Doubting Thomas 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 ✝️ ⚖️

So Andy Burnham says his government will "probably consider" a staggered age of consent to stop grown men from pursuing 16 and 17-year-olds. On the surface, it sounds like an obvious, common-sense safeguard. Look closely at what Downing Street is actually doing here, and the cynicism is breathtaking. First, notice the classic Westminster dodge in Pat McFadden's Sunday morning interviews: ministers "probably will consider it," with zero firm commitment and zero timeline. This sudden burst of moral urgency only appeared because Russell Brand was just jailed for ten years and David Walliams was suspended from the Labour Party days ago over allegations involving teenagers. When celebrity scandals start lapping too close to Westminster's own doors, politicians suddenly scramble for a Sunday headline to look tough. Second, pretending that Britain simply lacks the right paragraph in the law books insults the public's intelligence. Rape and sexual assault are already crimes at any age. Several of the allegations surrounding Walliams involve girls who were 15, which is already below the age of consent. Across the country, grooming gangs targeted children aged 12 to 15 for decades while police and local authorities looked away. Britain never had a shortage of written laws protecting girls. It had cowardly institutions that refused to enforce the laws already sitting on the statute book. Look at the complete intellectual incoherence inside Labour's own platform, too. Many of the exact same politicians suddenly acknowledging that 16 and 17-year-olds are vulnerable children who cannot safely navigate power imbalances have spent years campaigning to lower the voting age to 16. Apparently a 16-year-old has the mature judgment to elect a Prime Minister and decide national tax policy, right up until a media scandal makes it politically convenient to treat them as children again. If Andy Burnham genuinely wanted to protect young women from predators, he wouldn't be hiding behind vague consultations while his government simultaneously releases convicted offenders early after serving a third of their sentences because the Treasury refuses to build prison cells. Floating a new law you won't enforce inside a justice system that has run out of jail space protects nobody. It just buys a politician a clean Sunday news cycle while the real institutional rot goes untouched.