We’re losing focus again aren’t we? Just like last time. Making petty, stupid, knuckleheaded political point-scoring the issue.

Let me just sharpen the lens for a moment: Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of working class white schoolgirls, some not much past Teletubbies age, have been gang-raped by groups of largely Pakistani men.

It’s an awkward, horrible, inconvenient truth isn’t it? Sounds like something Tommy Robinson would say. And indeed did.

Which is why us hand-wringing white liberals have been so terrified of saying it.

For far, far too long.

We decided, as a society, that accidental perceived racism was a worse crime than mass child rape.

Just let that sink in for a second.

What a screwed-up, bizarre society we have become.

Because it isn’t. Racism – which I hope I have tried to fight all my adult life – is thick, stupid and hateful. And I know on a grander scale it morphs into nationalism and nationalism starts wars, but that’s not the scale we are talking about.

In this case we are really talking about perceived microaggressions (against gangs of child molesters remember) – and that is simply not in the same room as organised child sodomy with kids being seen as “easy meat” to be passed from one depraved scumbag to another.

Is it possible that, decades too late, we are beginning to see this?

At Prime Minister’s Questions Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch used the newly minted term “rape gang scandal” rather than the previously ubiquitous and much less evil-sounding “grooming gang scandal.” Good for her.

The Prime Minister himself said: “Too many victims have been let down for a long time by warped ideas of community relations and the protecting of institutions.”

He even repeated it twice.

Which is a step forward from the moment David Lammy suggested using the word “Asian” in connection with rape gangs somehow made you a paid-up member of the far-right, or the time the Labour Party let MP for Rotherham Sarah Champion resigned her front bench position for writing: “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”

Did she jump? Was she pushed?

No matter, that was then and this is now.

The big question at PMQs, and pretty much everywhere you might have looked in the last few days is should the Government set-up an national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal?

Kemi Badenoch thinks it is essential.

Keir Starmer thinks it’s a waste of time.

And a vote in the commons last night said we aren’t going to get one.

For now.

I can’t help thinking that, whatever your stripe, this seems a wilfully perverse position for a Prime Minister who, PMQs was told, has set up no less than 60 inquiries since moving into No10 on 5 July last year.

Starmer points out the last related inquiry headed by childcare academic Alexis Jay took seven years… and that what victims need (and there are A LOT of victims) is action now.

I disagree. Action 20 years ago is what they needed. They have been utterly failed by successive governments.

Why do inquiries move so glacially? The Bloody Sunday inquiry took 12 years, the Post Office inquiry started in 2022 will report in 2026, the infected blood inquiry took six years.

Why?

Because public inquiries are ordered when it is prudent for politicians to kick the can down the road, by which time they will never have to take responsibility.

But not now, not with this issue.

There is compelling evidence that these horrors are still going on.

So here’s an idea both sides seem hell-bent on ignoring.

Do both.

Taking action now and ordering a national inquiry are not mutually exclusive.

We must do both.

We need this not just to offer the victims a sliver of comfort but also as a nation to purge ourselves of the horror we have allowed to fester among us.

(Note to Mr Keir: tip me the wink and I will put together a team of half a dozen investigative hacks and I promise we will report back, every angle covered, within the year. Faster if need be. We aren’t civil servants and have things called deadlines – and we never, ever, miss them.)

Bottom line on this is that politicians never learn. They particularly never learn that their lies and obfuscation always make things worse – and they will always be exposed. Their attempts to hide the truth to bolster nebulous concepts like “community cohesion” will always result in the exact opposite of their intent.

Not just MPs but police, social services, councils… all are complicit in this.

Real community cohesion requires truth, the absolute truth for all to see.

That’s all we are asking for Mr Starmer.

So can the lot of you stop using the rape of children to score political points and get on with healing this dreadful wound both for the girls involved and for our greater nation.