Allison Pearson
The grooming gang cover-up is Britain’s real racist scandal
Young girls were just collateral damage in the greater project of multiculturalism
While Prince Harry was making a speech on Sunday night, Himself was in a London cab. The driver was incensed by reports suggesting the Duke and Duchess were abdicating because Meghan had been the victim of racist media coverage. “I didn’t even know she was black until I saw her mum at the wedding,” huffed the cabbie.
He spoke for millions of Britons who welcomed the beautiful American actress into our Royal family with open arms and had no concerns about her suitability.
On Question Time, when the actor Laurence Fox also dismissed the suggestion that Meghan had faced racism and said that, as countries go, we were really quite nice and nonracist, there was uproar in the “woke” echo chamber of social media. The rest of the country simply nodded and said: “Too right, mate.”
An audience member (naturally, she turned out to be an academic and regular BBC contributor) then accused Fox of “white privilege”. That charge is supposed to intimidate its target into silence. Refreshingly, Fox refused to be cowed. He pointed out that nervousness surrounding the issue of racism meant that “things like the Manchester grooming scandal get ignored”.
How painfully true that was. In the very week that an excoriating 150-page report revealed that Greater Manchester Police (GMP) knew of grooming gangs sexually exploiting almost a hundred girls, some as young as 12, “in plain sight”, Question Time did not feature a single question on the topic. The BBC was keen to indulge the notion that a cosseted multimillionairess had been a victim of racism, while completely ignoring girls like Victoria Agoglia, who died after having her 15-year-old veins filled with heroin so she could be raped by dozens of “Asian” (Pakistani-heritage) men.
I ask you, which case is of greater national significance? A duchess who leaves the Royal family after 20 months because it’s “not working for me”, or the revelation that police officers turned a blind eye to scores of children being grotesquely violated because to arrest their tormentors might look like cultural insensitivity?
Not much “white privilege” for poor Victoria, whose grandmother begged in vain for police and social services to help her. Nor for the 11-year-old in Oxford whose buttock was branded with the initial of her Britishpakistani
“owner”. On the contrary. The girls being white, and their abusers being non-white, made it much less likely they would be protected.
At long last, we now have conclusive proof of that. After a five-year investigation, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has just upheld a complaint against a senior Rotherham officer who admitted that his force ignored the sexual abuse of girls by grooming gangs “for decades” because it was afraid of increasing “racial tensions”. The copper, who was unable to be identified, told a missing child’s distraught father that grooming was “P--- shagging”, and admitted that “what with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”, because the town “would erupt”.
Keeping the lid on social unrest, not upsetting “the community”, that was the main thing. Young girls pimped, threatened, tortured? Why, they were just collateral damage in the greater project of multiculturalism.
After Victoria Agoglia died after an overdose was administered by an older man in 2003, official denial became a lot harder – although that didn’t stop the coroner at Victoria’s inquest doing his best. He “recognised the multiple concerns”, but pointed out that the girl had a “propensity to provide sexual favours”. Remember that insensitive man was talking about a child who was supposedly in the care of Manchester City Council when she was coerced, before puberty, into prostitution.
GMP set up Operation Augusta to tackle “the sexual exploitation of a significant number of children in the care system by predominantly Asian men”. Police identified at least 57 child victims and up to 97 suspects. But Augusta was abruptly closed down after just over a year when police turned to less “sensitive” crimes. The report claims there was a lack of resources, but the amazing Maggie Oliver, the retired detective who blew the whistle, said that not only had GMP “deliberately” not investigated child rape, it had tried to get the official report suppressed.
So, just to recap: 27 towns and cities so far where grooming gangs, made up of predominantly Pakistani-heritage males, have plied their foul trade.
Last year, the NSPCC identified 19,000 victims of gang abuse and admitted the true number is probably much higher. It is, without doubt, the biggest scandal this country has seen in my lifetime, yet still there is a terror on the part of officialdom of conducting the full public inquiry that is so clearly needed. Back in December 2018, Sajid Javid, then home secretary, said that it was “wrong to ignore” the ethnicity of abusers. Born in Rochdale to a British-pakistani family, Javid was ideally placed to insist that he wanted officials researching the causes of gang-based exploitation to “leave no stone unturned”. Even Javid, after he spoke out, was asked by a Muslim writer if he worried that his comments “may have fuelled hate crimes”. Thus do perpetrators continue to evade justice because exposing the hateful things men from that background have done to girls might cause, yes, “hate crimes”.
Consider the fate of that Home Office report into grooming gangs commissioned by Javid. Now complete, officials are refusing to make it public. Why?
We are often told that this is a complex issue. I think it’s horribly simple, actually. As Shaista Gohir of the Muslim Women’s Network told Newsnight last week: “Pakistan is one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman.” If you import Pakistan’s misogynistic attitudes into parts of the UK and they run straight into vulnerable young white girls who look, to a certain type of man, like easy meat, then you have a recipe for sexual abuse. Furthermore, if your authorities are afraid to confront and condemn those misogynistic attitudes for fear of appearing racist, then that sexual abuse can flourish on an industrial scale.
I agree with Maggie Oliver. After the scathing report into GMP was published, she demanded that criminal prosecutions be brought against those at the top of the police. Meanwhile, hundreds of victims are suing seven councils and South Yorkshire Police for their part in the Rotherham scandal. Good for them.
But a scandal of this magnitude calls for remedy at the highest level. Priti Patel has got off to a terrific start, as Home Secretary. I hope she will call on her reserves of political courage, publish the report into the grooming gangs and announce a public inquiry. Laurence Fox was right. We are a remarkably tolerant nation. If anything is going to fuel racism in the UK, it’s the attempt to brush these abhorrent offences under the carpet.