The Minister Who Buried the Rape Gangs Walked Out Weeping for the Children

The Safeguarding Minister Who First Refused A National Inquiry And Then Branded Survivors Liars Has Now Resigned

Jess Phillips resigned as Safeguarding Minister on Tuesday. She was the second minister to quit as Keir Starmer's government enters its terminal phase. Her letter runs to eight paragraphs. It does not mention the rape gangs inquiry once.

Phillips Cited Child Safety to Exit a Collapsing Government Without Naming the Biggest Child Protection Inquiry in British History

The Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs is chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield. It began work on 13 April 2026, five weeks ago. Its terms of reference were fought over for months. Phillips was the minister responsible for child protection throughout that fight. She oversaw the appointment of the Labour Party grandee as chair, the consultation process that ignored thousands of response and the drafting of scope that protected both the Home Office and the CPS. She resigned today without mentioning any of it.

She told the Prime Minister that progress on child protection came from threats she issued whenever a political crisis gave her the opening. That is a minister confessing how safeguarding policy worked on her watch. She had the method. The rape gangs inquiry was the biggest child protection crisis in modern British history and she never once deployed it.

Instead, she tried to ignore the rape gang cover up, refused Oldham Council's request for a statutory inquiry, and when the pressure became politically unsurvivable she appointed a Labour baroness to manage it.

Her letter also has a structural dishonesty. Phillips is resigning because Labour lost more than 1,400 councillors last week, because over eighty MPs are demanding Starmer set a departure timetable, because the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary reportedly walked into Number 10 on Monday to tell him to consider his position.

The child protection failures she describes are real and Jess Phillips is using them as cover for a political exit. Phillips knew the full scale of those failures while she held the job. She stayed. The children did not become the story until she needed one.

Starmer Has No Safeguarding Minister and a Five-Week-Old Inquiry With No Ministerial Accountability

The Longfield inquiry began work on 13 April. There is now no minister in post with responsibility for its oversight. The terms of reference took until 31 March to finalise after months of procedural delay this publication has documented in detail. The government that fought over every line of those terms has now lost the minister who signed them off.

Phillips's letter tells Starmer he only acts under threat and that she is done making threats. That is his own former Safeguarding Minister, in writing, confirming the mechanism by which child protection policy moved in this government. It moved when she threatened him and it stopped the moment she stopped.

The specifics she sets out are damning. Ninety-one percent of online child sexual abuse is self-generated. Children are groomed and exploited into producing it themselves. The technology to prevent children taking naked images of themselves already exists and could be deployed on every phone and device in the country. Civil servants had a worked solution ready over a year ago.

Phillips could not get the Prime Minister to act.

After twelve months she extracted a promise to threaten legislation. That is the full extent of what a year of her pressure achieved. The date for even that slipped from March to June. She asks in her letter how many children were left without a safety net while the government dilly dallied and worried about tech bosses. That question has an answer and Phillips knows it.

The children exploited across Rochdale, Rotherham, Oldham, Bradford and Telford are owed a full statutory reckoning. The inquiry meant to deliver it is five weeks old and already without a minister accountable for its outcome.

The Outgoing Safeguarding Minister Has Made the Case Against Her Own Government

Jess Phillips was the minister responsible for safeguarding children from sexual exploitation. She held that office while the grooming gangs inquiry was being delayed and diluted. She resigned today citing child protection failures she could not fix because the Prime Minister would not act without being threatened.

That is her account. Her letter accuses Keir Starmer's government of treating child safety as a political inconvenience to be managed. She does not mention the Conservative Party, Reform, or Elon Musk. Others have reached the same conclusion about this government. Phillips is the first to reach it from inside the Cabinet, on House of Commons headed paper, addressed to the Prime Minister by his first name.

Labour cannot be trusted with the safeguarding of children.

That verdict belongs to Jess Phillips. She earned the standing to deliver it. She spent a year trying to get Starmer to threaten legislation to stop children being groomed into producing abuse imagery of themselves and failed. She leaves office without mentioning the live national inquiry into the mass rape of working-class White girls across England.

The cancer she identified runs wider than grooming gangs. It is the institutional habit of knowing and doing nothing with that knowledge. Phillips practised it and then named it. The difference between her and everyone else who has done the same is that she did it in a resignation letter the whole country can read.

Worse than anything else, what this resignation letter shows is a Labour Party that is not prepared to safeguard children. That is something unforgivable.

I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.

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