Jess Phillips, a member of the Labour Party’s huge majority in the British House of Commons, was first elected to
Parliament in 2015 and has made a name for herself as a champion of female victims of male violence. Every year since her arrival, she has read out a running list of the names of women killed by a man. After Labour’s election victory last year, Phillips was, appropriately enough, appointed as—to provide her full title, including parentheses—parliamentary under-secretary of state (minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls).
No longer just a campaigner, Phillips now has the power to act. And there could be no more important or appalling an example of violence against women and girls than the so-called grooming-gang scandal, which has shamed Britain since it was first uncovered by former Labour MP Ann Cryer and a small number of dogged reporters a couple of decades ago. It became an international story when the first official report relating to the mass abuse of young girls was commissioned by the city council in Rotherham from Professor Alexis Jay, who identified 1,400 children abused there between 1997 and 2013. Jay and others revealed then and have since continued to uncover not just the mass rape of young girls but a systematic and deliberate refusal by both the police and local authorities to deal with the perpetrators or even to acknowledge that the crimes had happened. By this point in time, as many as 250,000 young women and girls in towns and cities across Britain—the figure is an extrapolation from official reports, multiplied by the number of towns where there have been prosecutions—may have been victimized.
As J.K. Rowling has pointed out, it should more accurately be described as the rape scandal, since the grooming itself—meaning the slow seduction of the innocent until they are in a position to be used—is the least awful aspect. There has been torture, too: Reports have revealed beatings, girls being branded with the initials of their abusers, broken bottles being shoved into them, girls doused with petrol, stabbings and thrashings, as well as other even more depraved practices. But British officialdom does not speak openly of such things. Euphemism has been part and parcel of the response since it was first uncovered, so it is hardly surprising that the scandal is not even accurately described by the label by which it has become known.
As the relevant minister, Phillips was asked in December 2024 by Oldham Council in Manchester to set up a government inquiry into historic child abuse in the area. There had been a local review in 2022, but it had been restricted to the years between 2011 and 2014, and the abuse did not end then.
Given the extent of the national scandal, which Phillips herself campaigned on while in opposition, one might have expected the answer to Oldham Council’s request to be an obvious yes—and for the inquiry to be nationwide in scope rather than limited to Oldham. But Phillips said no. This had, she said, nothing to do with her or the government. It was a local matter for the council to deal with. And so the “grooming gang” scandal is back in the news, where it should al-ways have been.
How, one might wonder, could a woman who has spent her political career in opposition focused on violence against women commit such a volte-face now that she is in power, when so much of what happened remains covered up—and when such abuse continues?
To understand that, you need to add the key element to the story I have so far omitted. The victims of the rape gangs were almost all young white girls and the rapists almost all adult Pakistani men. The main reason the gangs were allowed to operate with impunity was the widespread view among the police and the authorities responsible for the welfare of the girls that it would damage “community relations” if the crimes were investigated, let alone prosecuted—and that on no account should the ethnic background of anyone involved ever be discussed.
In other words, the real story here (other than the unspeakable crimes themselves) is how politically correct attitudes and an obsession with the benefits of diversity have genuine, nationwide, soul-crushing, and devastating consequences, such as the abandonment of what may be hundreds of thousands of girls to rapists. Jay’s inquiry into Rotherham, for example, revealed how a senior police officer once told a distressed father that the town “would erupt” if the routine abuse of white children by men of Pakistani origin became widely known. Another police official was reported to have said that the abuse had been “going on” for 30 years and that “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.”
_____________
Phillips’s own constituency of Birmingham Yardley has a large Muslim population. Last year, before the election swept Labour into power, she resigned as a party spokeswoman precisely so she could vote for a Gaza cease-fire in Parliament. This was politically necessary for her; in the July election, her majority crashed from 13,141 to just 693 after a challenge from a candidate focusing almost entirely on Gaza. Phillips is clearly keenly aware of the electoral consequences of angering her Muslim constituents and losing her position as a result the next time voters are called to choose their representative, and an inquiry into the full story of the rape gangs would surely foment anger and lead to potential defeat.
