Labour’s Rochdale MP Paul Waugh told the House of Commons that the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s comments over the Casey report were “beneath contempt.”
Replying to the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper Badenoch said that the pressure on the government came from the Tories campaigning on the issue
“The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership,”
Cooper argued that the Tories did nothing for more than a decade, noting the Alexis Jay report into child sexual abuse which the Conservatives failed to implement the recommendations of and a grooming gangs taskforce.
And added that The Casey report sets out “a timeline of failure” from the previous government, including while Badenoch served as minister for children
Waugh who has been criticised in some quarters for failing to vote for a national inquiry while arguing for one said he was listening with cold fury to Badenoch’s reply
Writing on X earlier, he said
“Along with other Labour MPs, I voted in January against a Tory Parliamentary motion that would have killed off a new law to safeguard children.
The motion would have rejected the entire Children and Wellbeing Bill – which itself delivers a vital recommendation by the Jay inquiry into child sex abuse, to give children outside school a named identifier.
If the Opposition had been serious they could have tried to amend the bill at a later stage not its Second Reading. That would have been a very different matter.
If you really care about the victims of abuse, you don’t play Parliamentary games with it.
And you don’t block one of the main recommendations of the Jay report that the previous government failed to deliver on.
