UK Labour’s Lost Loves John O’Sullivan
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/uk-labours-lost-loves/
On this occasion the topic was the scandal of Muslim grooming-and-rape gangs and their mainly white working-class young English women victims, some of whom were children (and not only legally so.) That scandal is now entering its third decade—first rumors of it were heard in 2001 and it broke into national news with the Rotherham episode in 2013—as it simultaneously morphs into an even more serious scandal of official and police complicity in both the original rape scandals and the subsequent cover-up.
It’s not the case that nothing has been done in the intervening twelve years. More than fifty major cities across Britain have had grooming gang scandals, trials, and convictions which resulted in lengthy sentences for perpetrators since the Rotherham scandal went national in 2013. There have been ten official enquiries, from which a general picture emerges of organized gangs of “South Asian” or “Pakistani-heritage” Muslim men who prey on vulnerable teenage English girls, seduce them, beat and brutalize them, demoralize them as worthless sluts, and then prostitute them to friends and clients in other towns.
The mass media has also reported these stories, run commentaries on them, and interviewed some of the surviving victims. But they have done so at intervals in response to the latest city “shamed” rather than in a sustained and detailed way that would compel government action to discover what was happening and to set it right once and for all. Similarly, the enquiries, though serious and informative, have been limited in their impact because they have had neither the powers to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath nor terms of reference covering police and official complicity that would force the worst aspects of the scandal into the sunlight of public and political debate.
Accordingly, the scandals have rumbled on in the background of politics with some of its key facts hard to establish. “Grooming” of the kind described above doesn’t exist as a specific criminal offense and “rape” covers a larger category of offenses. Statistics about the numbers of such rapists and their victims are scattered—the Office of National Statistics doesn’t keep them and tells inquirers to write to the Home Office. Over the years both official inquiries and police investigations have refused to divulge some of their findings “in order to protect community relations” which is sometimes a sanitized explanation of the fear of being accused of racism. And there are underlying disagreements in Westminster, Whitehall, and the media over whether Muslims are disproportionately represented in such crimes and if so, whether their religion has anything to do with it, and if so, whether such a connection should be discussed.
Critics on the Left and in the bureaucratic “Blob” argue that because there is no legal offense of “grooming,” there can be no accurate estimate of it separate from other sexual offenses where the (shaky) figures show white men to be the majority of offenders. They claim the Muslim aspects of the scandals are more to do with “far right” propaganda than with specific Muslim crimes or levels of crime, Muslim beliefs, or by extension with immigration.
There are two problems with such arguments which echo the perversely complacent “Better Rapists than Racists” T-shirt worn by a young German woman after the Cologne railway station mass sexual harassment young German women of 2019:
First, they blend the organized, collective, and brutal mass seduction, rape, and prostitution of young women into the much larger universe of sexual offenses against the women and children in the family and in other contexts. Any signs of disproportionate Muslim presence in “grooming gangs” is thus magicked out of the statistical evidence.
Second, they treat that statistical evidence as the only valid depiction of reality when both the evidence given in courts and an overwhelming number of accounts from local citizens in towns like Rotherham and Oldham make clear that at least some grooming gangs were known to be active in their communities, apparently friendly with the police, and disproportionately Muslim, when not entirely so. They also show that gang members talked of and to their victims with the racial-cum-religious contempt that would be seen as “supremacist” if employed by working-class whites about . . . well, about anyone else at all starting with the postman.
It should be added—and not solely for fairness, as we shall see—that police and officials also showed a socially and morally snobbish contempt towards the vulnerable young women victims, treating them as slags and sluts, and as either not needing protection nor really worth protecting. A particularly deluded progressive variation on such judgments was included in a Home Office circular that told police the exploited girls had made a legitimate lifestyle choice. If this latter contempt can be reasonably traced to an anti-underclass snobbery (extending sometimes to the respectable working class) of the native English, as it can, so surely can the rapists’ sense of ownership of their victims be traced in part to a dual religious and sexual superiority of which the rapists themselves often boasted.)
