#WTH The grooming gangs of England

Is there a culture of impunity for Muslims in the UK?

©BBC

This is a piece about Pakistani-origin British grooming gangs, and their years-long predations against mostly white, mostly poor British children. But I want to start somewhere else, because, absent the context I hope to present briefly, it is difficult to understand how this happened.

Three hostages were released by Hamas this weekend. Their photos are reminiscent of the Holocaust: Gaunt, hollow-eyed men, who are paraded in front of screaming and celebrating Palestinians, with one Red Cross enabler standing by, and another shaking hands with terrorists and grinning. Eli Sharabi was expecting to see his wife and daughter only to discover that they were murdered on October 7. And as Hamas laughs, the BBC focuses on the parallels they see between convicted Palestinian terrorists being released and the starved Israelis.

Another day ending in “y”, you might say.

In England, a man engaging in anti-Muslim performance art burns an object symbolic of his anger. The US flag? Israeli? The Union Jack? The Bible? Nah. It’s a Koran, and because it is a Koran, he is arrested and charged on “suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence.” This is the same Met Police in the UK that threatened a “visibly Jewish” man near a pro-Hamas demonstration with arrest.

Meanwhile, in Africa, tens of thousands have died in Sudan, which the outgoing Biden administration labeled a “genocide.” Ethnic cleansing, systemic rape, and indiscriminate bombings — including attacks on UN workers — are all such a bore to the legacy media. Ditto for the systemic hunting of Christians in Nigeria. Is the BBC (or CNN, for that matter) spilling gallons of metaphorical ink over these deaths? Nope.

The inference that I’m leading you to (rather obviously) is that there is some sort of impunity for Muslim crime; that Muslim-on-Muslim crime is of no interest; that Muslim-on-Jewish crime must be seen in “context” (h/t SecGen Guterres); and that Muslim on Christian crime is an issue that must be treated with “sensitivity” otherwise it will negatively impact “community relations.” And so we come to the grooming gangs.

The narrative is relatively straightforward, per our pod guest, Dominic Green, Fellow at the Royal Historical Society, former editor of the U.S. edition of the UK’s Spectator, and frequent commentator in the WSJ, National Review, and The Telegraph, among others:

We are talking about potentially tens of thousands of victims, too often written off by authorities as “slags” — whores — and their desperate parents sometimes themselves threatened with prosecution. It’s not just that the girls, often as young as 10 and 11, were ignored after tales of rape and assault so heinous I won’t repeat them here. It’s the eyes wide shut by everyone from the central prosecutor involved — Sir Keir Starmer, now PM — to the justice ministry, to human rights campaigners, to local police. And then there is the class snobbery — these girls were “no better than they should be,” “looking for trouble,” what in America might be called white trash, from working-class towns, with working-class families. Their virginity is a small price to pay for the sanctity of “community relations.”

Now, before you jump on me for Islamophobia or some other religious or racial crime, I should underscore that we are talking about hundreds or thousands of perpetrators and potentially exponentially more victims. The perps are almost uniformly South Asian, and the victims are, for the most part, white. Does that mean all Muslims are perverts, groomers, or rapists? Absolutely not. Decent people of every and no religion are horrified. One of the tribunes for these girls is former prosecutor Nasir Afzal, himself a South Asian Muslim.

But there has been a conspiracy of silence around both the criminals and the victims, an unwillingness to honestly discuss the risks and rewards of appointing “community” spokespeople, whose main job is to shield their communities from unfair, and unfortunately, very fair charges. The communities themselves have been far from introspective. And absent Elon Musk, who raised the question of what the hell has been going on in the UK, we would have remained ignorant.

As we look at Europe today, with millions of Syrians in Germany, North Africans in France, South Asians in England, and the risk of ever more refugees pouring in, it is time for Europeans to ask themselves whether they have managed generations of immigrants well. Whether they have taught shared values, shared language, shared respect for democratic principles… Or whether they have fetishized differences and tolerance to the point where rape, terrorism, and murder are accepted in the name of multiculturalism.

I believe firmly in immigration. Most of the world that I have devoted my career to is Muslim. But when you begin to hold immigrants to different standards than those to which you hold your native-born citizens, you weave a tangled and dangerous web. We are only at the beginning of the unraveling in Europe. And these grooming gangs are just the beginning.

