“Britain’s not broken,” declared Keir Starmer as he welcomed the winners of this year’s Pride of Britain awards to Downing Street on Tuesday. It’s not the first time he’s used that line. From interviews with The New Statesman and GQ to his address at last month’s Labour Party Conference, the Prime Minister has returned to the theme again and again. But this is more than a slogan: it is the moral centre of his governing claim.

Starmer’s premiership rests on the conviction that civic and institutional reform are all that’s needed to get a slightly damaged Britain back on its feet. Yet the national grooming gang inquiry is the ultimate test of that vision. It sits at the most politically combustible intersection of race, class, religion, and institutional failure in modern Britain. Here, Starmer must prove that the state can still exercise moral authority, uphold justice without fear or favour, and rebuild public trust in the institutions that failed the most vulnerable.

So far, though, things look uncertain. Jim Gamble, once a frontrunner to lead the inquiry, yesterday withdrew from consideration, stating that political “point-scoring” had created a “highly charged and toxic environment”. His exit turns what should have been a moment of national reckoning into another episode of public doubt. And it is this doubt that will define whether Starmer’s claim holds true.

Matters have escalated further in the last 24 hours. Four survivors who resigned from the inquiry’s Victims Liaison Panel have now demanded that Jess Phillips step down as Safeguarding Minister before they will return to the process. In a stark letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, they accused Phillips of publicly contradicting or dismissing their accounts. On the test of this betrayal of trust, the entire vision of Starmer’s administration may stand or fall.

The moral narrative of Starmerism has been built around restoring competence, seriousness and trust after years of  Tory chaos. It’s a kind of managerial moralism, a belief that technical efficiency can rebuild social faith. And while administrative competence matters, moral clarity matters more. The grooming gang inquiry is where that deeper test begins.

Beneath its surface, the inquiry carries far more than bureaucratic purpose. Yes, it seeks to uncover institutional failures and deliver justice for survivors. But it also bears enormous symbolic weight. Thanks to the Pakistani background of a wildly disproportionate number of the perpetrators, it touches on themes that make cosmopolitan elites squirm — the same elements of race and religion which have shaped the nation’s self-image as a successful multicultural society.

For many victims, the inquiry represents the state’s last chance to make amends. For the public, it is a measure of whether institutions can still speak truth without political calculation. And for the state itself, it is a chance to renew its postwar pluralistic ideal, to prove that Britain’s diversity and justice is undergirded by a clear moral framework that everyone, no matter where they come from, ought to share.

However, Gamble’s withdrawal creates a rupture in the narrative. On paper, as a former senior police officer and respected child exploitation expert, he seemed an ideal candidate to chair the national inquiry. From a technocratic standpoint, it was a perfect fit. But in withdrawing yesterday, he highlighted a lack of survivor confidence in his candidacy due to his policing past, and wrote that he could not continue without the full trust of victims. His decision signals that even the process of justice has become politicised, consumed by mistrust and suspicion.

Here, Labour’s civic vision collides with the country’s crisis of belief: a state unable to find someone trusted to ensure justice has lost its moral centre. Signs of this fragility have appeared over the past year under the Starmer administration. Former anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq is on trial for — of all things — corruption. Meanwhile, Lord Mandelson’s public defence of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, whose name is synonymous with the exploitation of minors, has further scrambled the party’s moral compass. Together, these scandals feed a growing perception that the Government’s appeal to competence masks a deeper ethical drift. Gamble’s withdrawal and the resignation of the survivors simply confirms that political and institutional credibility are fraying at the same time.

Britain’s true crisis is deeper, though: it is the collapse of belief that institutions can act in the will of the people. Labour promised to be the party of competence, yet competence without moral authority cannot restore legitimacy. How the Government handles this inquiry will determine whether it can genuinely rebuild social trust, or merely manage its decline.

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Jide Ehizele writes on faith, culture, and belonging in modern Britain.

OBEhizele

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