Labour MP Natalie Fleet has blasted Kemi Badenoch for her reaction to the grooming gangs report, asking “how dare she” politicise the report’s horrific findings.
On Tuesday, Fleet appeared on GB News to discuss the news that the government had launched a national inquiry into grooming gangs, following the publication of Baroness Casey’s report.
During her appearance on the channel, the Bolsover MP Fleet called out Kemi Badenoch for her reaction to the Casey report and her criticism of safeguarding minister Jess Phillips.
In an impassioned speech to viewers, Fleet said she was “really angry” at the Tory leader’s comments labelling Phillips the “worst safeguarding minister ever.”
Fleet, who was groomed as a teenager, said that the reason people like her were in parliament was because of politicians such as Phillips.
Fleet was uninterrupted by host Martin Daubney as she defended Phillips, Keir Starmer and the government, and highlighted the Tory party’s hypocrisy on the issue of grooming gangs.
She slammed Badenoch for seeing the Casey report as an opportunity for “points scoring,” highlighting that the leader of the opposition leader said her party had “won” in an email to Conservative members.
Following her GB News appearance, Fleet took to social media to once again support Phillips and call out Badenoch.
Sharing the clip on X, she wrote: “Without support of women like @jessphillips, I wouldn’t be speaking out. @KemiBadenoch had the power to do something about this, instead she did not speak about grooming gangs once in the last parliament, or meet with one victim. How dare she politicise this now?”
Baroness Casey herself has also been critical of Badenoch for her reaction to the report.
Appearing on Newsnight on Monday, the peer said she was “disappointed, to put it mildly” at how the opposition had politicised her findings.
Her report detailed failures at all levels by authorities to tackle the horrific crimes of grooming gangs.
The peer had been tasked with producing an audit on the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse in England and Wales. Her report found that the ethnicity of people involved in grooming gangs has been “shied away from” by authorities, and criticised the “failure” of the authorities to “understand” the nature and scale of the problem to date.