Funnily enough I wrote an essay on an incredibly similar subject recently, after forensically researching the background of Starmer, Phillips and Farage when it comes to tackling CSE, an area I have extensive history of working in.
I'll copy and paste it below for those interested, but I started the research open minded.
Farage isn't the good guy here. Not by any means.
Fewer MPs have done as much as Starmer and Phillips, both in terms of social policy reform to protect victims and in terms of actual meaningful support (who btw I did not vote for Starmer, and do not support in any way whatsoever, my politics is very different to his in many ways.)
A Critical Analysis of Victim Advocacy in British Politics: The Divergent Approaches of Starmer, Phillips, and Farage.
In the landscape of contemporary British politics, the issue of victim advocacy, particularly concerning Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), has become a potent area of focus. The approaches to this sensitive issue, however, vary dramatically, reflecting fundamentally different political ideologies and theories of change. This essay will critically analyse the distinct contributions of three prominent public figures: Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips, and Nigel Farage. It will be argued that while Starmer’s tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) exemplifies a strategy of systemic, internal reform within the legal establishment, and Phillips’s career represents a trajectory from grassroots, service-oriented activism to parliamentary advocacy, Farage’s engagement illustrates a populist, discourse-driven approach that remains detached from the professional and policy frameworks dedicated to victim support. A comparative analysis of these three figures reveals not only their individual priorities but also broader trends in how victimhood is constructed and utilised within modern political discourse.
Keir Starmer: Systemic Reform within the Legal Framework
Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) between 2008 and 2013 coincided with a period of intense scrutiny of the institutional response to CSE. His approach can be characterised as one of top-down, systemic reform aimed at correcting entrenched failures within the criminal justice system. A central pillar of this reform was a deliberate doctrinal shift in prosecutorial guidance. The 2013 revised CPS guidelines on child sexual abuse were instrumental in moving the locus of assessment from the perceived credibility of the victim to the objective credibility of the allegation. This was a crucial intervention designed to counteract the systemic biases that often disadvantage young or traumatised witnesses, whose testimonies may present with inconsistencies not as a result of fabrication, but as a symptom of psychological trauma. This reform represented a significant evolution in legal practice, acknowledging the complex interplay between trauma and testimony.
Furthermore, Starmer's response to the manifest failings in the Rochdale grooming cases demonstrated a strategy of accountability and internal restructuring. His public admission of institutional failure, coupled with the appointment of Nazir Afzal as Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West, who subsequently secured the landmark convictions, served a dual purpose. It acted as a necessary concession to public and political pressure while simultaneously driving internal change. The establishment of the Child Sexual Abuse Review Panel in 2013 further solidified this approach, creating a mechanism for historical case review and institutional learning. Analysis of CPS data from this period lends quantitative support to the efficacy of these reforms; both the raw number of child abuse prosecutions and the conviction rates saw a discernible increase during Starmer’s directorship, suggesting that the systemic changes were having a tangible effect on prosecutorial outcomes.
Jess Phillips: From Grassroots Activism to Parliamentary Influence
Jess Phillips’s engagement with victim support offers a contrasting model, one rooted in grassroots service provision and direct, frontline experience. Prior to her political career, her role managing domestic abuse refuges for Women's Aid provided her with a profound, experiential understanding of the lived realities of victims of sexual and domestic violence. This perspective, grounded not in legal theory but in the practicalities of support services, informed her subsequent political advocacy. Her appointment as Birmingham’s inaugural Victims' Champion in 2012 marked the transition of this expertise from a purely operational sphere to a municipal policy-influencing role, where she lobbied criminal justice agencies on behalf of victims.
Since entering Parliament in 2015, Phillips has effectively translated this grassroots credibility into a powerful political platform. She has consistently centred the victim's narrative in parliamentary discourse, most notably through her annual reading of the names of women killed by men in the UK. This act serves as a poignant political intervention, re-humanising statistics and challenging the abstraction of policy debate. Her recent appointment as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls completes her trajectory from an external critic and service provider to an internal government policymaker. Her approach, therefore, embodies the fusion of direct, experiential knowledge with the mechanisms of political power, arguing implicitly that effective policy must be informed by the realities of those it purports to serve.
Nigel Farage: Populist Rhetoric and the Politics of Grievance
Nigel Farage’s contribution to the discourse on victimhood and CSE stands in stark opposition to the models presented by Starmer and Phillips. His professional background as a commodity trader is devoid of any direct involvement in the legal, policy, or third-sector frameworks of victim support. His engagement is almost exclusively rhetorical and has become more pronounced in his post-Brexit political career. Farage has focused on the issue of "grooming gangs," framing the problem predominantly through a cultural and nationalist lens. This approach selectively engages with one facet of CSE, often mobilising it to support a wider political argument about immigration and cultural incompatibility, rather than addressing the multifaceted nature of child abuse.
This rhetorical strategy diverges fundamentally from the policy-driven work of Starmer and the service-oriented advocacy of Phillips. Whereas their work aims to improve material conditions and legal protections for victims, Farage’s discourse operates primarily in the symbolic realm of political grievance. His focus is less on the victim as an individual requiring support and more on the crime as a symbol of national decline or cultural threat. Critically, this is not accompanied by any discernible policy proposals or professional engagement aimed at enhancing victim services or reforming the justice system. Indeed, his pejorative use of the term "victim class" in other contexts suggests a deep-seated ideological opposition to the very frameworks of support and recognition that Starmer and Phillips have worked to build.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the approaches of Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips, and Nigel Farage to victim advocacy represent three distinct and ideologically divergent models of political engagement. Starmer’s work at the CPS was that of the institutional reformer, meticulously altering the legal and procedural architecture from within to achieve better justice outcomes. Phillips exemplifies the advocate whose authority is derived from lived experience and grassroots service, which she has successfully leveraged to influence national policy. Farage, in contrast, represents a populist model, where the issue of victimhood is appropriated as a powerful rhetorical tool in a wider culture war, detached from the professional and practical realities of victim support. The comparison illuminates a crucial distinction in modern politics: the difference between engaging with an issue to effect substantive change and employing an issue as a means of mobilising a political base. Ultimately, the work of Starmer and Phillips, though different in method, shares a common goal of systemic improvement, whereas Farage’s contribution remains firmly in the realm of political discourse, with little demonstrable impact on the victims he purports to defend.
|