HIGHLIGHTS

Can you break down the UK’s “grooming gangs” scandal for us?

DG: This scandal breaks down into three phases. The first begins with the mass immigration of Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh, which was previously also part of Pakistan, from the 1960s into the industrial mill towns of Northern England and the Midlands. There were rumors of endemic sex abuse and grooming attested to from the 1980s onwards and perhaps even earlier than that by locals. The scandal was brought to the attention of local authorities and local police forces by the victims and their mothers in the 1990s. There was no action taken by police or local authorities publicly anyway until 2000, 2001 with the first investigations. There is plentiful evidence that through the '90s and through the 2000s, as the number of cases and accusations multiplied, and it became clear that this was a national issue, not just a local one restricted to a few towns, that the police aggressively discounted the testimony of the victims, all of whom were underage, children who had been raped, serially, trafficked, drugged, tortured, consistent pattern of the most degrading kind of exploitation imaginable.

And police forces and local authorities suppressed this in the name of what they called community relations. And there are testimonies from the victims and their parents of people specifically being told the perpetrators are Pakistanis, we can't have this. We'll have a riot. And being told, the girls even being told that they were white slags, which is a British vulgarism for whores. It eventually produced convictions in 2010, 2011, and then the investigative work of a reporter at the London Times who had been sent up north on assignment to cover something else and realized that he had stumbled in what was effectively the story of the century, revealed that this was endemic across the cities of the North and Midlands. And there were more convictions in a handful of places and local inquiries in three or four towns. And the numbers of estimated victims, just of the handful of men who had been convicted was over 1,000 in each of these small towns.

There are cases in around 50 cities across Britain, including in the affluent, leafy and liberal south, not just the depressed post-industrial north, there is massive evidence of nationwide trafficking. And the response of the conservative government, which was in power in the 2010s, was to announce an inquiry which effectively recommended improvements to welfare services of the believe the victim's kind and telling the police not to take the side of the rapists, murderers and torturers. There has, however, been no nationwide inquiry into the nature and scope of the crime and how it may well overlap with other forms of serious crime. At the end of 2024, Elon Musk somehow became aware of a transcript from the court proceedings of a trial of Oxford. And I do recommend to your listeners that they take the trouble of reading the few paragraphs that Mr. Musk saw because they're amongst perhaps the most disgusting things that I have ever read of happening in any advanced or civilized society. It's absolute evil and depravity.

How is the Labour Party implicated din this scandal?

DG: This is how the Labour Party has built its electoral coalition. That's why there will be no inquiry in this. The Labour are forced to do this. The people who did this are Labour voters. The people who covered this are Labour politicians at the local level, the people who told police and families to stay out of it are Labour MPs, the elected representatives. And in Britain, unlike in the United States, party nominations are centralized. You can't just run to be the MP for one of these towns because you live there and you feel like it.

You have to go to the central office of the party and they interview you and select you and then send you to a town where they think that you would win. So every level of the Labour Party is implicated in this. And there are people in the cabinet who have become associated with the suppression of this story in order to serve the Labour agenda. And the Prime Minister, the man who now says that he is aghast and demands all kinds of action, the Prime Minister was the director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, which is when this scandal broke. Now, Keir Starmer's record as the Director of Prosecutions, to be fair, is better than that of his predecessors, but it is by no means, from what we can now tell, without blemish. So this goes from the very bottom, from the criminal underclass to the very top to 10 Downing Street or British society.

What did these girls endure as they were being groomed?

DG: The grooming is the first stage in that it usually involves giving them cigarettes or candy or free rides in taxis. So, often the groomer was the first person to rape them and then became a pimp. And the number of individual rapes, by the way, no police force in Britain, none of the regional or even the National Force has even begun to estimate the numbers. The number in parliament has been cited as a quarter of a million or even half a million or a million. It is impossible to know the number of crimes that have been committed or the number of criminals who... And every police force will tell you that there are dozens of suspects that they weren't able to convict who are still at large. The sentences that were given, last week, a sentence of three years was given to the rapist of a child by one of these gangs.

