‘Can you promise us all now that you will put the safety of our young women and girls before the fear of upsetting people?’
Andy Burnham speaking at last night’s Ask Andy event(Image: )
The snow was falling and there was a noisy protest group outside the 4C Community Centre in Ashton-under-Lyne last night as Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham held his regular public Q&A session. The Ask Andy event, chaired by ex-Northern Agenda Editor Rob Parsons, saw Mr Burnham quizzed about topics including crime and housing, trains and community integration.
But it was the final question of the night (watch here from 1 hour 40 minutes) that prompted the most heated response. One young man put it to the mayor that ‘several inquiries across the UK have found the fear of being labelled as racist and other titles have led to failures to act on predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs targeting predominantly white girls’.
He asked: “Can you promise us all now that you will put the safety of our young women and girls before the fear of upsetting people, because the Labour government that you were a part of up until 2010 appeared to put our girls last in areas such as Rochdale, Oldham and even Tameside.”
In a 10-minute reply, Mr Burnham launched into an impassioned defence of Greater Manchester’s response to the child sexual exploitation scandal since he became mayor in 2017, suggesting online critics accusing local leaders of a cover-up were ‘trying to pull everyone apart’. Setting out the local reviews and police investigations set up into grooming gangs in recent years, Mr Burnham said: “I 100% will stand by what I’ve done.
Mr Burnham said ‘nothing’ was more important to him than the safety of kids in Greater Manchester(Image: )
“I would never turn away in the way some of these people describe. Nothing is more important than the safety of kids to me living in Greater Manchester and any allegation that I don’t take that totally seriously as my top priority is a complete affront as far as I’m concerned.
“The way people just throw that around on social media, well, I don’t do that. I’ve never done that. I never would do that, and I’m confident now I have a police force here that’s absolutely with me at my side, operating in entirely the same way.”