But Phillips herself is largely inconsequential to this story. As a junior minister, she may not even have been the person who decided to reject an inquiry. More likely it was her boss, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper—or even the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer. He has a history here. In a prior role as the director of public prosecutions, Starmer was forced to apologize in 2012 after it was revealed that the Crown Prosecution Service, under his leadership, had dropped a case against a rape gang despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. That move had led to the Greater Manchester Police dropping its wider investigation into rape gangs in the area, which meant that the abuse there simply continued without interference. Two years later, the Rotherham council would blow the story wide open…until it simply just closed again. Why? The British state under both the Tories and Labour, as well as Britain’s cultural establishment, has become so infected with an ideologically driven refusal to deny the possibility that there are any deleterious consequences to mass immigration that they will engineer a cover-up of the mass rape of young girls and will label anyone who speaks out as “far right.” Their control over the national discourse is far more potent than the liberal establishment’s in the United States, and with results that beggar belief.
Some girls were locked up as sex slaves, raped over a thousand times. Others were so frightened of the consequences of not complying with their rapists’ demands that they felt they had no choice. In 2002, for example, a local solicitor working with Risky Business, a youth project for children at risk of exploitation in Rotherham, accompanied a victim to a police station. While they were there, the victim’s rapist texted her to say he was holding her younger sibling prisoner. She immediately dropped the complaint. But who told her abuser that she was with the police at that moment?
The solicitor complained and filed a report to the council pointing out the ethnic element of the gangs. She was told never to refer to “Asian” men again and was then suspended and sent on a two-day equality-and-diversity course by the council for ideological re-training.
In one limited sense, the council was correct. In Britain, the word “Asian” is used to refer to people from the Subcontinent—Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Nepalis, and Sri Lankans. And it is therefore inaccurate to use the word “Asian” to describe the gangs, since there is a very specific makeup to almost all those involved: Muslims of Pakistani or Bangladeshi descent. Not Sikhs, Hindus, or Buddhists. Indeed, it is pretty clear now that the use of the term “Asian” is a deliberate part of the strategy of denying the actual composition of the rape gangs—a rhetorical diversion. As Jonathan Foreman pointed out in this publication in 2014, “one reason the perpetrators were able to flourish for so long was that those in authority were much more concerned with denying or deflecting attention from the existence of Pakistani rape gangs than they were with the safety of thousands of brutally abused girls.”1
When Foreman wrote that article, in the wake of Professor Jay’s 2014 report into Rotherham, it was assumed that the gangs had operated only in a few areas. Since then, however, the scale of the problem has emerged. The journalist Charlie Peters, who has doggedly dug into the story for years (while being labelled racist for doing so), has so far identified more than 50 towns where such gangs have operated and continue to operate. In 2023–24, police recorded 7,365 sexual grooming offenses in England and Wales, up 10.1 percent from 2022–23 (the rise is likely explained by better recording by police and more reporting by victims). But the most common outcome, in 32 percent of cases investigated, is for no suspect to be identified.
The earlier story of police and other official inaction—and, in some cases, outright complicity—is the core of the ideological scandal. So cowed were they by fear of being accused of institutional racism that they would deliberately turn reality on its head. Jay’s report showed one detective dismissing—on the grounds that the sex was “consensual”—the complaint of a 12-year-old girl who had been gang-raped by five men. In another case, two fathers who tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused were then arrested themselves when police were called to the scene. Schools tried to intervene, raising alerts with the police over many years about girls between the ages of 11 and 13 being picked up outside schools by cars and taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of men. Police did nothing.
Why? The rationale was almost always to protect “community relations”—i.e., keeping the peace among different racial and ethnic groups. That meant not only refusing to intervene but actively covering up what was happening, with reports blocked, unpublished, and full of mischaracterizations. In 2018, Home Secretary Sajid Javid ordered an inquiry into the characteristics of grooming gangs, saying that they should leave “no stone unturned.” He had the best of intentions, but the Home Office’s permanent bureaucracy kicked into action, and the report it produced was a whitewash.
At first the Home Office refused to publish its findings; its response to a Freedom of Information request was that doing so would “not be in the public interest.” When its report was finally released in 2020 after public pressure, the nation was told that “group-based CSE (Child Sexual Exploitation) offenders are most commonly white.” This claim gave those in the media who wanted to deny any ethnic element room to say, as the Guardian did, that “most child sexual abuse gangs [are] made up of white men.” But the report’s overall finding was that a paucity of data made it impossible to “answer the question of the relationship between ethnicity and child sexual exploitation.” This language is Orwellian. The data either exist or they don’t—and if they don’t, it clearly cannot be correct to assert they show that “group-based CSE (Child Sexual Exploitation) offenders are most commonly white.”