Now, there are people who got a similar sentence, only a few months shorter, for saying rude things on Twitter after a terrorist attack last summer. The discredit that this brings on the entire judicial system cannot be underestimated. Nobody now has any respect or trust in their leaders. And when that happens, we are heading for a breakdown, total breakdown of civil society and order. The kind of crimes, as I said, are so depraved and so extensive that they are without parallel. No inquiry actually can do justice to this issue, I believe, because we are talking about a number of perpetrators, there is not enough room in the prisons to accommodate them. It's very clear that many members of their own communities turned a blind eye or perhaps even encouraged the directing of these kind of energies outside of their communities. And when you mention calling someone a kuffar and calling them white, this and that, what you're describing is what is supposed to be the worst kind of crimes that you can commit in Britain.

They are crimes which are racially aggravated and religiously aggravated out of the mouths of the perpetrators, making it very clear that they saw this as a racial and religiously motivated crime. Except of course it was the wrong kind of victim and the wrong kind of perpetrator.

Are the grooming gangs an organized criminal enterprise?

DG: What we are seeing is a form of organized crime. Now, organized crime is only ever addressed by national task forces that are given specific police and legal powers in order to pursue the work. Nobody's talking about sending 21st century G-men to Rochdale or Rotherham and rooting this out. But that is what we're describing. And no one has yet considered how this overlaps with other forms of organized criminality such as the heroin trade, such as other forms of human trafficking, forced marriages, all these things which are also endemic within the same communities as the rapists came from.

So this is, as I said, this is a colossal issue which is going to break Britain apart and may well yet have similar things happening in other European societies. But certainly in Britain's case, it is going to break the society and I believe it is also going to bring down the Labour Party and render it unelectable and very possibly also discredit the conservative party because as I said, every institution of British life, the welfare, the police, the judiciary, the political parties, all of them are implicated. And I think most people are ready for there to be a reckoning and a clean sweep because what has happened is depraved.

Why didn’t the police stop the predators, even after being informed about them?

DG: If you tell the police your job is not to go after criminals, your job is to maintain community relations, then you turn them into a form of social worker and you turn them into an ideologically charged force who do not administer the law blindly, but are charged with maintaining certain desired social outcomes. And therefore you will address Jews because there are 12 times as many Muslims. And so it's much more of a problem for community relations if you annoy them. You will kick girls out of police stations when they've been raped because you fear civil disorder. I am very sympathetic to ordinary policemen and women in the street. I've had many interactions actually with them and off the record as it were, they will say that this is not why they joined up.

Why is this scandal unique to certain migrant communities and not others?

DG: Everybody started as it were in the same place because Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, Christians were all subjects of the British under the Raj in India. Pakistan was created as the British left in 1947. And so before the era of immigration, everybody started from pretty much the same place in terms of their relationship to British, British culture, their common history of empire and so on. The unfortunate and apparently unsayable truth is this, the previous conservative prime minister is the grandson of Hindu immigrants who via East Africa trace their origins back to India. The current leader of the conservative party is Nigerian Christian background who is partly raised in Nigeria. The idea that multiculturalism per se is impossible for everybody is plainly not true.

Hindus and Sikhs in Britain have an above average level of educational attainment. They have an above average professional level, and income level, and they have a below average level of criminal offending. They are, in other words, model minorities much as Jews and Chinese are. The total dysfunction, the terrorism and so on that we have seen is unfortunately occurs only among Muslims. And the reasons for this are enormously complicated and they go all... And the people, unfortunately there is an industry of people who are supported by the government and the civil service will tell you it has nothing to do with Islam. Most people don't believe that. Most people know that obviously this is a fact. And now whether it is a motivating factor or a reinforcing factor is simply nobody knows. What we do know is there are certain behaviors which are endemic among Pakistani Muslim communities which are not likely to lead to efficient assimilation and upward mobility.

They are, for instance, forced marriage, cousin marriage, which produces the highest level of birth defects amongst any group in Britain, this much we do have numbers on, forcibly withdrawing young girls from school when they're so young that it's illegal to do that and then sending them back to Pakistan to marry some uncle or cousin. These are all things which are actually of course illegal in Britain. That's been allowed to go on for decades and practiced by larger and larger numbers of people for the reasons that we've outlined, that the governments either were naive, which I think we have, when we say how did these things happen.

What does justice look like for the victims?

DG: There are various ideas people have put forward and they involve stripping the assets of those who are convicted and putting it into a fund for the treatment and care of the victims. I think the level of popular anger about this means that most people would support any kind of measure. I think any dual national, and this is something which is suggested, any dual national who has committed a serious crime, not just in the case of these grooming and rape gangs, but many of the other serious crimes should instantly be stripped of their British citizenship and expelled.

