Keir Starmer makes agile U-turn in the air about care gangs research | Keir Starmer

The news emerged in a remarkably restrained way: a speculative question to Keir Starmer during his Q&A with reporters on the way to the G7 summit in Canada. Yes, he said, carefully speaking while he was stuck in the aisle of the tight jet, there would be there A fully legal investigation into care gangs.

This was, it had to be remembered, not just one of the most poisonous debates in British politics in 2025, but a true starmer and his ministers had constantly pushed back against demands for such an action.

So why now? At first glance, this may look like the recent U-turn on the eligible for the winter fuel surcharge of pensioners – A late recognition that the original decision was considered, masked by words about changes in the circumstances.

But in this case, things are demonstrably more nuanced, despite the remarkably furious reactions from Kemi Badenoch and the Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, who were fast to accuse the Prime Minister of delay for no reason.

It is worth remembering that the scandal and the official answer to that are not a new issue, and that demand for a new study coincide with Elon Musk, the billionaire X owner, who would suddenly take interest in the subject.

By the time Musk started to post furiously and often misleading on the subject, in the ideas of the British far right, anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson still leaned, ministers still thought about how the recommendations of an existing study were completed by Prof Alexis Jay in 2022.

The government was buffered by a sudden brutal media and political landscape, interrupted by grim vignettes such as Musk who calls Jess Phillips, the security minister who may have done more to fight violence against women than any Westminster MP, a “rape genocide apologist”.

The Conservatives And Reform UK then demanded a more complete national investigation into the phenomenon of the sexual abuse gangs that arose around the nightly economies of a series of cities, with many of the perpetrators of Pakistan heritage.

The first instinct of No 10 was to bring down and claim that the best action was to act on Jay’s recommendations. But within a few weeks this started to shift and The government has announced that The Crossbench Peer and the security expert Louise Casey would perform an evaluation of the evidence based on smaller local questions, without the legal skills to force witnesses to testify.

Casey has now completed its review and, while starmer on the plane was on his way, a full national investigation recommended that will be set up.

So this is perhaps less a U-turn than the consequences of the previous U-turn of January, and in reality, Casey had called for a national investigation, it would have been extremely difficult for the government to push back against this.

However, this will not fully suppress the political anger on the subject. The formal announcement of the home office of the study implicitly recognizes this, and also has plans for the National Crime Agency to collaborate with local police services to try to prosecute the things of care gangs that took place years ago.

Some critics of starmer, among them, also remain angry that, as they claim, he described supporters of a new investigation as “far right” when the prime minister hit Musk in January. This is an overload of the actual comments from Starmer, who did not go further Then say that they ‘strengthened’ some extreme right -wing demands.

But, as shown by the Hofdeel last week In which seven men who took care of two vulnerable teenage girls in Rochdale from 2001 and 2006 are sentenced, this is not a matter of disappearing. The hope must be that the new research will at least help replace part of the invective with facts.