What’s the real reason Labour is reluctant to hold a grooming gangs inquiry?
After decades of silence, a long-overdue debate has erupted about the rape gangs in British towns.
A backlash has been growing since GB News reported that the Labour government’s Safeguarding Minister, Jess Phillips, had rejected calls from grooming gang survivors in the northern town of Oldham for a public inquiry into the abuse they suffered and the way it was covered up. The interventions of Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Nigel Farage, and Kemi Badenoch have made it difficult to ignore the depravity of organised grooming gang activity in England.
For more than 20 years it has been an open secret that, in numerous English towns and cities, ‘Asian’—principally Pakistani—rape gangs were operating in plain sight of the local police and officialdom.
These gangs were given a free pass to carry on with their monstrous crimes because neither the local nor the national elites were prepared to acknowledge the fact that multicultural Britain was in big trouble. Anyone who tried to expose the activities of these grooming gangs and highlight the ethnic origins of the criminals and the victims was denounced as Islamophobic and racist.
One 13 year old's letter scribbled letter that was ignored by police. She had sought help from her local NHS crisis intervention team. Just months latter this child was found dead from a suspected heroin overdose:
Keir Starmer is facing growing pressure to a launch a national review into grooming gangs, but so far the Prime Minister is holding firm. ‘This doesn’t need more consultation, it doesn’t need more research, it just needs action. There have been many, many reviews…frankly, it’s time for action,’ he said yesterday. Starmer’s comments reinforce the position of Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, who last week refused Oldham Council’s request for a government-led public inquiry into grooming gangs in the town. But what’s the real reason Labour is so reluctant to probe these appalling crimes?
Is Phillips reluctant to give the go ahead to an inquiry
that might ask difficult and sensitive questions about the identity of the
perpetrators?
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Phillips’ wafer-thin
majority might play a part in her thinking. The Labour MP for Birmingham
Yardley won at the last election by just 693 votes. When she made her
acceptance speech, she was heckled. Phillips responded by saying: ‘I understand
a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence’. Her
constituency, like others in Birmingham, has a significant Muslim population.
Is Phillips reluctant to give the go ahead to an inquiry that might ask
difficult and sensitive questions about the identity of the perpetrators in
Oldham, and indeed in other towns affected by Pakistani grooming gangs who
exploited children for their own sexual gratification?
Phillips’ letter to Oldham Council, seen by GB News, claims
that it is for the local authority ‘alone to decide to commission an inquiry
into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to
intervene.’ Whether or not this increasingly untenable position can hold isn’t
clear. But what is plain to see is that Labour appears petrified of having an
open discussion on the ethnicity of perpetrators, in places like Rochdale,
Rotherham and Telford. Is this because vote bloc politics risks swinging
elections in marginal constituencies?
Whatever the reason, this issue isn’t going away. Elon Musk
at least appears determined that it won’t. The X owner has said: ‘So many
people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this’. He even
suggested Phillips herself should be jailed. Whatever you think of Musk’s
intervention, the choice here must surely be to prioritise justice for victims
of child sexual exploitation. But is Labour’s fear of losing seats influencing
their apparent reluctance to give the green light to a broader inquiry?
Comments by ex-Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk who
responded to Musk’s ‘prison’ post on X, makes it clear that Labour at least has
questions to answer on this subject. Danczuk, a Reform candidate at the last
election, made a bombshell accusation that ‘senior Labour politicians warned me
not to mention the ethnicity of the perpetrators, for fear of losing votes,
when I tried shining a light on the Rochdale grooming gangs’. His accusation,
if true, pours further fuel on this increasingly explosive issue.
The role of the perpetrators’ religion in these crimes
remains a sensitive issue in British politics, which many politicians are
clearly wary of addressing. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
this was an important factor in at least some of the crimes. Notably, in 2012,
Judge Gerald Clifton, who sentenced members of the Rochdale ‘grooming gang’ at
Liverpool Crown Court, said: ‘All of you treated them [the victims] as though
they were worthless and beyond respect. I believe that one of the factors that
led to that was they were not of your community or religion’.