And it's not as if, say, in the case of Pakistan, Britain is without leverage. It sends tens of millions of pounds a year to Pakistan in the name of development funds and so on. It allows Pakistani nationals to come in and out of the country all the time. There are all kinds of measures that can be used. We should not have people like that in our country, I think is how the vast majority of people feel. You can't break the laws as a foreign national and then expect welfare for the rest of your life when you get out from serving a three-year prison sentence for raping a child. That is currently how things work incidentally. So all this will change.

Who is leading the charge against the grooming gangs?

DG: I will mention Nazir Afzal who grew up in, I believe Rotherham or Rochdale, one of these northern towns and became the chief prosecutor for the North West England region and did work with Keir Starmer when Starmer was Director of Prosecutions in London, worked with him to secure the first major convictions. So there are individuals like that, but I'm afraid that the effort to create intermediaries, which is how the European states generally have managed mass immigration, they appoint leaders, that has more often than not been part of the problem.

The first Labour peer to be nominated to the House of Lords was from Rotherham, Lord Ahmed, and was subsequently convicted of raping both a young boy and a young girl when he was a teenager in Rotherham himself. And this is the person who was picked as it were to be the poster boy for his community's assimilation into Britain and its relationship with the Labour Party. So like most people, I think that there has been not enough condemnation from within these communities, but I'm not surprised there isn't because what there is are reports of intimidation, violence, threats against people who do try to speak out.

How is this story still being suppressed by the British establishment?

DG: One of the things we have seen in recent years is the division of society actually between the families and the singletons, the dysfunctional, the broken. And that's also a reason why the nice people didn't want to know. And that said, that's also a reason why the nice people will also be unstoppable in their outrage. Now they do know because as you said, if you are a parent, this is an insight into hell. And obviously the Labour government in Britain is shooting the messenger and threatening tighter social media controls, threatening to extradite people from the United States to the UK because they've said rude things on Twitter. You can't make it up. None of that can work. They are like some kind of benighted tribe dealing with people who've got electricity and high explosive. The change in communication, the fact that there is a podcast that we are talking on rather than the BBC controlling what can and cannot be aired in Britain is in itself a proof that we are long past the point at which it would be possible to suppress or contain people's opinions.

They may still be intimidated, they may, as you're saying, lock people up for saying the wrong thing. But you can't do that to millions of people and you can't do it to people who have enough of a profile. You can do that to poor people who have too much to drink and say the wrong thing online or something, but they can't. It's unstoppable. And it is actually democracy as it's supposed to be.

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

The true horror of the Rotherham grooming scandal – and the shameful failure to stop it (Sam Ashworth-Hayes, The Telegraph, January 13, 2025)

Cooper announces ‘rapid national audit’ into grooming gangs, plus new local inquiries (BBC, January 16, 2025)

Kemi Badenoch X Post (Kemi Badenoch, January 14, 2025)

Meeting with grooming victims ‘shocking’ - Badenoch (BBC, January 14, 2025)

Grooming gangs commit two sex offences a day, first figures reveal (The Telegraph, January 10, 2025)

UK lawmakers vote against inquiry into ‘rape gang scandal’ as Musk keeps up pressure (Fox News, January 8, 2025)

Grooming gangs scandal timeline: What happened, what inquiries there were and how Starmer was involved – after Elon Musk’s accusations (Sky News, January 8, 2025)

Police files reveal vast child protection scandal (Andrew Norfolk, The Times, September 24, 2012)

The United Kingdom’s grooming gangs (Dominic Green, Washington Examiner, January 10, 2025)

Dominic Green X Post (Dominic Green, Twitter, January 6, 2025)

The Biggest Peacetime Crime—and Cover-up—in British History (Dominic Green, The Free Press, January 5, 2025)

Britain’s rape scandal returns to the front pages (Stephen Pollard, Commentary, February 2025)

Labour, ‘Islamophobia’ and the U.K.’s Grooming Gangs (Sadanand Dhume, WSJ, January 16, 2025)

Rotherham, ‘Islamophobia,’ and internalised British shame (Jake Wallis Simons, Jake Wallis Simons Substack, January 4, 2025)