This was just breaking mid-morning, and, ooh! Doesn't it put a different wrinkle on the recent scandal involving Jess Philips, Sir Keir Starmer's Minister for Safeguarding and Violence and Women and Girls, turning down a national inquiry into the so-called 'grooming (read; rape, torture, and abuse) gangs (which very well could be still operating with near impunity in the United Kingdom) was universally greeted with howls of disbelief and derision.
How could something so horrific, so seemingly pervasive, so devastating to the lives of the working-class little girls affected be of so little concern to a progressive, heavy-on-#wymmins rights party?
...The city of Oldham, site of some of the worst 'grooming gang' abuses on record, wrote to Starmers' Labour government, begging for an inquiry.
The Safeguarding Minister herself shot it down with an excuse that rang horrifically hollow. 'It's for you all to sort out,' she basically said.
State failure was a consistent theme of British politics in 2024. So as the new year begins, attention has turned to perhaps the most egregious instance of that malaise in modern times: the horrific scandal of grooming gangs in dozens of UK cities. Jess Phillips, the Safeguarding Minister, has rejected calls for a government inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham, prompting a Tory backlash. Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary, called it ‘shameful’; Liz Truss, the ex PM, labelled Phillips’ title ‘a perversion of the English language.’ Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, argues that the Home Office minister ‘deserves to be in prison.’...
And it was - perhaps still is - a widespread scandal of epic proportions.
Reports of young girls being groomed by gangs of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, first began to emerge in 2002, when the then-Labour MP Ann Cryer warned that it was happening in her Yorkshire constituency of Keighley.
In 2010, a group of five men who had committed sexual offences against girls aged 12 to 16 were convicted in Rotherham in South Yorkshire. The Times then launched a long investigation, exposing not only the shocking extent of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, but also of a wider pattern of horrendous abuses of young girls by organised networks of men, predominantly British-Pakistani.
The story began to gain wider traction. In recent years, child-grooming gangs have been jailed in more than a dozen other English towns, mostly in the north of England and the Midlands: notably Rochdale, Oldham and Telford, but also Bristol, Oxford, Huddersfield, Halifax and Banbury, among others.
Well, speculation ran rampant that Labour didn't want to upset a very large and critical part of their voting pool by rattling the cages of what they were more than willing to label as 'cultural differences.'
Besides - modern, over-educated Labour elites couldn't give two fig leaves about white working-class slogs and their spawn.
Indeed, so much so that they were busy working hard to enshrine any mention of 'grooming gangs' or 'rape culture' as 'Islamophobic.' Such an accusation carries hate-speech penalties in the dystopian UK if the intent to upset the recipient is proven. If the government wants you vamoosed or the local Muslim leaders feel you're a thorn in their side, it's not a difficult proposition to obtain a conviction.
Hurt feelings are truly enough to silence people from speaking the truth.
Even the state television network will happily dox a person to the entire nation for being a 'racist/fascist.'
This is fine though. https://t.co/lmX82wrsVY
— Maximus 🇬🇧 🐘🌲 (@landofangle) January 29, 2025
The deck is pretty much stacked against a pale-faced fellow waving a Union Jack in the street, and God forbid he dares yell, 'Rule Britannia,' or something equally as offensive.
God forbid he points out what appears to be overwhelming evidence of the ethnic origin of the names released for 'grooming gang' arrestees.
Here is the Guardian claiming that "there are no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionally engaged in [grooming gang rapes]"
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) December 31, 2024
Here is a partial list of names of the convicted in Rotherdam:
Here are mug shots from around UK: pic.twitter.com/T2FiNQ80Ic
Once again, it is demanded that citizens ignore their lying eyes and dutifully lap up whatever the government feeds them as 'the truth.'
In 2011, Times journalist Andrew North published a bombshell investigation of child sexual abuse in the town of Rotherham, England. Thanks to his reporting, and an independent inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay, we know that between 1997 and 2013 more than 1,400 girls were groomed, sexual abused and (in some cases) violently gang-raped by mostly British Pakistani men.
The incident was notable not only because of the scale of the abuse, but also because of the ethnic dimension (most of the victims were white or non-Muslim Asian), and because of evidence that authorities had failed to act for fear of appearing “racist”. In subsequent years, various other examples came to light, and the groups of perpetrators became known as “grooming gangs”.
