How the Home Office Buried the Grooming Gang Scandal
The government are hoping that the public have a short memory, as they attempt to turn the latest round of local grooming gang inquiries into another limited hangout.
With Keir Starmer forced to jump aboard what he once called a “bandwagon of the far right,” the Home Office has announced the terms of reference for their statutory-backed local grooming gang inquiries. The announcement doesn’t inspire confidence that they will be anything more than a limited hangout. Like previous reports, the complicit establishment will concede some of the narrative to their opponents, purely to contain public outrage and preserve the multicultural settlement that imported the perpetrators and silenced victims in the first place. Concrete action will be deferred via further reports, committee hearings, and promises of “a national conversation”. Nobody will be sacked, imprisoned, or deported.
Perhaps my pessimism is unwarranted. But the sporadic attention paid to the grooming gangs over the years suggests a Gell-Mann amnesia effect has set in. Those complicit in creating it cannot be trusted to deliver justice.
Take Labour Baroness Anne Longfield, who will chair the inquiry alongside co-panellists Eleanor Kelly CBE and Zoë Billingham CBE. Longfield was children’s commissioner from 2015 - 2021, and was criticised for defending her deputy, Sue Berelowitz, being awarded £134,000 in severance pay and then hired as a consultant on a £960 day rate the next day. Berelowitz authored the 2012 children’s commissioner’s Interim Report, which found “Asian” men were six times more likely to be convicted of group-based child sexual exploitation than whites, but reported “individuals classified as `White’ form the largest group of perpetrators in both gangs and groups.” Berelowitz’s contract was cancelled, when it was found that her consultancy fee broke Whitehall rules, but Longfield’s Office attempted to defend the decision. Given Longfield’s error in judgement, and inactivity on the rape gangs during her stint as children’s commissioner, her appointment is cause for concern.
We should be sceptical that Longfield or the Home Office will keep their promise to “examine the role of ethnicity, religion and culture, when considering the factors that drive and enable group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse.” This is the same Home Office that described the grooming gangs as a “grievance narrative” invented by “right-wing extremists”, after the Southport murders. The same Home Office that knew British women were being advertised as the spoils of conquest to prospective illegal migrant clients by people smugglers on social media, and did nothing. The same Home Secretary who described her Muslim faith as “the core of who I am.”
“It is the part of me that remains when all else is gone. I would see it as the central truth of who I am as a person.
“It shapes my life and my views and how I think about the world and my role and my place in it. My faith calls me to public service. The fundamental values of my faith around decency and fairness, not wanting to live in a society where there’s conflict, those fundamental drivers I get from my faith. Others would get them from other places but for me, they’re shaped by the fact that I’m a Muslim.”
Some of the same civil servants will have worked on the 2020 report, which Baroness Casey’s 2025 audit condemned for baselessly claiming a majority of rape gang perpetrators are white.
Four victims have already resigned from the advisory panel, citing safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ unprofessionalism, and being told to stop blaming “brown men” for the abuse they suffered. Signs that the inquiry will only pay lip service to the racial motives and Islamic justifications given by the gangs are already showing. Hence why Keighley & Ilkley MP Robbie Moore proposed, during a Home Affairs Committee hearing with Phillips this week, that the Cabinet Office supervise the inquiries instead of the Home Office, given the latter department’s record of inadequate action on the scandal.
That the inquiry confines its scope to 1996 - present is also troubling. The Parliamentary research briefing published alongside the terms of reference makes significant omissions in the timeline of the state’s awareness of the scandal. It begins in the early 2010s, but a Rotherham Advertiser article suggests these crimes date back as far as 1975, beginning a decade after 5,000 Mirpuris migrated to the UK. Retired detective superintendent Mick Gradwell recalled patrolling a Blackburn nightclub “where one of the issues was Asian men cruising around in BMWs and Mercs trying to pick up young drunken girls” in 1979. Other reports show government agencies discussing the gangs since 1996, meaning the problem precedes local authorities acknowledging it, and failing to act.
Meetings were held in 2000 with Jane Senior of Risky Business, where representatives from Rotherham social services and South Yorkshire Police were told about the abuse of children by adult Pakistani males. Anti-Racism Co-ordinator from the Youth Service, Bhupinder K. Mauku, was also present, indicating that local authorities cared more about narrative control than protecting vulnerable children in Rotherham.
