At last Sir Keir Starmer has announced a national inquiry into the mass-rape gangs prowling the streets of our towns and cities to target young girls for sex. And not before time.

His dramatic U-turn follows months of Government reluctance to launch a country-wide probe into the so-called ‘grooming’ scandal that has shamed Britain for decades. Street rape gangs have operated in the North, the South, the Midlands. There are thousands of girl victims, mostly underage, mostly white. But make no mistake: youngsters of all creeds and colours (including boys) have been damaged by this repugnant, out-of-control crime which I fear is ongoing today.

This week, a new report will be unveiled in Parliament which will explicitly link the issue of street grooming to men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Written by the crossbench peer and former Victims’ Commissioner Baroness Casey, it will state unequivocally that white British girls have been targeted and they were ‘institutionally ignored’ for fear of racism.

I know this is true. I have met parents with daughters caught up in the gangs. They cried out for help. They went to the police, alerted their councillors and social workers, begged local child protection charities to act. Invariably, they were shown the door.

In some cases, the parents were told they were the problem. They had ‘failed to protect’ their child. The daughters were taken away by social services to a council-run home. And, like bees to a honeypot, the gangs then swooped on these insecurely run places, and the girls were gang-raped all over again.

If this sounds fanciful or just hearsay, I can tell you it isn’t. In 2010, over two pages of this newspaper and under the headline ‘Asian gangs, schoolgirls, and a sinister taboo’, the Mail published my article revealing for the first time that countless children were being groomed as sex slaves on the streets.

Picked up at school gates, supermarkets, parks, the victims were being plied with drink and drugs, taken to private homes or flats above shops and raped, then passed around to other men.

(From left to right) brothers Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain were convicted of a range of offences involving the sexual exploitation of teenage girls in Rotherham

Sue Reid broke the scandal 15 years ago of white teenage girls being taken to flats or homes to be passed around by groups of men

One of Sue Reid’s Daily Mail stories uncovering the scandal from 2010

The police and other authorities, my article warned, were failing to act to protect the vulnerable children for fear of being branded racist. The simple fact was that, when it came to street grooming (as distinct from internet grooming, for instance), the vast majority of the sexual predators were South Asian, and their victims non-Muslim girls.

My article made completely clear that the vast majority in our South Asian communities are law-abiding citizens who would have been appalled by the grooming, and that rapists come from all racial and social backgrounds.

That didn’t stop the predictable cry of racism from Left-wing critics, however – including the New Statesman magazine, which called me a fascist. (One editor involved in that smear has since been convicted of making indecent images of children.)

In the years since that article in 2010, the Mail has been entirely vindicated. Political correctness and fear of being labelled ‘Islamophobic’ unquestionably did paralyse police, council officers, social workers and child protection charity workers who refused to act, despite the stories ordinary families were telling them.

Now, finally, a light is being shone into this evil corner of our society. The powerful Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body of many organisations, has given ‘qualified support’ to ‘yet another investigation… provided it follows evidence rather than prejudice’.

The MCB points out that there are plenty of non-Muslim rapists. It states that ‘group-based’ child sexual exploitation offenders are ‘most commonly white’, citing Home Office research from 2020.

And that is true. These white men chase down gullible girls on social-media sites and persuade them to meet face-to-face, with inevitable, terrible consequences.

But Sir Keir’s new inquiry concerns an equally heinous crime: the sex grooming of youngsters on our streets, at shopping centres and at other places they gather, by predominantly Pakistani and Bangladeshi men with impressively expensive cars and a line in patter that goes: ‘You’re pretty. Want a lift home, love? We can have a pizza on the way. I can be your boyfriend’.

‘Emma Jackson’ was raped by Asian gangs as a 12-year-old in Rotherham

Sir Keir Starmer has announced there will be a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs

Disturbingly, the MCB has hit back at the intervention of non-British Tesla CEO and ‘foreign billionaire’ Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), who raised the alarm over this kind of sex grooming in January.

Musk published on his social media platform a hitherto secret English court transcript detailing a grotesque, depraved, sexual attack on a white underage girl by multiple men who were later convicted of gang rape.

Make no mistake, whatever anyone thinks of Elon Musk, his transatlantic intervention helped pave the way for this new statutory inquiry, where witnesses will be compelled to appear and give evidence under oath.

It also sparked Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP who is now independent, into launching his own private grooming-gang investigation which is currently collecting evidence from survivors and whistleblowers.

Yesterday, Lowe sent the Government ten important tests for Sir Keir’s formal inquiry. These include the demand that cultural dynamics must be addressed, including the role of religion, and that data on the race, gender, nationality and immigration status of perpetrators should be published in full.

Lowe demands that councils should be compelled to open their records on street rape gangs to scrutiny. Many of these documents are believed to have been deliberately destroyed. But those that still exist should be made public to show how many girls made complaints of sexual abuse – and how many were ignored.

