THIS Labour government has many delusions, but perhaps most astonishing is that it seems to believe we still live in the pre-internet era. That’s the only possible explanation for Jess Phillips, Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, sneaking into the Chamber on Tuesday afternoon, hours before the Commons broke for Easter Recess, in the hope of brushing the betrayal of grooming gang survivors under the carpet.
By all accounts, her fellow Parliamentarians were given just 45 minutes’ notice of the statement that Phillips read out. Phillips herself seemed almost bored by what she was reading, racing through it at breakneck speed with the attitude of a surly teenager. But the words are there in Hansard, available to all online. They read: ‘We will set out the process through which local authorities can access the £5million national fund to support locally-led work on grooming gangs.’
In other words, the five inquiries for which the £5million had been earmarked have been scrapped. Instead, any local authority will be able to apply for funding for ‘more bespoke work’ – victims’ panels, audits of the handling of historical cases, and suchlike. With more than 50 towns implicated in the atrocity, that £5million won’t stretch very far.
Unfortunately for Phillips, shadow minister Katie Lam was hot on the case. She delivered a blistering response which quickly went viral on X. ‘The girls we are talking about are predominantly white. The men who preyed on them were predominantly Muslim, generally either from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage,’ Lam said in a rare moment of honesty from our elected representatives. ‘Does the Minister accept that in many cases these crimes were racially and religiously aggravated? How, without a national inquiry, can we understand what part those factors played? The British people deserve to know the truth. What darker truths does the suffering of those girls reveal about this country – and why will the Government not find out?’
Phillips’s response to Lam was downright snake-like. ‘I think it is a shame that she referred to only one sort of child abuse victim, when the statement is clearly about all child abuse victims,’ she said. ‘There should be no hierarchy.’
But of course there is a hierarchy. Jess Phillips will sing like a lark all day long about ‘toxic masculinity’ and the apparent misogyny of white working-class men. She’ll prattle on for hours about incels and Andrew Tate. Yet when it comes to the victims of the grooming gangs, her silence is deafening.
‘It is so obviously political,’ Sir Trevor Phillips, former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, told Times Radio. ‘It is so obvious they are not [holding the inquiries] because of the demographic of the people involved, largely Pakistani/Muslim background and also in Labour-held seats and councils who would be offended by it. That is clearly the reason they are not pursuing this, and it is utterly shameful, given what has been done to these children by these men.’
Reform MP Richard Tice said: ‘Labour are terrified of the pro-Gaza vote and the extremist inner-city vote. This is why they have reneged on holding formal inquiries into child rape gangs on white girls. Gutless cowards.’
Raja Miah, who has been working on exposing the gangs in Oldham for six years, wrote on X: ‘What’s playing out in Parliament isn’t just a scandal. It’s a reckoning. Let’s not pretend we don’t see what’s happening here. Jess Phillips and her Labour government, dependent on the Muslim bloc vote, is burying the Rape Gang scandal in broad daylight. The questions that must be asked are this: Who exactly are they protecting? – and why?’
Miah has been forensic in his exposure of Labour’s cover-up of the grooming gangs in Oldham. In February, he posted to X naming Deputy PM Angela Rayner, Jim McMahon, Minister for Local Government and former leader of Oldham Council, and Debbie Abrahams MP as complicit in the cover-up.
In 2022, the three issued a statement describing Andy Burnham’s Oldham Independent Assurance Review as ‘one of the most comprehensive safeguarding reviews ever undertaken’. According to Miah, ‘Burnham himself has since admitted his review was “limited” and lacked the statutory powers necessary to get to the truth.’
Miah describes multiple failings of the review, including that it interviewed just onesurvivor, following pressure by Maggie Oliver, whom Oldham’s Director of Children’s Services tried to silence; the researchers took only limited notes of testimonies, and multiple witnesses refused to sign off on their testimonies due to inaccuracies; the review covered only a limited timeframe, and gave no figures for how many survivors there were in Oldham.
Miah was also highly critical of the proposed inquiry into the gangs in Oldham – one of the five scrapped by Jess Phillips.