Minutes of a later 2002 meeting of “key players” in Rotherham show that social services knew the names of rapists (later jailed), the children’s homes and schools they frequented, and the takeaways, taxi firms, and hotels they used to facilitate the abuse. Again, no preventative action was taken.
Instead, as one 2010 Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board report stressed, local officials ensured “great care will be taken in drafting … this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided”. The problem is only ever acknowledged as something which must be covered up to preserve “community cohesion”. As Rotherham MP Denis MacShane confessed, he didn’t raise the issue in Parliament because, as a “Guardian-reading liberal leftie”, he was afraid “to rock the multicultural community boat”.
In his 2016 book Easy Meat, journalist Peter McLoughlin accused the state of using Rotherham as a “designated scapegoat” with the 2014 - 2015 Casey & Jay inquiries. This inquiry may be doing the same: focusing on three locations, despite evidence that the scandal spans over fifty towns and cities across Britain. Only Oldham has been announced as a region targeted by the inquiries, but back in 2013, Thames Valley Police Chief Constable Sara Thornton warned that child sex trafficking gangs were operating in every city in the country. This included fifty in London, despite Mayor Sadiq Khan continuing to feign ignorance as to what a grooming gang is.
According to the Independent, allegations that Sikh girls were being taken as “sex slaves” sparked gang violence between Muslims and Sikhs across Birmingham in 1988. In 2001, a group called Real Khilafah distributed a letter to Muslim youths, instructing them to intoxicate Sikh girls and convert them to Islam. The same in-group solidarity that enabled the Sikh community to defend their children, establishing the Sikh Awareness Society in 1998, was denied for the white British, who were accused of racist conspiratorialism for even raising the issue. But Barry Sheerman MP, Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Committee from 2001 - 2010, admitted all that while Parliament knew children were being raped “up and down the country… We knew about that, [but] we didn’t do enough about it. Members of this house, many of us, knew what was going on.”
One 1996 - 1998 Rotherham social services investigation found at least 70 girls in residential care were coerced into “child prostitution”, prompting a Home Office-funded research project which concluded in 2001, but was never published. The findings indicated that Pakistani taxi firms and takeaway food shops were used to traffic girls procured “outside schools, bus and train stations, residential homes and homeless projects.” That same year, Home Secretary David Blunkett made his first attempt to criminalise criticism of Islam as incitement to religious hatred. Blunkett revised the defeated bill in 2006, while his Home Office was investigating child sexual exploitation in his Sheffield constituency. A 2001 Rotherham “key players” meeting concluded with Risky Business’ Adele Weir intending to draft a letter to Blunkett. We are unsure whether Blunkett ever read or received the letter.
Nevertheless, another Home Office-funded research project in 2002 found 56 sexually abused schoolgirls had links to just 3 Pakistani brothers. This information was provided to South Yorkshire Police, who again refused to act. Neighbouring Greater Manchester police also ignored warnings beginning in 2002, as one victim’s mother testified during a 2012 trial in Rochdale. The government certainly knew about the pattern among perpetrators by 2007, because the Home Office began funding the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (CROP). CROP helped produce the 2008 BBC Panorama programme Teenage Sex For Sale, which featured Pakistani men condemning English girls for dressing immodestly by Muslim standards. This was the same excuse given by the wives of convicted rapists, to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in 2013, for why white girls brought the abuse on themselves: “Filthy. How they dress. They have no shame, no fear of Allah.”
The Panorama documentary prompted questions in the House of Lords by Lord McColl of Dulwich about the torture of children by their rapists. That same year, the UK Human Trafficking Centre produced My Dangerous Loverboy, a film to be shown in schools to warn girls against grooming. But state bodies did not acknowledge comparisons to “Loverboy” gangs of Turkish and Moroccan paedophiles targeting white girls in the Netherlands at the same time. Doing so would produce a pattern of religious- and ethnic-based predation, which Britain’s political class remain uncomfortable with.
