With Baroness Louise Casey recommending a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has committed to one. But, many will be asking: why did it take him so long?

For months, the Labour leader has been criticized by various quarters for refusing to hold a national public investigation into grooming gangs — formally known as group-localized child sexual exploitation (GLCSE). Thrust back into the spotlight by Elon Musk at the beginning of the year, the Labour leadership has until now refused to authorize a national inquiry.

Instead, back in January, home secretary Yvette Cooper announced plans for a rapid national audit into the cultural and societal drivers of GLCSE (led by Baroness Casey), along with five government-backed local inquiries (all on a shoestring budget of £10 million). It then appeared that the government watered down these plans by later announcing that councils would be able to access a paltry £5 million fund to support “locally-led work” on grooming gangs.

Bar a select number of Labour backbenchers, along with “Blue Labour” grandee Maurice Glasman, the governing party has been incredibly reluctant to hold a national statutory inquiry. There are a variety of potential factors at play. Sir Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has claimed the government’s hesitancy over investigating grooming-gang activity was down to “obviously political” reasons because of the “demographic of people involved”.

When looking at the perpetrators of GLCSE, a 2020 academic paper co-authored by two professors, Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe, concluded that “Muslims, particularly Pakistanis, dominate GLCSE prosecutions” (based on data consisting of 498 defendants in 73 prosecutions between 1997 and 2017). This corresponds with the findings of reports on industrial-scale GLCSE in English towns such as Rotherham in south Yorkshire and Telford in Shropshire.

The reality is that in many parts of the country, Labour has traditionally electorally benefited from the deep-seated group identity of communities which are overrepresented in grooming-gang participation. Indeed, this biraderi-style clannishness in relatively segregated Mirpuri-origin populations is likely to be flagged in Casey’s yet-to-be-published report as a key cultural driver of GLCSE. There may be long-standing fears within the Labour Party that a comprehensive public investigation into grooming gangs would feed into the vilification of an ethno-religious community that has historically provided it with considerable electoral support.

Shedding further light on the role of Kashmiri-heritage predatory enterprises — some involving relatives across the generations — also risks weakening the “progressive” narrative that modern Britain is an integration success story and a paragon of multiculturalism. With many victims of GLCSE being white-British working-class girls who were disproportionately in the care system and suffering from learning difficulties, theories of “white privilege” and “oppressed minorities” look all the more irrelevant.

Of course, there is a degree of self-preservation on Labour’s part. Some of the most egregious cases of institutional mismanagement over grooming-gang abuses took place in historically Labour-controlled local authorities. One example was the premature closing down of Operation Augusta, a police and social services investigation into child sexual exploitation which was axed by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) with the support of Manchester City Council (which has been under Labour majority control since 1971).

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has been under Labour control since its creation back in 1974. Telford has generally been under local Labour control (apart from short stints of no party having overall control, with the Conservatives being in charge from 2008-2011). Shaun Davies, the current Labour MP for Telford, initially rejected calls for an inquiry into grooming gangs operating in the town when he was leader of Telford and Wrekin Council. A comprehensive national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs is likely to uncover the true extent of Labour’s grim record when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable in local communities.

Starmer could have made this choice months ago, putting real distance between his record and that of the Conservative Party which over 14 years failed to launch such an inquiry. Instead, Labour may be condemned for having delayed the decision and only acting as the result of an audit, despite there being enough evidence for an inquiry for years. But Baroness Casey has left the Prime Minister with no choice. Now there is no hiding place for the Labour government.

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Dr Rakib Ehsan is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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