The Dog Whistle That Blew the Roof Off: Lucy Powell and the Performance Politics of Denial

There are moments in British public life when the theatre of politics forgets it's supposed to be subtle. Lucy Powell, Leader of the House of Commons and living proof that you can sound confident while steamrolling your own credibility, delivered such a moment this week when she dismissed the subject of grooming gangs as a “dog whistle” and mocked a commentator for bringing it up with the phrase “let’s blow that little trumpet.”

This, in response to a Channel 4 documentary, Groomed: A National Scandal, which, just to clarify for the irony-impaired, wasn’t a tuba solo or an episode of Brass Eye but a harrowing account of the mass, organised, industrialised sexual abuse of young girls. A national scandal, as it says on the tin — and unlike most things labelled “national scandal,” this one actually is.

"The problem with Lucy is she thinks nuance is a floor polish"

Now, in the more forgiving corners of Twitter (or X, for those of us nostalgic for fascist rebrands), Powell’s defenders have claimed she was merely calling out how the issue was being used, not that it was being raised. The problem is that, when your tone of voice suggests someone just proposed injecting heroin into corgis, it’s hard to then claim you’re a paragon of nuance. Especially when the subject is the gang-rape of children.

She later issued the classic politician’s apology: the non-apology. “I’m sorry if this was unclear.” That old chestnut — the verbal equivalent of shrugging while your house is on fire and muttering, “Sorry if the arson offended you.”

From “little trumpet” to full-blown brass band

Powell's gaffe wasn’t merely a case of clumsy phrasing. It was an Olympian-level dive into the swimming pool of self-satisfied detachment that plagues the modern political class — a class so obsessed with appearing progressive that it now physically recoils at discussing any subject that involves both crime and ethnicity. Like a vegan trying to pronounce “steak tartare,” it’s just too much.

The gang grooming issue — repeatedly found to have been ignored, minimised, or papered over by local authorities because they feared appearing racist — is precisely the kind of institutional cowardice that any self-respecting party of accountability should be loudly condemning. But Powell, ever the careerist trapeze artist, managed instead to sound like she was auditioning for a seminar on unconscious bias while actual victims are still waiting for justice.

Labour: now with 100% more DEI, 0% discernment

This is the contradiction at the heart of modern Labour: it wants to be the party of “real people” — the Greggs-eating, train-taking, cost-of-living-crushed masses — while also remaining firmly ensconced in the language of academic HR departments and diversity impact assessments. It’s a bit like saying you’re pro-beer and then demanding the pub serves only kombucha.

Powell’s reaction wasn’t just tone-deaf. It was the noise of what has become of a political culture terrified of genuine complexity. That a Channel 4 documentary featuring victims of child sexual exploitation in Powell’s own Manchester constituency was dismissed as “a little trumpet” is less dog-whistle and more foghorn — one announcing the presence of a party no longer sure what justice actually means unless it fits neatly into a DEI PowerPoint slide.

The cult of performative anti-racism meets actual accountability, runs away screaming

Let’s be clear: the racial component of grooming gangs matters because it directly influenced the response of the authorities. Not because race itself is the root of evil, but because well-meaning bureaucrats decided it was better to let working-class girls be raped than be called racist on Facebook. And that is perhaps the most British tragedy imaginable: fear of social awkwardness trumping the screams of children.

So when Powell implies that raising the issue is somehow bigoted — when it is, by all accounts, what happened — she’s not only dismissing the evidence, she’s reinforcing the very dynamic that allowed it to happen. And for that, she should not only apologise properly, but perhaps spend a little less time perfecting her smug interjections and a little more time talking to the girls who were told to shut up because their abusers ticked the wrong boxes on the demographic spreadsheet.

Dog whistles, trumpets, and the Westminster kazoo ensemble

Of course, her critics are not saints either. The Tories, bless their sweaty little focus-grouped souls, have spent the last decade doing their best impersonation of an outraged Telegraph comment section, bemoaning the cover-up of grooming gangs while somehow failing to actually, you know, do anything about it. They've turned the issue into their own kind of whistle — a moral referee’s tool blown with gusto every election cycle before being tossed back into the glove box next to Suella Braverman’s crumpled deportation plans.

Even Reform, that newly gentrified UKIP-on-sea, is enjoying a little orgy of self-congratulation. Having discovered that being horrified by child abuse polls quite well, they’ve lined up to look shocked — this, from a party whose leadership seems to think nuance is a type of Italian pasta.

Britain’s political class: one bad noise after another

The Lucy Powell affair is not just about a woman saying something stupid. It’s about how all of Westminster operates now. They don’t discuss real issues; they flinch at them, filter them, repackage them through some pre-approved virtue-signalling template. And when they get it wrong — as Powell spectacularly did — they don’t double down on truth. They hide behind intention.

And in that sense, Powell isn’t an outlier. She’s just a little more honest — accidentally — about the cowardice that’s become standard.

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