Statisticians admit when in a reflective mood that data is the plural of anecdote. What this HUMINT data shows is that an epidemic of a particularly horrible crime was entrenched in English towns and city centres and indeed in people’s semi-conscious social attitudes, but that while everyone was agreed that something should be done, not nearly enough was done, and sometimes nothing at all.
So might matters have drifted on indefinitely except for a human foible remarked on by the late Josef Stalin: One death is a tragedy, he said, a million deaths is a statistic.
Elon Musk noticed what the court transcripts revealed, and seeing some individual tragedies in them, tweeted angrily about them. In my view it is less significant that Elon Musk performed this public service since he’s neither popular nor influential in Britain, than that he drew public attention to some of the worst atrocities visited upon the young women victims and so aroused consciences that had fallen half-asleep.
It’s hard not to feel some desire for the “wild justice” of revenge when you read this excerpt from the judge’s sentencing of five men for a series of offenses against young women not in Rotherham or Oldham or any allegedly ‘left behind” ghetto of poverty in Northern England but amid the dreaming spires of Oxford:
“You, Mohammed Karrar, prepared her for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men (count 30). At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet. Not only were you both involved in the commercial sexual exploitation of GH, you also used her for your own self-gratification. You both raped her when she was under 13. When she was very young, although it is not clear whether she was under 13, you both raped her at the same time (oral and vaginal/anal). It happened on more than one occasion (Count 28).”
Having read the full judgment, I can testify that this is typical passage to be found more than once on most pages of a sixteen-page document. In January when this latest storm broke, however, the desire it provoked was at least as much for the shaming and punishment of those in authority who had enabled or concealed such crimes as for those who had committed them (many of whom had already been tried, convicted, and served prison sentences.)
In particular this indignation drove two demands on the government—the first was for a new independent national inquiry with legal power to compel testimony under oath (since all the previous ones had made weak proposals or been subsequently ignored); the second was that it should cover the complicity and corruption of the police, local government, and social services in the crimes committed against the young women.
The problem for Labour Ministers is that these two demands are in conflict with each other. Labour cannot easily agree to holding an enquiry it does not control politically. Grooming scandals took place mainly in local authorities controlled by Labour, in authorities where Muslims accounted for a majority of Labour councillors, and in which the police and social services had turned a blind eye to the sex trafficking of children in care and sometimes threatened to arrest desperate parents when they sought to protect their kids.
At the time the excuse of fearing an accusation of racism held the high ground. Not any more, however. As sometimes happens in a scandal, the surrounding moral atmosphere subtly changes so that crimes and excuses change places and the gravity of the former excuse is suddenly felt as if for the first time. No one says any more “Everyone does it.” On the contrary, locals begin to ask such questions as “Did anyone get a piece of the action from the gangs in return for silence?” Some victims claim that they did; and rumors of other types of official complicity with the grooming gangs are widespread. If clear evidence of such serious corruption were to surface, an independent inquiry could hardly avoid investigating it. That would not only damage Labour directly today; it would make its reliance on the Muslim vote in a close election a source of weakness rather than of strength.
That’s why it was no surprise back in January that Labour’s Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, refused to appoint an independent national inquiry. Indeed, it was even a slight surprise when she agreed to finance five smaller local ones as some small compensation. Since then, however, rumors had been seeping out of Whitehall that no money was being allocated for such enquiries. A senior lawyer hired to run one of them was telling reporters that his letters weren’t being answered by Ministers. Then, on the last day before the Easter recess, Starmer sent a prominent left-wing feminist Minister, Jess Phillips, into the Commons chamber to announce that something had changed.
As Michael Deacon, my sourly witty successor as the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter, put it—“if the relevant councils don’t fancy an inquiry, they can choose to spend the allocated funds in some other, ’more bespoke’ way.”
Trebles all round at the town hall!
