Outside the wartime use of rape as a weapon, it’s hard to think of anything comparable in scale and brutality to the “Asian grooming gangs”. We are all now sickeningly familiar with the stories of very young girls being gang-raped, trafficked, doused in petrol, kept in cages, tortured with broken glass, violated with anal pumps, and killed by arson or drug overdoses. Some weren’t even 10 years old.
We don’t know how many have been abused to date. The Jay report revealed 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone, between 1997 and 2013. More than 10 years on, similar gangs have been exposed in more than 50 UK towns: many are still active. Even a conservative calculation on that basis suggests tens if not hundreds of thousands. And since the scandal first came to light, we’ve had inquiry after inquiry. There have been convictions, sometimes of large groups, but every trial reveals that more remain at large.
All the while, the topic has continued to seep into the groundwater of public awareness. And since Elon Musk fanned the flames afresh in January, Starmer has faced a storm of criticism for refusing to grant a fresh inquiry, only commissioning Baroness Louise Casey to conduct an audit of existing reports. Now, though, the Casey audit has provided an excoriating overview of failure. She recommends new inter-agency reporting rules, a new national police investigation, mandatory data collection on perpetrators’ ethnicity, and changes to the law so that children under 16 can no longer be regarded as having “consented” to sex with an adult. Those victims who were appallingly convicted of “child prostitution” will have their criminal records expunged. She also recommended a new national inquiry.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to implement it all. As it were casually, as an afterthought, she also noted that the report identified cases where suspects were asylum seekers: no doubt the detail that prompted Starmer to get out in front of feared civil unrest by announcing the inquiry before the report’s release.
Will it be enough? Perhaps 10 years ago it might have been. But though Cooper did her best to sound angry as she noted that we have “lost more than a decade” in addressing the crimes, in fact, we lost far more than that. The omerta was, and still is, stifling. Newspaper clippings hint at abuses dating all the way back to the Seventies; when far-Right groups raised the alarm in the early 2000s, they were mocked for their accents, accused of stirring up hatred, and censored. When Left-wingers and moderates noticed, they didn’t fare much better: Julie Bindel broke the first mainstream press account almost 20 years ago, only to be called racist for her efforts. The late Times journalist Andrew Norfolk paid a professional price for investigating; former Labour MPs Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion faced stonewalling and harassment. And all that time, our institutions went on grimly pretending everything was basically fine. Why?
With the perpetrators now officially acknowledged, beyond any doubt, to be “disproportionately Asian and Pakistani men”, some accuse Starmer of a cover-up motivated by the party’s ongoing reliance on Pakistani “biraderi” clan politics, to deliver votes in many constituencies. Such allegations are still just that – allegations. But there are surely two senses in which Labour had an interest in making this story go away.
First, that as the Casey report acknowledges, the crimes really are mostly committed by ethnic minority men, mostly Pakistani, against white-majority children. And Labour are, far more than any other party, the standard-bearers for “diversity”. On this front, Helen Lewis spelled out the problem with commendable clarity earlier this year: no one on the Left wants a “national conversation” about the rape gangs — because so many of the possible solutions are, from this perspective, prima facie unacceptable:
“Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent Right want? […] Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.”
And second, it’s not just about race relations. It’s also about the public sector, of which Labour has long presented itself as a champion. And the extent of institutional complicity, already clear, is reiterated in Casey’s report: they all knew.
The police, especially, knew. Victims were blamed, or even arrested: in one notorious incident, a father arrived outside the house in which his own daughter was being raped, called the police, and was then himself arrested. In other incidents, girls would press charges only to be immediately contacted by their rapists with threats: events strongly suggestive of police corruption. One officer in Rotherham told a desperate father that the town “would erupt” if the crimes were exposed; another, according to the 2014 Jay report, admitted these atrocities have been ongoing for 30 years but “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”.
Care homes also knew. One Bradford girl reported all the way back in 2014 that the home where she ought to have found safety and respite didn’t just look the other way — when the men who raped and sold her arrived outside the home, the staff would tell her to “go out and see them”. Councils knew, too: Birmingham was suppressing reports into looked-after children being raped and trafficked 30 years ago. In Oldham, the notorious leader of one rape gang was appointed “Welfare Officer” after a girl had already come forward with allegations against him. How many teachers knew? If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, the Department of Education knew.
The truth is that these gangs are a Frankenstein’s monster hatched in the public sector, and shielded by its operant dogmas. All of the incentives in our modern institutions tended toward burying their crimes — from the cold charity and misapplied cant about “autonomy”, that enabled troubled adolescent girls to come and go from care homes to their rapists, to the police fixation on “community relations”, that misbegotten child of multiculturalism and policing by consent, to the national-level emphasis on “multiculturalism” and reflexive contempt for the white working class.
Everyone wanted the Pakistani rape gangs to be racist nonsense. “Diversity” and a large, costly public sector are load-bearing pillars of the whole modern British social contract. It really wasn’t just the Left: the difference in complicity between Labour and the other mainstream parties is a matter of degree, not kind.
“These gangs are a Frankenstein’s monster hatched in the public sector, and shielded by its operant dogmas.”
Now, though, it’s Labour, above all others the party of diversity and the public sector, in the unhappy position of needing to prove — rapidly, and to a mutinously angry electorate — that these pillars of “modern Britain” can be upheld, without this necessarily coming at the expense of brutalised working-class girls. Will it work? On the inquiry, Cooper has promised a nationally led effort that will force recalcitrant local officials to stop covering up failures. And who knows, perhaps it’ll be different this time. But the Grenfell inquiry spent seven years and £177 million telling us what we already knew about bad bureaucracies, only to recommend a solution mostly composed of more bureaucracy. As a public inquiry into public inquiries conducted by the House of Lords in 2024 concluded, recommendations are often not implemented. No wonder the public has come to see them as an expensive, time-consuming way of kicking the can down the road.
And even if it is different this time, it’s unclear whether the raft of measures Cooper has announced will be enough to reassure the public that Labour’s response has shifted from pathological deferral-by-process to something resembling action. I suspect that very little would do so, short of a kind of blue-sky radicalism wholly absent from mainstream politics. Instead, though everything points to this as a problem insoluble within the existing system’s terms, Labour still appears to be clinging desperately to those existing terms.
Witness Cooper’s insistence that what we’re talking about here is the “depravity of a minority”, and that this mustn’t be used to “marginalise whole communities”. Meanwhile everything we know about clan-based as opposed to Anglophone individualistic cultures suggests collective responsibility is in fact the right response. So if it turns out that the only way of actually tackling the problem really is “marginalising whole communities”, would Labour be willing to restore trust in the system by actually doing so? The answer is surely no.
Still more unthinkably, for all the mainstream parties, the extent of institutional corruption suggests that actually tackling these systemic failures would require more than some new procedures, or throwing a few mid-ranking officials under the bus. That it would, in fact, require razing every one of the institutions, ideologies, proscriptions, and ruling-class shibboleths, that treated the victimisation of tens of thousands of white working-class girls as acceptable collateral damage in the construction of “modern Britain”.
But nothing in Cooper’s speech today gave any indication of willingness to touch these sacred foundations. Instead, Labour’s announcements amount to yet another cleanup operation on behalf of the overall diversity-and-big-welfare regime, that seeks only to scrub away the most egregious evidence of its inability to protect those it was founded to serve. With every mounting sign of this paralysis, growing numbers of those citizens begin to wonder if the change we need is of a more fundamental kind.