On January 11 he posted on X: ‘Sources inside Oldham Council contacted me overnight distraught that Labour leaders had secretly met with sectarian Muslim opposition councillors. Their goal? Sabotage the judge-led Telford-style inquiry into grooming gangs that was agreed to take place in Oldham after the government had refused a public inquiry. In Telford, independence was key to exposing the truth – the council couldn’t interfere. But in Oldham, [Council leader] Shah Arooj’s corrupt administration is reportedly plotting yet another cover-up, ensuring they control the investigation’s outcome. This isn’t just the council marking its own homework – it’s writing the questions, marking the answers, and publishing whatever suits them.’
Labour’s capitulation to the Muslim voting bloc is now too obvious – too craven – to hide. It’s clear that the party will never reveal the true nature or scale of the grooming gangs; that under their governance, justice will never come for the survivors. Consequently, it’s clear that any inquiry held under the party’s auspices would only ever have been a whitewash.
So what’s the alternative? One option is Rupert Lowe’s independent national inquiry. Lowe has raised over half a million pounds in just over a week, all from small public donations – a clear indication that there is widespread demand for a reckoning on the issue. The Rape Gang Inquiry will hold a call for written evidence, followed by live-streamed public hearings, resulting in a written report.
The Inquiry seeks answers to three key questions: What happened? How did it happen? Why was it allowed to happen? Answering those questions is a crucial step in Britain coming to terms with what took place – and is still taking place across the country. If done properly, the inquiry will send seismic waves through the establishment. If Miah is correct that this does go all the way to the top, it could very well bring down the government.
But then what? With public trust in our establishments shattered, what comes next? How can the British people come to terms with the scale of the atrocity that has taken place in our midst? As a nation, how can we begin to heal from it?
Rotherham Labour MP Sarah Champion has estimated that there are as many as a million survivors of these gangs living among us. I’ve talked to a few of them; without exception they live in the shadows, in fear for their and their families’ lives while their attackers roam free. Some have been forced to move from town to town in an attempt to escape their tormentors; others stick it out in their home towns but stay behind closed doors, afraid of seeing their rapists in the streets.
Those survivors will never be able to live freely, will never have the chance to begin to heal from the damage done to them, until justice is fully served. That means, firstly, that their rapists are not free to walk the streets of their home towns, but it also means that the police and council officers who facilitated the abuse are held to account in court. Likewise, public trust, the very coherence of Britain as a nation, cannot be mended until that reckoning takes place.
That’s why, in addition to Lowe’s inquiry, I’m working on the creation of a National Archive for the Survivors of Grooming Gangs. The aim of the Archive is to record the testimony of every single survivor we can find, to create a historical record of the atrocity which has taken place in our country over the last four decades. Those records will be freely available to the public and to researchers who want to delve in more detail into those all important questions – What happened? How did it happen? Why was it allowed to happen? My hope is that this period will be studied in the same way as other atrocities, such as the Holocaust, are studied, and the research used for educational purposes. We must never again allow suicidal compassion for the outsider to get the better of us.
The records will also be used to bring private prosecutions of police and council officers wherever possible. By building up a full and complete picture of what took place, we can build the evidence base required to bring successful prosecutions. We can’t continue to let the establishment police itself.
Finally, the Archive will act as a national memorial to the lives that were lost and shattered, as a way to begin the healing process. Support for the victims will be central to this work; part of the funds raised will go directly to providing the survivors with high-quality therapy with a practitioner of their choice. Currently too many of them are having to make do with just six hours with an NHS-assigned therapist, which is risible. In the longer term, I hope that the funds can be raised to establish a centre of excellence focused on therapy for survivors of long-term sexual abuse.
If you would like to support this project, I have set up a small fundraiser to get us started, which will also allow us to keep in touch with supporters. That can be found on GoFundMe. If you’d like to be personally involved in helping to set it up, I can be reached at donnarachel@proton.me
There are testimonies here, there, and everywhere by now. One of the purposes of the Archive will be to collate those also as historical records so that researchers can get a clear picture about what information was and was not in the public record at any point in time. Some of the information is being held privately, such as police records and court testimonies, court records which you have to pay to access. This, we will do if we raise enough money. Again, those too will be kept as historical records. It is a huge long-term project that needs to run alongside a national inquiry.