In other words, if local councils didn’t wish to investigate how councillors or their officials had dealt with the grooming gangs scandal, well, they needn’t do so—PLUS they have some extra dosh to spend on whatever they feet like! And who told them this? Well, Ms. Phillips’ official ministerial position is—roll it around your tongue—Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls (known as Minister for Safeguarding) and what she was plainly safeguarding was Labour’s grasp on the Muslim vote.
As we old Fleet Street hacks say: you couldn’t make it up!
If anyone doubts that this announcement was a disaster for the Starmer government, a look at Ms. Philipps’s stricken expression would banish his optimism. She seemed devastated—a naive feminister Faust wondering why she hadn’t asked Mephistopheles ”Is there a catch?” when she sold him her soul for a front-bench seat. A life devoted to women, girls, victims, their rights, feminism, and municipal government all thrown away—it was written on her face as her young Tory “shadow” waltzed away with all the best feminist indictments of government indifference towards rape victims.
For Labour under Starmer the decision to cancel investigations into the grooming gangs is no less fateful. It dramatizes a choice that he had already been making quietly and gradually in a series of earlier decisions but that now was taking solid and visible form in government regulations. That choice is about the future shape and identity of the Labour Party.
Labour began as a coalition of the ”organized working class” (i.e., workers enrolled in trade unions) and socialist intellectuals in the various bodies such as the Fabian Society. Essentially, it kept that alliance in being for many years, picking up a significant number of left-wing ”social” Liberals as the Liberal Party declined in the 20th century. Starting in the 1950s, however, workers began to disappoint the intellectuals by being much too content with capitalism as it delivered postwar prosperity even to the point of voting Conservative. Labour responded in two ways. First the intellectuals gradually moved Left, making Labour a party of the public sector middle-class as well as of a shrinking proletariat. That development, was helpful to Labour because the middle-class was growing too, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the loss of blue-collar votes. As Keith Windschuttle pointed out in his important essay on The Nation and the Intellectual Left, the Left moved from supporting majoritarian democracy in a united nation to adopting democracy defined as permanent negotiations between a multitude of ethnic, social, and gender groups in a “multicultural” democracy organized and supervised by . . . the public sector middle class! And the first important step in realizing this vision was Blair’s decision to increase immigration massively in order to dish the Tories by—what was the phrase ?—rubbing their faces in diversity by expanding the electorate in order to recruit replacements for its lost workers.
When Labour was a coalition of the workers and intelligentsia, the workers were the final arbiter in policy because democracy was a social unity governed by majorities and the workers had the numbers. Now, that democracy is a matter of negotiations between social groups under the supervision of a bureaucratic elite, the government can determine a great many matters without reference to the voters—or rather with reference mainly to those voters it favours.
And In the nine months he had been Prime Minister, as I discuss in Britain’s Omni-Shambles in the current issue of the Hungarian Review here, Starmer’s political choices indicate that he’s following an approach that Windschuttle calls ”asymmetric multiculturism,” i.e., he leans towards the Muslim community over Labour’s formerly bedrock blue-collar voters when their interests clash (over, say, migration policy)—maybe modified slightly by deference towards the public sector intelligentsia (who are his own people.)
Following the knifing murders of three girls in Southport, Ministers suppressed accurate information about the murderer that might have linked the crime with either immigration, terrorism, or Islam while arguing that the anti-Muslim riots responding to the murders were organized by ”the far right” and blaming individuals like Nigel Farage for spreading false rumors that later proved to be true. It’s right and proper, of course, to calm public feelings on such occasions. But that should be done without hints that one community bore the greater guilt and with a minimum of inflammatory rhetoric. Instead, Starmer who had prioritized calmness in responding to the murders, made a speech calling for the full force of the law to be enforced against the rioters . The courts heeded him too and stayed open late at night to ensure speedy trials; the prisons released violent and sex offenders to make room for the rioters; judges explicitly linked severe sentences to the urgent need to maintain public order; and one judge regretted hat he lacked the legal power to impose more severe penalties.
