After months of turmoil, the chair and the terms of reference of the government’s national grooming gangs inquiry have at last been announced. The inquiry will be led by Baroness Anne Longfield, a Labour peer and former children’s commissioner. She will investigate the ‘systemic, institutional and individual’ failures to deal with these gangs and to protect their victims. It is unclear still what shape the inquiry will take, and whether or not it will be a whitewash. Some survivors have already criticised the decision to make the inquiry chair a Labour peer.

But perhaps the key question will be how seriously it will take the central political controversy of these crimes and how the state has failed to deal with them: race and religion. We are told it will ‘examine how ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in responses at a local and national level, as well as other issues of denial.’ In particular, it will ‘consider the background (including ethnicity, religion and culture)’ of the perpetrators. This is referring to gangs of predominantly Pakistani-Muslim men and their victims, largely vulnerable white girls.