Labour accused of turning blind eye to abuse

Three senior Labour politicians have accused Tony Blair’s government of turning a blind eye to child abuse and terrorism in the Muslim community for fear of inflaming community tensions.

Former MP Ann Cryer said the ‘politically correct brigade’ predominant on the Left dismissed her warnings after she exposed a sex-abuse scandal involving Asian men in her constituency.

rochdale MP Simon Danczuk said far too many on the Left had been guilty of ‘obsessing about multiculturalism’ rather than more important issues such as child rape.

And Denis MacShane, a former Foreign Office minister and ex-MP for rotherham, said he was threatened with the sack for urging Muslims to turn away from terrorism.

The criticism of the Blair government’s record came as it emerged that MPs are to investigate whether the home Office knew about allegations of abuse in rotherham as long ago as 2001. At least 1,400 girls, some as young as 11, were assaulted and raped by gangs of Asian men in the town over a 16year period.

The Commons home affairs committee will question home Secretary Theresa May over what her department knew about the scandal. It is now known that in 2002 a home Office researcher was conducting an investigation into trafficking and underage prostitution by mainly Muslim gangs in rotherham, but it was never published.

There is no suggestion that David Blunkett, then home Secretary, knew of the report’s existence but the committee will ask whether there was an overriding culture in the Blair government aimed at avoiding any harm to community cohesion.

Mrs Cryer said that when she raised concerns in her constituency of Keighley, in West Yorkshire, between 2002 and 2004, her views were dismissed. ‘A politically correct Left just saw it as racism,’ she said. Speaking on radio 4’s The World This Weekend, she added: ‘The politically correct brigade will always have anxieties about this sort of thing.

‘You don’t want to give the BNP and the EDL ammunition, but I had to think if these were my daughters I’d be very upset about this, so what can I do to alleviate the situa-

‘Cosseting Muslim constituents’

tion.’ Mrs Cryer revealed that former London mayor Ken Livingstone suggested she had ‘misunderstood’ the situation in Keighley.

‘I was very cross,’ she said. Mrs Cryer called for mandatory reporting so that doctors, teachers and social workers are obliged to flag up suspected abuse.

Mr Danczuk, who has done much to expose abuse carried out by Asian men in his roch- dale constituency, said some of his Labour colleagues disapproved of his efforts.

‘I’m in no doubt that rotherham is not an isolated case, and the same kind of abuse is happening right now in towns and cities across the country,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to save a lost generation from having childhood innocence ripped from them, then we need to stop obsessing about multiculturalism and reform children’s services now.’

Last week Mr MacShane admitted he did not do enough to speak up about child abuse when he was rotherham MP, because he did not want to ‘ rock the multicultural community boat’.

Mr MacShane – who stepped down two years ago after being found guilty of expenses fraud – revealed he had been forced into a ‘grovelling climbdown’ when he criticised Muslims who supported terrorism. he said he was threatened with the sack by then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who ‘spent an inordinate amount of time cosseting his Muslim constituents in Blackburn’.