Unusually severe sentences were nonetheless imposed on first offenders and for non-violent speech offenses that extended restrictions from the street to the internet and from threats against public order to politically or morally offensive content that has been traditionally protected in law. Some of those accused, convicted, and sentenced were genuinely surprised to discover that their ”free speech” rights had been circumscribed to the point of their being imprisoned for—as they saw it—advocating a more restrictive immigration policy. In a very short time, the general public developed the suspicion that both in sentencing policy and in regulating ”free speech,” the government was operating a dual standard. The damaging concept of ”Two-Tier Keir” was coined and it soon became a populist orthodoxy.
That was still the a broad majority sentiment when in January Elon Musk tweeted his shock at the terrible brutalities inflicted on the grooming gangs’ victims and revived the national sense of shame that still nothing had been done for them. Then—within the two-week period leading up to Easter—the following three public announcements took place, almost as in a Somerset Maugham short story or a Marx Brothers farce:
First, the Lord Chancellor and Justice Minister (they’re the same person: as luck would have it, a Muslim lady lawyer) announced that she wanted to reject the recommendation of the Sentencing Council—a legal quango that gives advisory (i.e., really compulsory) guidelines to judges on their sentencing practices—to introduce differential treatment in sentencing of racial and religious minorities but she didn’t think she had the legal power to do so. Bingo! Two-tier justice. A row ensued; the sentencing council defied the Minister showing complete ignorance of the democratic principle that officials can’t defy Ministers openly; the Lord Chancellor threatened the nuclear option—new legislation; the council caved. But the damage had been done; two-tier justice, far from being a populist myth, had been slowly working its way through the machinery of the legal establishment until it struck an iceberg and sank. But for how long? We know now that “two-justice” is what the public sector middle-class wants and so it will probably be resurrected when the public has ceased looking.
Second, the deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, who is also Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government, having established a committee to define Islamophobia in law, published its terms of reference which will be based on “perceived” Muslimness which might therefore need to protect communities mistakenly identified as Muslim such as Sikh, Hindu, Jain, and Buddhists. Is there anyone left out? Well, there is one obvious group left out. . . except that many of them would be covered by a “people of no faith” clause. Otherwise, it’s the poor old white native Christians—sorry, ladies, this time it also includes you out—who will be unprotected as they drown in this Sea of Faith regulations. Remember too that it was a similar reliance on “perceived” racism that explained some of the failures to protect the young and vulnerable white victims of the grooming gangs.
And, third, Jess Phillips, the Safeguarding Minister, made her historic announcement, outlined above, that there would be no major independent enquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, and especially not one into who might have helped to cover it up.
It beggars belief that these three official statements were all released within the same two week period even by a government as accident-prone as the Starmer administration. Each one of them was a warning sign to the workers that they were no longer Labour’s first priority. Taken together they amounted to a lawyer’s letter from Transport House serving divorce papers on Labour’s earliest and most faithful spouse in the British working class on the grounds that the post-Blair Newest Labour no longer felt as they once had about protecting the weakest and most vulnerable members of society who probably never voted anyway. The Starmerite Left wanted to be free, to flirt with new partners, maybe to try an open marriage, or even a plural one, to marry the Muslims for their votes and the public sector middle class intelligentsia for its acquiescence in their social engineering. And the victims of the grooming gangs? Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking legs. Nothing personal, just politics—the old Tammany Hall kind.
What, however, of the victims’ fathers, mothers, and boyfriends? Not all is lost. They now have a choice of parties eager to represent them; at present the Tories don’t seem to be making the cut; Nigel Farage and Reform lead the list of suitors; but it’s too soon to know and the wounds are still fresh. Besides, even if they have a party, will they still have a country?
I think of Labour’s lost love sitting in a coffee shop, in between intervals of confiding in the barista, desperately searching the classifieds for a smaller flat, and filling in an official housing questionnaire, perhaps one modelled on an old Soviet joke:
Where were you born? England.
Where did you grow up? Great Britain.
Where did you spend your working life? The United Kingdom.
Where would you like to live? England.
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