Swept Under the Rug: Labour’s Motion on Women & Girls Is a Study in Hypocrisy and Avoidance

🧹 Swept Under the Rug: Labour’s Motion on Women & Girls Is a Study in Hypocrisy and Avoidance

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

“Sandwell Labour Cannot Preach Protection While Denying Justice

 “Sandwell Labour Cannot Preach Protection While Denying Justice”

#Sandwell #Safeguarding #GroomingGangs #VAWG #ChildProtection #Accountability

For years, survivors of grooming gangs and organised child sexual exploitation have called for truth, justice and transparency. Not slogans. Not performative activism. Not PR campaigns designed to soothe public opinion without confronting institutional failure.

Yet here in Sandwell, we are faced with the uncomfortable reality that the very same Labour Group now loudly promoting “Sandwell Stands” — their highly-publicised violence against women and girls (VAWG) campaign — once refused to support a motion calling on the Government to establish a National Statutory Inquiry into grooming gangs and the rape and exploitation of girls.

#SandwellCouncil #Labour

The moral contradiction is stark.

The hypocrisy is undeniable.

The consequences are profound.

#CSE #JusticeForSurvivors

White Ribbon, Reclaim the Night – and Selective Memory

As the council marks White Ribbon Day and the 16 Days of Activism, lighting civic buildings orange and encouraging public solidarity, one unavoidable truth remains:

You cannot champion women’s safety today while running from accountability yesterday.

#WhiteRibbon #16DaysOfActivism

The survivors of grooming gang abuse — many of them still living with unimaginable trauma — needed this council to stand up, not step aside. They needed the Labour leadership to demand an inquiry that would expose systemic failures and deliver justice. Instead, they were met with avoidance. Deflection. And, in some cases, outright dismissal.

#SurvivorsDeserveBetter

Political Cowardice Disguised as “Measured Leadership”

When the call for a national inquiry was debated locally, Labour councillors chose the comfortable option: a diluted, self-affirming motion about Sandwell’s “commitment” to tackling CSE. What they didn’t choose was courage.

They did not choose to stand with victims.

They did not choose to demand a national reckoning.

They did not choose the path of truth.

And nationally, Labour MPs failed to back an amendment that would have forced the inquiry into law. Only when the political pressure became overwhelming did the national party U-turn.

#PoliticalFailure

Even now, the very inquiry Labour reluctantly conceded has fallen into crisis: survivor walk-outs, resignations, political interference, and a process stalling under the stewardship of Jess Phillips. The inquiry survivors fought for has been allowed to drift into chaos under Labour’s own government.

#InquiryCrisis #JessPhillips

And Then Came the Smears

To make matters worse, certain politicians — including independents and former Conservative councillors now seeking new identities — dismissed calls for a national inquiry as “far-right dog-whistling.”

These comments were not only ignorant; they were insulting. They trivialised the suffering of victims. They dismissed legitimate demands for justice. They attempted to reframe a moral duty as a political manoeuvre.

Such rhetoric does not protect survivors; it silences them.

It does not challenge extremism; it fuels institutional protectionism.

It does not safeguard children; it protects the systems that failed them.

#FarRightDogWhistle #VictimSilencing

These individuals should reflect deeply on the damage caused by using survivors as political shields.

This Is Bigger Than Politics

We cannot continue with a model of governance that produces slogans instead of safeguards, campaigns instead of courage, and selective outrage instead of unflinching accountability.

White Ribbon Day, Sandwell Stands, VAWG awareness — these initiatives matter. They have value. They deserve respect. But they mean nothing if they are used as moral cover to avoid the very accountability survivors have been fighting for.

#EndCSE #TruthAndJustice

The girls who were abused, ignored, and abandoned by institutions deserve far more than a public-relations cycle. They deserve a fully resourced, fully empowered national inquiry that puts their voices at the centre. They deserve political leadership willing to stand with them when it matters — not just when the cameras are rolling.

#SupportSurvivors

A Call for Honesty and Accountability

If Sandwell Labour wants credibility, they must confront this contradiction openly. That means:

Acknowledging their refusal to back a national inquiry.

Reaffirming support for a survivor-led, statutory investigation.

Accepting that their past decisions damaged trust.

Ending the culture of political self-protection.

Anything less is just more of the same.

#AccountabilityNow #LabourInSandwell

Sandwell deserves leadership that stands with survivors before the press releases go out.

Because justice is not a hashtag.

Safeguarding is not a slogan.

And the fight against violence towards women and girls is meaningless without confronting the failures that let predators operate with impunity.

#NoMoreExcuses