The MP’s letter to the Government also asks: ‘Will this inquiry investigate political motivations behind the cover-ups, including the role of the Labour Party? In multiple towns, fear of losing the Muslim “bloc vote” appears to have driven officials to stay silent.’

This is contentious because it is clear that councils of all political persuasions were ensnared, to some extent, in the cover-up as fears of being branded racist took hold across Britain. One thing widely misunderstood about this grooming-gang scandal is that their rapes did not just happen in immigrant-heavy, poverty-ridden, Labour-voting areas.

The gangs were – and are – highly mobile, often using the motorways at night to travel round the country. They specifically targeted towns and cities where there were lots of white girls, some middle-class, to groom and rape.

Last Thursday, in an interview with GB News, Dominic Cummings (a former chief adviser to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister) entered the fray, claiming that Whitehall officials and politicians helped to hide the scale of street grooming.

The new report, written by crossbench peer and former Victims’ Commissioner Baroness Casey, will state unequivocally that white British girls have been targeted and were ‘institutionally ignored’ for fear of racism

Officials, particularly in the Department for Education where Cummings worked during the early 2010s, routinely redacted documents about the abused children in ‘mass cover-ups of the whole thing’, he stated. Many officials lied that it was a ‘conspiracy theory’ that girls, some just 12, were being raped en masse.

‘There was a fear of the consequences of facing reality,’ said Cummings, adding that ‘thousands and thousands’ of the abused have not got justice.

In January this year, I wrote that the Sikh community was the very first group of British citizens to say that sex grooming was taking place on an ‘industrial scale’. Their community leaders complained back in 1988 that: ‘Muslim youth are coming around our schools abducting and raping girls.’

A Birmingham TV station that year aired a hard-hitting documentary on ‘child rape for profit’. It revealed that Sikh girls were being enticed into false relationships by ‘so-called boyfriends’, who then ‘sold’ them as sex slaves to other men. The Sikhs, with a reputation for being fierce warriors, scared off the gangs.

When the important documentary was re-released in January this year, a Sikh leader said: ‘The UK authorities later wilfully buried the truth about this cancer.

‘White Caucasian girls became the target instead, allowing the problem to metastasise countrywide over decades’. There is no doubt about this. We now wait to see what Sir Keir’s new investigation will mean in reality.

Will it be delayed for years by the slow wheels of Whitehall? Will it name names? Let us hope it holds the guilty in officialdom, whether in councils or Government, to account and punishes them.

Remember, when Musk released his court document in January, the Prime Minister claimed those who immediately demanded a statutory inquiry ‘were jumping on the bandwagon of the far Right’.

Labour politicians, too, voted against a national probe, claiming we’d already had an independent investigation called the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), with a report published two-and-a-half years ago.

That inquiry has since been accused of cherry-picking six case-study areas where there were no significant reports of Pakistani-Muslim gangs roaming the streets. None of the northern towns where the abuse first emerged was chosen for scrutiny. Bristol was the only place plagued by the grooming gangs which was examined in depth (and this involved convicted Somalian rapists).

Ignored was the northern town where I first broke the scandal. I was invited to the home of Emma Jackson (not her real name), who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. She lived in West Yorkshire, the middle-class daughter of grocery store owners, belying the oft-peddled myth that all the victims were feckless girls whose parents had abandoned responsibility for them.

When Emma was first raped multiple times she was still playing with dolls, had barely reached puberty, and had never been kissed by a boy.

The highlight of her week was Saturday, when she would meet up with friends in the play area at the local Tesco shopping centre while her parents, Jack and Carol, stocked up on groceries.

Yet by her 14th birthday her innocence was over. She had been sexually abused by 54 men from all over Britain. ‘I had become a sex slave,’ Emma told me at her delightful home full of family pictures, with her mother by her side.

‘I was wearing ankle socks when I was first raped by a gang on wasteland one afternoon. My white coat was covered in blood, and they left me to go home on the bus alone.’

Emma had been lured into the gang by a teenage Pakistani boy her own age. He had met her in the supermarket play area and introduced her to older male relatives in their 20s, who said they wanted to be friends. They then gave her vodka, cigarettes, and cannabis joints. ‘I had no idea these men were in a gang,’ she told me. ‘I thought it was exciting to meet them every day after school before catching the bus home.’

Since Emma in 2010, I have heard equally heartbreaking stories from ordinary girls and their families in myriad towns – from Oxford to Telford, Rotherham to Rochdale – where gangs have been convicted.

We now know there was a wall of silence, a dangerous culture of denial, that reached the very top of successive governments.

Sir Keir will find that this new inquiry cannot be thrown into the long grass. The genie is out of the bottle. He will have Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and the terrier-like Rupert Lowe snapping at his heels if it is delayed, dragged out, muzzled by lawyers or dumbed down.

As the Mail said, in an opinion page, after we exposed the mass grooming of girls all those years ago: ‘What is happening in our towns is a national scandal. The lesson of all this is that censoring the truth is always very, very dangerous.’

And so it has proved to be – especially for the victims and for Britain’s reputation as an honest nation.