.
This is strategy.
If you name CSE, you must address your own failures.
If you address failures, you must accept responsibility.
If you accept responsibility, your PR narrative collapses.
So instead?
You sweep it under the political carpet.
Literally — as the meme below illustrates.
📣 The Leader’s Facebook Response Was Worse
When challenged, the Labour Leader replied:
> “There are too many different acts of violence and abuse to list every single one — the motion is all-encompassing.”
This is not an answer.
This is the exact evasive language condemned in every major safeguarding report.
Jay. Casey. IICSA.
All of them warned:
> Councils failed victims because they refused to name CSE explicitly.
If your motion were truly “all-encompassing,” you would not fear the words:
Child Sexual Exploitation. Grooming. Rape of minors.
The avoidance is deliberate, calculated and cowardly.
🚨 Labour’s Motion Protects the Council — Not the Child
This motion avoids:
accountability
inquiry
transparency
naming the harm
acknowledging survivors
facing past failures
Because those things aren’t politically comfortable.
Instead, we get the usual soft-focus PR:
allyship charters
training sessions
white ribbon pledges
feel-good awareness projects
All style, no substance.
All performance, no courage.
It’s not about safety.
It’s about safeguarding the Labour Group’s reputation, not safeguarding girls.
🎯 Final Verdict
Labour’s motion is:
Sanitised
Politically safe
Strategically evasive
Morally underpowered
Safeguarding-illiterate
Hypocritical given their vote against the national inquiry
A betrayal of survivors
A Council that cannot say the words Child Sexual Exploitation
cannot claim to stand with girls.
And a party that sweeps CSE under the rug does not deserve to lead the conversation on women’s and girls’ safety.
#Sandwell #CSE #VAWG #Safeguarding #Accountability #GroomingGangs #JayReport #CaseyReview #PoliticalHypocrisy #LabourCouncil #ResidentsVoice
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