There was just one use of the word “Muslim” in the report, which does not even attempt the argument that the data on the religious affiliation of perpetrators are insufficient; it simply ignores the issue altogether. But as Javid, himself of Pakistani origin, put it in 2018: “It is a statement of fact—a fact which both saddens and angers me—that most of the men in recent high-profile gang convictions have had Pakistani heritage.” Labour MP Sarah Champion went further, pointing out that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”—after which remark she was forced to resign as shadow equalities minister.
The Home Office’s attempt to pretend that data do not exist and that, in any case, there is no ethnic angle to the story, has not been repeated since. A recent study showed that national grooming-gang statistics are dominated by men of Pakistani origin. Comparing the number of prosecutions with the overall population, the newer study found that 1 in every 2,200 Muslim men over the age of 16 in England and Wales has been prosecuted for these offenses between 1997 and 2017. For Pakistanis, the figure is 1 in 1,700. In specific towns, the figures are even more shocking. In Rochdale, 1 in 280 Muslim men over 16 have been prosecuted. In Telford, a town in Shropshire, 1 in 126. And in Rotherham, 1 in 73. And these figures are just for those who have actually been prosecuted.
But facts and evidence are rendered irrelevant when ideology is the driver. As a second report into Rotherham in 2015 by Dame Louise Casey found, the city council deliberately covered up the abuse because it was worried about racial tensions. The same motivation drove the approach of municipalities across the country.
In Telford, the Labour council did everything in its power to prevent an inquiry. Ten councillors wrote to the home secretary saying such an action was unnecessary and that reports of abuse had been “sensationalized” by the journalists who had uncovered the horrors—this, even after the lessons had supposedly been learned from the cover-ups in Rotherham and Rochdale. When the eventual inquiry into Telford was published in 2022, it found there had been least 1,000 victims. Again, most of the victims were white, most of the abusers Pakistani. Police officers referred to parts of the town as a “no-go area.” The inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community.” The same concerns applied at the council, where anxieties over appearing racist caused politicians responsible for public order to wave away concerns simply because the perpetrators were “Asian.”
In fact, the Telford Council went out of its way to make life easier for the rapists. Knowing that taxi drivers had been offering children rides in return for sex, in 2006 it suspended licensing enforcement for taxi drivers, removing any barriers to the practice. The inquiry described this decision as “borne entirely out of fear of accusations of racism; it was craven.” The leader of Telford Council in 2016, who co-signed the letter opposing an inquiry, was Shaun Davies. Today he is a Labour MP who sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee.
_____________
The poisonous cocktail underlying this scandal is the mix of woke ideology and raw politics. In the mindset of those responsible, multiculturalism trumps all else. Those who point out uncomfortable facts must, by definition, be morally bankrupt.
This has been true for decades. Ann Cryer, who as a Labour MP in 2003 first raised the issue of the exploitation of children by these gangs, was immediately branded by those in her own party as a racist, liar, and fantasist and was forced to install a panic button in her home. Sarah Champion and former Home and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, two other Labour politicians who would also not keep silent, were slandered as racists. Brave journalists like Julie Bindel and Andrew Norfolk were, and still are, relentlessly attacked by a toxic alliance of far-left and Islamic groups.
Now that Labour is in power, the ideological drive of the left is even more closely fused with the governing party’s growing political need to court the nation’s 4 million Muslim voters. That election served as a rebuke to the Tories and their comical final years in power, which sent voters into the Labour camp temporarily to deliver that message. Many of those voters will return to the Tory side in coming elections. This poses a direct threat to Labour’s dominance, because it does not have the Muslim electorate locked up. In its victory last year, the party’s vote total actually fell (by more than 14 percent) in constituencies with a Muslim population of more than 15 percent. Overall, there are 110 constituencies with an electorally significant Muslim population. Labour needs these constituencies desperately.
And so, even though rape gangs are still operating, and even though none of the officials responsible for the cover-ups has been held properly accountable, let alone prosecuted, there is every incentive for Labour to do all it can to bury this issue—as Jess Phillips sought to do as a good soldier at the end of 2024. Her actions and those of her government backfired and brought the “grooming gang” story back to the front pages. The fiendishly complicated political question that arises from this is: Will Labour find it necessary to send a message about its political fidelity to those Muslim constituencies by refusing to conduct a national inquiry into this horror, which will go down as one of the rankest periods in Britain’s storied and ancient history?
1 “Britain’s Heart of Darkness,” October 2014
Photo: Ben Sutherlan via Wikimedia
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.