Despite this clarity, many still remain fearful of pointing to the truth. The ‘Islamophobia’ definition drafted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims (and adopted by Labour) hardly helps; it says using the phrase ‘sex groomer’ in relation to someone of Muslim heritage might be an example of ‘Islamophobia’.
According to GB News’s Charlie Peters, whose dogged
reporting has shed much light on these horrific crimes, there are ‘credible
reports’ of grooming gangs being active in dozens of different towns and cities
across Britain. These organised rape squads have targeted mainly white
working-class but also Sikh girls, inflicting unimaginable horrors on children
for decades. Former home secretary Jack Straw said victims were seen as, ‘easy
meat’. Indeed, victims say perpetrators referred to them as, ‘white slag,’
‘white trash,’ and one case even involved forced sharia marriages.
Despite this, the racially and religiously motivated
element of these heinous crimes remains hardly discussed. The Telford inquiry
(2022) revealed more than 1,000 girls were abused, and said it had gone on for
decades, beginning as far back as the 1980s. The Jay report into Rotherham
(2014) said that 1,400 children in the town were subject to ‘appalling’ abuse
over 16 years from 1997. The ‘majority’ of known perpetrators were of Pakistani
heritage. In Oxford, there may have been as many as 373 victims.
The harrowing reports of what children in Britain have
endured over the last few decades are nightmarish. Several children were
murdered (one was allegedly dismembered and disposed of at a kebab shop), a
girl was kept caged and made to act like a dog, abusers routinely tortured
children, a perpetrator branded ‘M’ (for Mohammed) on a victim’s buttock with a
hairpin to indicate ownership, and an aborted foetus was taken by the police
for DNA purposes, without the 13-year-old grooming victim being told. In some
cases, the girls were dismissed by the authorities as ‘child prostitutes’ and
betrayed by the very people tasked with their welfare. The police botched
investigations, fathers trying to save daughters were arrested, and cries of
‘racism’ shut down discussion about a clear pattern of criminality occurring
within local authorities, emboldening perpetrators.
But amongst the darkness, there has been light, not least
the efforts of Andrew Norfolk, whose investigations for the Times triggered the
Rotherham inquiry. Whistleblowers like Jayne Senior and Maggie Oliver, and
former prosecutor Nazir Afzal deserve credit. So, too, does Sarah Champion, the
Labour MP for Rotherham, who received death threats and was forced to quit her
role as shadow equalities minister in 2017, after she wrote, ‘Britain has a
problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’. We must
also pay tribute to courageous campaigning survivors like Sammy Woodhouse,
Samantha Smith, Dr Ella Hill and Elizabeth Harper.
Musk’s intervention has put the global spotlight on the issue and there is mounting pressure on the government to act. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has called for a national inquiry into grooming gangs. There’s still time for self-proclaimed feminist and ‘strong woman’ Phillips to do the right thing. As minister with responsibility for violence against women and girls, she owes it to survivors and families to shine a spotlight on this nationwide scandal.
Another hard hitting article here: The Biggest Peacetime Crime—and Cover-up—in British History
I am so irritated by the use of 'Asian' to describe these gangs. They're not Japanese or Chinese or Filipino or Thai...
ReplyDeleteI've read some of the court transcripts that have come out online. They read like the most grotesque fiction that a perverted writer could come up with, but they're real. The things that were done to those poor girls was utterly, unspeakably evil. And even more evil is the cover up. There's no way of describing how I feel about the establishment that allowed this, without getting myself excommunicated.
And there's more - much more - to come. When one considers there were national inquiries for child abuse within both the Catholic Church and the Church of England it does underline the accusation that the Labour Party has vested interests in avoiding one here.
DeleteJust posted a picture of some of these gang members ... And, yes, none of them look Japanese or Chinese. Is "Muslim Grooming Gangs" hate speech?
