Five more people were stabbed and 230 were arrested on the closing day of Notting Hill Carnival.
The Metropolitan Police said officers “used their search powers to take weapons off the streets and prevent additional serious violence” after three people were stabbed at the event in west London on Sunday.
The force also recovered three firearms on Monday – two at the carnival itself and one during a vehicle stop in Harrow involving people believed to be travelling to the event.
Around one million people were expected to attend the two-day celebration of Caribbean culture this weekend, billed by its organisers as “the greatest community-led event on the planet”.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ade Adelekan, who was in charge of the policing operation, issued an appeal on Monday morning for anyone with information which could help prevent further violence to come forward.
He said the “vast majority” of people attend the event to have a good time, but Sunday had been “marred by unacceptable violence”.
In an update on Monday evening, the Met said that as of 22:50pm there had been five stabbings that day. The force added that two of the victims were in a life-threatening condition.
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The Met said two people sustained slash wounds in Monday’s stabbings while one of the attacks involved a corrosive substance.
Image: Pic: Reuters
A 32-year-old mother who was stabbed on Sunday remains in a life-threatening condition, the force added.
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Police said the mother had been attending with her young child on what was supposed to be the “family day” of the celebrations.
The Met said 35 officers who were injured on Monday are receiving the force’s “full support”.
The 230 arrests made on Monday including 49 for possession of an offensive weapon, 37 for assault on an emergency worker and eight sexual offences.
There were also nine arrests for possession of class A drugs and 40 for possession of class B drugs.
A man wanted for attempted murder was also spotted at the carnival and arrested.
In his appeal on Monday morning, DAC Adelekan said: “Yesterday we saw the first day of Carnival marred by unacceptable violence… We are tired of saying the same words every year. We are tired of telling families that their loved ones are seriously injured, or worse. We are tired of seeing crime scenes at Carnival.
“Carnival is a community event and the vast majority of people come to celebrate, to dance, to enjoy music and have a fantastic experience.
“It is the responsibility of all who value this event, who want to see it as the celebration it should be, to speak out and speak up about the violence that continues to overshadow it.”
The appeal was issued after 103 arrests were made on Sunday for violence, robbery, sexual offences, drug offences and possession of offensive weapons. Meanwhile, 18 officers were assaulted.
Image: A samba dancer takes part in Notting Hill Carnival. Pic: Reuters
A 29-year-old man who was stabbed on Sunday remained in hospital in a non-life threatening condition as of Monday morning.
The third person stabbed on Sunday was a 24-year-old man who suffered non-life-threatening injuries and discharged himself from hospital.
The eight stabbings reported across this year’s two-day event follow the 10 that were reported last year and the seven recorded the year before, according to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.
Notting Hill Carnival, which began in the 1960s, is one of the longest-running street parties in the UK.
It is free to all and culminates in a large parade on the Monday, filled with vividly costumed performers, music and dancing.
Around 7,000 officers were on duty for the bank holiday weekend event after the force said there would be a “very significant policing presence” this year.
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
What exactly does trade deal being ‘done’ mean?
The government says the US “has committed” to removing tariffs (taxes on imported goods) on UK aerospace goods, such as engines and aircraft parts, which currently stand at 10%.
That is “expected to come into force by the end of the month”.
Tariffs on car imports will drop from 27.5% to 10%, the government says, which “saves car manufacturers hundreds of millions a year, and protects tens of thousands of jobs”.
The White House says there will be a quote of 100,000 cars eligible for import at that level each year.
But on steel, the story is a little more complicated.
The UK is the only country exempted from the global 50% tariff rate on steel – which means the UK rate remains at the original level of 25%.
That tariff was expected to be lifted entirely, but the government now says it will “continue to go further and make progress towards 0% tariffs on core steel products as agreed”.
The White House says the US will “promptly construct a quota at most-favoured-nation rates for steel and aluminium articles”.
Other key parts of the deal include import and export quotas for beef – and the government is keen to emphasise that “any US imports will need to meet UK food safety standards”.
There is no change to tariffs on pharmaceuticals for the moment, and the government says “work will continue to protect industry from any further tariffs imposed”.
The White House says they “committed to negotiate significantly preferential treatment outcomes”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Image: Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Image: Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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3:18
Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.
The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.
Image: Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA
The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.
In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.
Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”
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3:18
Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.
She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.
The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.
On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
‘Flawed data’
However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.
She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.
“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
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3:07
From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?
The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.
She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.
‘Deep-rooted failure’
Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.
“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.
She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”
Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”
Image: Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”
Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.
“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.
“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”
The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.