"Delighted. What we wanted," so said the mum of a Glasgow victim as the SNP launched a public inquiry into grooming gangs in Scotland.
The brave mum was speaking to me after she met with minister Jenny Gilruth today, who has now announced the inquiry in parliament after months of pressure and persistence from opposition politicians, reporters, but above all others, the victims and their families.
Survivors will see this as a decision long overdue.
Last year, GB News revealed that a grooming gang had operated in Glasgow in the last decade. Speaking to a brave victim called Taylor, who shared her story with the channel because of our campaigning on the crisis, GB News outlined the missed opportunities by the police and social care to intervene amid her horrific campaign of abuse.
She was disparaged by social care workers and ignored by police officers, even after her name appeared in an investigation into group-based abuse.
One section in her social care files referred to the police attending with a “tentative inquiry” regarding the “possibility of possible sexual exploitation by a group of,” but then the next set of words had been blacked out by the authority.
Taylor believes, as do I, that these words are “Pakistani men.”
In her audit of grooming gangs in England and Wales, Baroness Casey found that the word ‘Pakistani’ had been “tippexed out” in an archive about child victims. It seems that the same thing happened to Taylor.
She spoke to us amid a furious debate about how to handle the grooming gangs' scandal in Scotland. Baroness Casey's audit led to a national inquiry south of the border, but the SNP blocked a Tory amendment in Holyrood that would have led to a similar probe.
Scottish Justice Secretary Angela Constance said that Police Scotland and the National Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Strategic Group would already be looking into this issue.
Constance also argued that there were “no current police investigations” into grooming gangs similar to the pattern exposed in many towns in England, where predominantly Pakistani men have targeted vulnerable white children.
Taylor’s testimony challenged the suggestion that the same pattern does not exist in Scotland. She told me that it made her feel sick to have her experiences disparaged in that way.
When the police were making "tentative" inquiries and failing to interview girls who were being named in investigations, it's no surprise that they weren't involved with any active cases.
The world's supply of Tippex cannot block out the truth about to flood out of Scotland - Charlie Peters | Getty Images
When we revealed our investigation, I feared that the same silence that had once affected coverage of grooming gangs when they were first exposed in England would extend to Scotland.
Just a handful of reporters followed up on our findings. One prominent politician even told me that they did not want to name-check GB News in Holyrood because it would reduce the chances of others taking it up.
The SNP tried to kick the issue into the long grass, launching a review with Alexis Jay as an advisor. It didn't work. It was a fudge that would never stand criticism.
Professor Alexis Jay has now been appointed not as an advisor but to lead the new inquiry. In the words of Labour MP Joani Reid, who pushed for this probe, "This moment belongs to the women and girls whose courage and persistence made it happen".
In reaction, Tory Roz McCall said it was "scandalous" that victims were not listened to earlier.
She added: "This long overdue U-turn by the SNP is the very least that survivors of grooming gangs deserve."
Labour also queried what had changed since the SNP argued such an inquiry was not necessary.
Whatever their reason, the Scottish Government's U-turn is long overdue.
It is thanks to the perseverance and tenacity of those who would not shut up and walk away, as many in Scotland's political elite would have surely hoped, that the full extent of Scotland's grooming gangs shame could now be revealed.
Not even the world's supply of Tippex can block out the truth starting to pour out of Scotland. And now, with a statutory public inquiry, the same investigative powers afforded to survivors and their families in England and Wales will finally come north of the border.
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