DeleteThere's no great mystery once you understand that the Labour Party died in 1994. For most of the century before that, its history was a war between the kind of people who had founded it -- working-class Christians and cultural Christians, motivated by simple desire to engage in practical politics for the benefit of their country and society -- and the doctrinaire middle-class socialists who parasited off the movement. Until 1994, the former group had prevailed, culminating in the expulsion of Militant under Neil Kinnock in the 80s.
ReplyDeleteOnce Blair became leader, however, the party was doomed. Socialists have no loyalty to anything but the ideology. The attitude is that you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, or more bluntly, your goal is so noble and your aims so vital that anything you do in pursuit of them is morally justified. We need Muslims to make up our coalition? OK. Muslims want, shall we say, "certain concessions?" Fine. The "concessions" are to be provided by indigenous sink estate trash? Result. It doesn't matter because it'll all be wiped clean in the earthly paradise we're building.
The English middle class always had a much more profound contempt for the kind of women who are the victims of the rape gangs than the aristocracy ever did, even than the rapists themselves did. In their diseased minds, the poor had let down socialism by repeatedly refusing to bring Marx's vision to fruition and violently rising against "the system." They deserve it. It's only very cold comfort to know that the vermin that make up the Labour Party today will be the first ones hanged from cranes if Islam ever becomes dominant in the UK.
Yes. My working-class WWI-veteran grandfather voted Labour for some pretty sound reasons, so did his kindly made-it-to-grammer-school son, and I then did too, until I finally woke up.
DeleteGadjo.
DeleteHere is a video which explains how both major parties were involved in the cover-up:
ReplyDeleteTory Child Campaigner Who Did Her Job, Replaced by Labour Activist Who Did His. - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p69z17OrLsw
It’s about 20 minutes long, but it’s worth listening to at least the first half.
Thanks NE - it is worth a watch.
DeleteYeh, Grannyopterix :-)
DeleteAlso worth checking out is this Triggernometry interview: https://youtu.be/etpAtC2S0uQ?feature=shared
Living so far away from the UK, it has been difficult to keep up with what seems to the constantly rewritten history of the so-called “grooming” gangs, as though they were in the racehorse training business. Most of the debate seems to focus on the statistics of race, ethnicity, and religion, which I don’t find all that interesting in themselves. A more important statistic, surely, is the number of perpetrators brought to trial (subdivided into acquitted and sentenced), compared with the number of suspected perpetrators who were investigated but never prosecuted, or never investigated at all. I don’t know whether we’re talking about only 10 percent of suspects (of whatever race or religion) were ever prosecuted, or only 1 percent, or only a tiny fraction of 1 percent. Which is it? Where can we find that kind of number-crunching online?
ReplyDeleteI know that Reform MP Rupert Lowe has been pushing the government for stats on crime and benefits by nationality, which they claim they don't keep.
DeleteI think the whole stats thing has become a bit of a red herring. It seems to have devolved into a question of whether Pakistani men are overrepresented in incidents of child exploitation, with the Right shouting 'oh yes they are' and the Left shouting 'oh no they're not'. Apparently, the police don't record this kind of organised CSE separately to 'normal' (for want of a better word) crimes against children, so the stats are going to be largely meaningless anyway.
I think what's being lost is not that it's a matter of whether a group is over represented in the crime stats or not, but that abusers were allowed to operate in the UK with impunity - and, it seems, sometimes with the assistance of the authorities - simply because of their shared ethnic heritage and because the authorities thought that 'not inflaming community tensions' was more important than protecting vulnerable young people, many of whom were in the state's protection. As I've always maintained with the Church scandals, as bad as the abuse it, the coverups are worse. And nobody in power is ever held truly accountable for them.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteMy point exactly, Lain. Let’s say, for example, that one offender wasn’t prosecuted because he is a Pakistani Muslim and the police or social services chose to give priority to not providing fuel for “Islamophobia.” Another offender was not prosecuted because he handed out a few thousand quid here and there in exchange for hushing it up. In a third case an offender wasn’t prosecuted because he was lucky enough to have a highly placed Met officer as a brother-in-law.