In 2004, Channel 4 pulled the documentary Edge of the City — despite reporting on “Asian Rape Allegations” in 2003 — worrying its contents were a boon to the BNP. That the BNP would not exist were the perpetrators not present in Britain was never contemplated. The supposition is always that the problem is the people pointing out the rapes, not the rapes themselves. After all, we’re all basically the same deep down, and if we all pretend they aren’t happening, then differences between groups would surely dissolve, and they would stop. The notion that there are intractable, ineradicable tensions between tribes implies solutions that egalitarian liberals don’t dare contemplate. Better to shut up, for the good of diversity!
This delusion constrained early whistleblowers about the gangs, now lauded for their bravery. Labour MP Ann Cryer insisted in 2003 that the gangs were “nothing to do with the religion [Islam]”. In Bradford, Andrew Norfolk claimed that child-care professionals knew Pakistani men were procuring victims from children’s homes in 1991. As Moore told Phillips, Bradford has been a known hotspot of rape gang activity for decades, yet local officials have denied an inquiry at every opportunity. A 2011 Barnardo’s report acknowledges that the Bradford Streets and Lanes project began to prevent children from being prostituted in 1995. The first rape gang prosecution in Bradford wasn’t until 2005. Despite this, Barnardos’ chief executive Martin Narey denounced former home secretary Jack Straw when he said on Newsnight that Pakistani men see white girls as “easy meat”, insisting the 2013 Derby rape gang convictions showed “vulnerable children of all races [are] at risk from abuse.”
Norfolk’s 2011 Times articles made the issue unavoidable, but even he refrained from reporting on the gangs for eight years, fearing it was a “dream story for the far right.” Likewise, when Julie Bindel reported on the gangs for Standpoint Magazine in 2010, she lamented that “Some of the [victims’] parents I met were racist, and some had developed almost a phobia against Asian men, fuelled by the misinformation and bigotry trotted out by racist groups in response to the pimping gangs.” I would suggest their prejudice is formed by Muslim men preying on their daughters, and the Pakistani community covering it up, rather than BNP leaflets. This is especially insidious when the perpetrators use taboos around racism to isolate their victims from their families. As one woman told Bindel: “Amir told me they [her parents] didn’t understand me and were racist and ignorant. I believed him.” She was estranged from her family, given a new Pakistani name, and told to read the Quran. Accusations of racism guaranteed her isolation, just as they encouraged public officials to turn a blind eye to the abuse.
The 2013 Parliamentary report confessed “there is a model of localised grooming of Pakistani-heritage men targeting young White girls. This must be acknowledged by official agencies, who we were concerned to hear in some areas of particular community tension, had reportedly been slow to draw attention to the issue for fear of affecting community cohesion.” The disparity was made clear, over a decade ago; and yet, education secretary Bridget Phillipson, who sat on the Home Affairs Committee in 2013, opposed the amendment to her Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2025, which would have brought a national inquiry forward. Yesterday, Phillipson responded to a question from Rupert Lowe MP, requesting an inquiry into violence against women and girls by foreign perpetrators, with a dismissive, “Here we go again...” Her rival for the recent deputy leadership race, Lucy Powell, called the grooming gangs a “little trumpet” and a “dog whistle” last May.
Even that report, however, references a 2012 trial to say the perpetrators were “five White British men from Derby” (including one Ijaz Ahmed), instead of the case which prompted Straw’s comments, in which all but one were Pakistani.
These peaks and troughs of public interest in the rape gangs suggest the British state is capable of regaining control of the narrative and forestalling the well-earned retribution awaiting them. Perhaps social media will prove too powerful for them this time. After all, Rupert Lowe MP crowdfunded his private inquiry online. It has concluded, with the report to be published in due course. Stories released by the inquiry team reveal sex-slave auctions at children’s homes, girls trafficked to Middle Eastern warzones, and torture too gruesome to repeat here. Lowe has promised to use Parliamentary privilege to identify the culprits of both the crimes and the cover-up, and that private prosecutions will result.
Try though the government might, the rape gangs scandal won’t go away. It’s too grave a moral stain on the national conscience. Punishment will eventually befall the unrepentant Pakistani enclaves that perpetrated the abuse, just as it will the officials who covered it up. The longer they wait, the worse it will be.