...While the report received favourable coverage in right-wing media, it was heavily criticised by some academics and left-wing activists. Writing in the journal Race & Class, Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail described it as “shoddy pseudoscience” that “empowered Islamophobes”. They also disputed the “dodgy 84 per cent statistic”.
...Now, there are obviously some caveats. One major reason so few people have been prosecuted for grooming gang offences is that authorities often failed to act for fear of appearing “racist”. There would have been more prosecutions, perhaps many more, in the absence of this fear.
...In any case, the biggest scandal of the whole grooming gang affair is the one Andrew Norfolk highlighted back in 2011: the fact that authorities turned a blind eye to abuse for reasons that basically amount to political correctness; they allowed vulnerable girls to be victimised so that no one would appear “racist”.
Regardless of what a comprehensive analysis would show, we already know that some individuals in England managed to get away with extremely serious crimes purely because of their ethnicity and that of their victims.
Thanks also to Starmer's solid dependency on a Muslim Labour voting block, they apparently will continue to escape justice.
There could also be another reason the government is not willing to dive into a national catharsis as far as ripping the scab off of the rape gang scandals. It's what they may find as far as local government involvement - either awareness and shameful, unconscionable indifference or, more revoltingly, personal participation.
BREAKING - The two former South Yorkshire Police officers arrested today have been accused by detectives of misconduct in public office and raping children supplied by grooming gangs based in Rotherham https://t.co/wat0zwfTGM
— Joe Rich (@joerichlaw) January 29, 2025
Rotherham is particularly important as it is, if not the worst example, close to the worst of the abuse sagas, and a report published in 2014 on the horrific extent of the perversions in the city is the seminal event as far as honest reporting on 'grooming gangs' goes.
A damning report which uncovered the extent of child sexual exploitation in a South Yorkshire town "broke the taboo in public discourse" around the issue, its author has said.
Prof Alexis Jay's investigation in 2014 found that at least 1,400 children were abused in Rotherham over 16 years while authorities and the police failed to act.
On the tenth anniversary of the findings, Prof Jay has told BBC Look North that her work marked the first time many of the victims had been believed.
However, she added that society still had "a long way to go" to properly deal with the crime and its consequences.
Prof Jay's report, published on 26 August 2014, found that between 1997 and 2013 girls as young as 11 had been systematically raped, trafficked and intimidated, mainly by men of Pakistani heritage.
It said there had been "blatant" collective failures by Rotherham Council's leadership and a failure by South Yorkshire Police to prioritise the issue.
Meanwhile, the report also stated that senior managers had "underplayed" the scale of the problem.
With today's news, it makes you wonder if South Yorkshire Police weren't 'failing to prioritize' the issue because it would have ruined a good time for fellow officers.
Amazingly, these arrests sprung from complaints inside that ten-year-old report.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said the men had been arrested as part of an investigation into the police’s handling of allegations of child sexual abuse.
The two South Yorkshire Police officers, who both served in the town in the late 1990s, were first arrested late last year, the watchdog said.
A retired constable in his 60s is being investigated following complaints of child sexual abuse against two girls between 1995 and 1999.
...A former police constable aged in his 50s was arrested in December and has been interviewed under criminal caution on suspicion of sexual assault and misconduct in public office.
He has also been accused of one count of indecent assault in connection to incidents that reportedly occurred around 1995-1996.
...Emily Barry, the IOPC director, said: “When we completed the Operation Linden investigations in 2022, into how South Yorkshire Police investigated reports of child sexual exploitation and abuse in Rotherham, we acknowledged that there may be further complaints from survivors.
...The IOPC began Operation Linden – the second largest carried out after its Hillsborough inquiry – following the 2014 Jay Report.
How nice they could get around to looking into things.
Now Rotherham citizens have the grim satisfaction of knowing it wasn't only the 'cultural differences' and city officials betraying their little girls, but the very uniformed enforcers of what is supposed to be the laws that protect them.
I wonder how many of them already knew the police were culpable?
I wonder how many more officers will be implicated and not just in this one city?
Keir Starmer and Minister Philips may well have a cursory count already, and that could have been part of the calculations to throw the inquiry request back at the feet of the Oldham City Council.
After all, the way Starmer has utilized the British cops for stormtroopers - and the way the police have seemingly gleefully responded to being given immense authority over every facet of citizens' lives - I don't imagine he wants any of the little luster is left on his enforcement arm scrubbed off by dirty deeds decades old.
Circle the wagons and let the people steep.
