It was a good day to bury shameful news, I guess. Just 45 minutes before the UK parliament broke for recess yesterday, Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips announced a watering down of an already very watered down set of local inquiries into the scourge of rape gangs. Perhaps they hoped Elon Musk would be too preoccupied with the trade war to fire up his X account.
We were promised, in January, five local inquiries in areas where the gangs were known to operate, after Labour rejected calls for a full-blown national inquiry complete with statutory powers. Now, there will only be one local inquiry, in Oldham, while other councils will be offered more ‘flexible’ – that is, even more toothless – alternatives. We are decades into this scandal now, and betrayal is still being piled upon betrayal.
Yes, it’s been more than 20 years since Ann Cryer, then Labour MP for Keighley, first raised the alarm about groups of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men preying on poor and working-class white girls in her constituency, only to be dismissed as a racist. Yesterday in parliament, Tory MP Robbie Moore, Cryer’s successor in the patch, was apoplectic. He’s long been calling for a Bradford-wide rape-gang inquiry, only to be rebuffed by the local authority. Why does the government think a looser, seemingly opt-in, approach will force Bradford Council, or any other council, to act, he asked, given they have a vested interest in keeping the truth hidden?
Why indeed. You could be forgiven for thinking Labourites would rather this issue was kept under the carpet, maybe because that’s where they’ve been keeping it for 20 years – even as one town after another, more often that not with a Labour MP and a Labour-run council, was exposed as the setting for the organised rape, drugging, trafficking, mutilation and murder of some of the most vulnerable people in society.
Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oldham, Huddersfield, Newcastle. The list goes on and on. GB News reporter Charlie Peters has found at least 50 towns scarred by these largely Pakistani rape gangs. We’re talking about thousands upon thousands of victims, spanning generations. Even those five local inquiries, unable even to compel witnesses to give evidence, were an insult given the scale of this horror. Now, the survivors – beyond Oldham, at least – won’t even be getting that.
The local reports we have had over the years tell a chillingly similar story – not only in terms of the background of the perpetrators and the background of the victims, but also of the response. The silence. Local authorities refused to act out of fear of accusations of racism, or even sparking ‘race riots’. Raped children were dismissed by police as drugged-up slags. Here were the wrong kind of victims, and the wrong kind of perpetrators. And they were all across the country.
Labourites’ refusal to look this issue in the eye is not just about raw political calculation. No doubt, they would rather Labour councils were not held to account for their complicity and negligence. No doubt, they are gripped by the genuinely racist conviction that tackling the rape gangs too aggressively might ‘alienate’ voters in inner-city, predominantly Muslim areas – as if Pakistani Brits aren’t also appalled by what has been going on in the shadows of their communities.
But it goes much deeper than that. Labour is lost to an ideology that is obsessed with looking good and thus incapable of doing good. That thinks protecting the image of multiculturalism is more important than protecting children from rape. That cannot compute victims when they do not conform to their prefab hierarchy of victimhood. That thinks the truth is a dangerous thing, because the plebs can’t handle it. That thinks the working classes are a race-riot-in-waiting. That has jettisoned class politics for identity politics.
The grooming-gangs scandal is the most grotesque example yet of Labour’s abandonment of the working class. Of the subjugation of working-class people’s interests – their traumas, in this case – to the supposed electoral interests of the party and the ideologies of the new elites. And it’s all borne from a deep-seated fear of ordinary people, white British and Pakistani British alike.
All these years on, they remain terrified of what might happen if we were allowed to know the truth.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
