Nigel Adams
Main Page: Nigel Adams (Conservative - Selby and Ainsty)Department Debates - View all Nigel Adams's debates with the Home Office
(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Mrs May
My right hon. Friend the Minister for Crime Prevention has looked at the issue—I think that the national group has considered it—and is sympathetic to the principle behind that point, but considerations of international law make it a more complex issue than it might at first seem.
Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) (Con)
The industrial scale of the child sexual exploitation in Rotherham has cast a dark cloud over that part of south Yorkshire. The former Member for Rotherham has said that he “could have done more”, but as a “Guardian reading liberal lefty”, to use his words, he did nothing. That admission is bad enough, but Mr MacShane has also said that he thought there was a culture of not wanting to “rock the multicultural community”. If Mr MacShane is to be believed, what does my right hon. Friend plan to do to ensure that turning a blind eye to such appalling crimes because of political correctness never happens again?
Mrs May
We need to be clear in all our interactions with anyone involved in anything like this, and in the messages we send from the House and the Government, that there can be no excuse for allowing the perpetrators of such appalling crimes to escape justice. Cultural considerations cannot be an excuse for allowing perpetrators to escape justice but, as I said, there are two issues here, and while it is important to consider the one that my hon. Friend raises, underlying that is a question of the culture within the agencies with regard to the sort of families these girls came from and whether they were to be believed, and that is the culture we also need to break.