https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/uk-labours-lost-loves/
On a quiet parliamentary afternoon, just before the House of Commons adjourned for the Easter Recess, Sir Keir Starmer’s own government launched a destructive missile, not an unguided one either but one aimed squarely at the Labour Party, in the hope that MPs would be so keen to leave for the holidays that they wouldn’t notice or mind very much.
Governments do that kind of thing from time to time, and sometimes it works by pushing an embarrassing controversy into a future when public opinion has “moved on,” i.e., is distracted by a later and more outrageous ministerial decision. But the maneuver collapses when the topic is a truly incendiary one.
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.