Champion: should she have been sacked?

“It has become axiomatic,” said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, “that as soon as a politician says something that is true and worthwhile, they are sacked and told to make a grovelling apology.” So it was with Labour MP Sarah Champion, who was forced to resign as shadow equalities minister last week over an article in The Sun in which she wrote that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”. As the MP for Rotherham – where more than 1,400 girls fell victim to organised abuse by mostly Muslim men of South Asian origin – Champion knows whereof she speaks. But that didn’t stop her being hounded out of her post for voicing “what I dare say the Left considers a ‘hate fact’”. Her treatment helps “explain why these scandals took so long to be uncovered”.

Champion has been a marked woman since last summer, said Andrew Pierce in the Daily Mail, when she quit the frontbench as part of the failed coup against Jeremy Corbyn. Her Sun article sealed her fate. Bad enough that she was collaborating with the hated Murdoch press. Worse still, she “exposed how the Labour hierarchy has been shamefully reticent on the prevalence of Asian sex-grooming gangs, because it fears upsetting the wider Asian community who are traditionally Labour voters”.

Don’t feel sorry for Champion, said Sean O’grady in The Independent. “Of course she had a point, badly put, about tiny numbers of men of sometimes Pakistani heritage being involved in vile sex gangs,” But it was silly to pen a shouty article that could be used as ammunition for The Sun’s “Muslim Problem” campaign. Besides, simply saying that there is a problem with some Pakistani men “doesn’t actually get us anywhere with these crimes”. It’s not as if communities of Muslim people are shielding these “monsters”, or as if mosques are “training schools for perverts”. We’re dealing with criminals, who in some cases evaded justice for too long due to a failure of policing. “We don’t actually need a racially focused debate about this any more than we need one about shoplifting or corporate corruption, because it misses the point. Sarah Champion ought to have seen that.”