Trevor Phillips:

The embarrassment of the politically correct only tars the innocent and entrenches the problem

It’s official. The BBC has finally given itself permission to acknowledge – in passing – that the spate of gang-related child abuse scandals scarring English towns and cities is being carried out predominantly by men of “Asian” origin. Even so, the most important aspect of the story was deemed to be the fact that Northumbria Police had paid an informer, himself a convicted abuser, to help crack the case. No doubt desperate to avoid being accused of stigmatising a community, the BBC did its best to turn this utterly routine practice into a matter of controversy.

But even its own journalists were embarrassed by the ploy. Mark Easton, the Corporation’s redoubtable home affairs editor, broke the long taboo on the Ten O’clock News, speaking passionately of the dozens of cases in which gangs of “predominantly Asian men [are] sexually exploiting predominantly young white women and girls”. Labour, hitherto lamentably limp on the issue in deference to its dependence on minority voters, spoke up, too. Sarah Champion, MP for Rotherham, abandoned the weaselly standby that “abusers come from all communities” to call this crime what it is: an organised assault on white children by people from a specific minority group.

These men are not just dark-skinned perverts. Most white abusers join paedophile rings in order to satisfy their sexual desire more easily. These gangs, in contrast, are motivated by greed, machismo and contempt for people not of their own ethnicity. The “Asian” gangs became child abusers because they are cynical, cruel criminals, not the other way around.

And the scale of their crimes is industrial. In Rotherham over 1,400 children were gang-raped, forced to watch sexual assault on other children, drugged and trafficked. Girls as young as 12 were made pregnant; some underwent abortions or had their babies taken away. Dame Louise Casey’s unflinching report last year laid the horror bare; and spoke of the political corruption that allowed it to go unchecked. To Ms Champion’s credit, she dismissed criticism from what she called “the floppy Left”, saying that the authorities had consistently ignored these crimes because “people are more afraid to be called racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse”.

This new-found frankness is wholly welcome. Two years ago, in the wake of my Channel 4 documentary Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True, I was denounced as an Islamophobe for documenting the revelations made by courageous reporters.

The sensitivity was not confined to political activists. At a motorway service station I was harangued by an Asian motorist for bringing his community into disrepute; he then reminded me that we had met before at a conference of judges. A Muslim peer suggested that I avoid standing too close to his family at a party lest an embarrassing argument ensued.

But as the impressive Chief Constable of Northumbria, Steve Ashman, told the media, these crimes will never be prevented unless and until we can speak openly about what is taking place. Unfortunately, we still have some way to go. For example, while most of the perpetrators are indeed Asian they are not all Pakistani; and Mr Ashman said yesterday that his force had arrested Iraqis, Afghans, Turks and people from other nationalities.

Labelling this phenomenon an “Asian” crime is therefore an evasion. It also insults the largest single ethnic minority group in the UK – Hindu Indians – who consider themselves Asian, and the many East Asians who have made the UK their home. Neither group has been even remotely associated with these crimes.

What the perpetrators have in common is their proclaimed faith. They are Muslims, and many of them would claim to be practising. It is not Islamophobic to point this out, any more than it would be racist to point out that the most active persecutors of LGBT people come from countries where most people are, like me, black.

If we are going to call a spade a spade, then we should do so without embarrassment. But our elites have replaced their old fear of being called racist with a new bogey. It comes to something when the BBC prefers to risk being condemned for racism than expose itself to the charge of Islamophobia.

Trevor Phillips is the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission