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.

 Click for: Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips' letter.

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:

Article from The Spectator:

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