DeleteWhat does it matter what reason they give fior not prosecuting the offender in each case? The real question is, How many of them are still around out there, who ought to have been prosecuted but weren’t, for one transparently spurious “reason” or another.
A more sinister dimension to this abuse is the allegation that the Labour Party at its highest level pressured MPs in these areas, many of them marginal seats, to stay silent and not represent these girls in order to avoid alienating the bloc Muslim vote. Also, the media similarly avoiding the topic so as not to undermine the narrative that multi-culturalism is proving successful. I think this singles out the failures to prevent these crimes as exceptional.
DeleteExactly, Ray. The crimes themselves (not wishing to belittle them) are almost a distraction. It's like arguing about whether wolves are more likely to have eaten your sheep than foxes, instead of looking at the shepherd who left the sheepfold gate open.
Delete@ Jack - this is precisely why the government don't want a proper inquiry and have fobbed victims off by throwing a few quid at a few local authorities to conduct their own inquires (with no power to compel witnesses) into their own behaviour and conclude that they did nothing wrong.
When you have police officers throwing 11 year olds out of police stations to be abused by men waiting outside, and finding drunk, half-dressed 13 year olds in rooms with adult men and then leaving them there, something in our system is very rotten.
Knowing how the police and social services worked back in the 1980s and 1990s, this aspect of this shameful neglect doesn't surprise me too much. Crimes against those on the margins, like prostitutes or homosexual men, are often ignored. These were young girls from poor families without a voice. What surprises me, is that it continued into the 21st century when frontline social workers and police officers were drawing attention to it and there was an awareness of organised CSE. These social social workers and police officers would have been hindered by their senior managers, no doubt influenced by politicians. This aspect needs a public inquiry.
DeleteCrimes against those on the margins are still largely ignored, from what I've seen. I remember a while ago a homeless man being set on fire under a bridge by a bunch of yobs not far from me. Nothing ever came of it. I was reading about the Macpherson report the other day - I'm sure that the failings there were 99% due to Lawrence's socioeconomic status rather than his race.
DeleteIt amazes me that the authorities can't be trusted to investigate themselves if a police officer is suspected of using undue force arresting someone; but it's apparently fine for them to investigate their own involvement in facilitating the most heinous kind of organised crime.
From the satirical website Babylon Bee ("Fake News You Can Trust"):
ReplyDeletehttps://babylonbee.com/news/to-avoid-prosecution-in-britain-neil-gaiman-joins-islamic-grooming-gang
The government is reportedly considering a proposal to outlaw the expression "Asian grooming gangs" as Islamophobic. The media will have to find other words to use. Maybe "Muslim rape squads"?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/grooming-gang-asian-racist-islamaphobic-term-council-b1204211.html?dicbo=v2-7MbAkzs
Under the title, How Pakistan’s rape culture led to the UK grooming gangs, The Spectator is carrying a short but revealing article by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, a Pakistani journalist in Lahore. His conclusion:
ReplyDeleteWhile the failure of the British authorities to protect young girls from grooming gangs is lamentable, there is something currently missing to stop these crimes happening in the future. There needs to be a much greater backlash to these crimes within the Pakistani community. While many progressive and liberal Pakistanis condemn sexist violence at home, when these crimes take place in Britain, they join their predominantly conservative fellow community members in a conspiracy of silence. Ostensibly this is because they are afraid of racism and ‘Islamophobia’. For many of these progressives in Pakistan, upholding the myth of cultural equivalence is more important than providing justice to the victims and prevention of these monstrous acts. It would be far better to speak up against these crimes, instead of looking to pin the blame elsewhere.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-pakistans-rape-culture-led-to-the-uk-grooming-gangs/