Here’s a surefire way to know if you’ve lost the moral plot – you get angrier about the public discussion of mass rape than you do about the mass raping itself. Your moral conscience gets more fired up by people talking about the industrial-scale abuse of working-class girls than it does by the abuse itself. You’re more horrified by the phrase ‘Pakistani rape gang’ than you are by the existence of Pakistani rape gangs. If any of that applies to you, then your morals have been well and truly shattered on the wheel of cultural relativism, classism and cowardice.
We witnessed a grim display of such post-moral lunacy this week, following comments made by Home Office minister Mike Tapp. He said the UK government’s national inquiry into Britain’s rape gangs must ‘identify and address any links between ethnicity, religion and culture, and child rape’. Most Brits will have thought his comments entirely reasonable – after all, it’s well established that Pakistani Muslims are over-represented in the crime of group-based child sexual exploitation. Yet others raged against him. They called him racist. They can’t believe people are still yapping about those gangs. Can’t you give it a rest?
The inquiry – which the government grudgingly agreed to following an explosion of digital rage over the past year – will be a ‘moment of reckoning’, said home secretary Shabana Mahmood this week. It will ‘explicitly’ look at the backgrounds of the abusers and rapists, she said, including their ethnicity and religion. And it will ask whether cops and officials failed to investigate these gangs out of a ‘misplaced desire to protect community cohesion’. (Spoiler: Yes, they did.) Tapp echoed his boss’s remarks and said the inquiry will interrogate whether there’s ‘a link’ between ethnicity and rape gangs.
Cue a mad dash for the fainting couch among bourgeois leftists. A Labour MP sent a formal complaint to the party whip asking, in the words of the New Statesman, if ‘the government’s official position is now that BAME citizens… might have a high predisposition to be child rapists’. Shorter version: Are you RACIST? Such juvenile wailing was rife among the Very Online left. ‘What. The. Fuck’, said Owen Jones, who is 41 years old. The fruitcakes of the Canary called Tapp a Temu version of Enoch Powell and said: ‘Shut your racist Tapp, Mike!’ Yeah, publicly mentioning the mass rape of working-class girls by mostly Pakinstani men? How impertinent. Shut up.
Zarah Sultana also called Tapp a ‘Temu Enoch Powell’ – there’s a shit-left WhatsApp group, isn’t there? – and said his comments were ‘straight out of the old fascist playbook’. That’s big talk for a woman who recently said ‘every inch’ of the Jewish homeland should be given to the Arabs. The former tit-whisperer turned Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, called on Keir Starmer to condemn Tapp’s ‘awful comments’. His deputy, Mothin Ali, accused Tapp of blowing a ‘racist dog-whistle’. ‘There’s no link between grooming gangs [and] any particular race, religion or culture’, Ali said.
And there it was – the great lie of the grooming-gang scandal. That wilful blindness to truth that made these outrages possible in the first place. For Ali is wholly wrong, and at some level he must know he is. Earlier this year, the government’s audit on grooming gangs, overseen by Baroness Louise Casey, confirmed what many knew – that these gangs that inflicted such horrors on poor and working-class girls in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and across England were to a large extent made up of Pakistani Muslim men. There are ‘disproportionate numbers’ of such men among the ‘suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation’, said the Casey audit.
It shouldn’t have taken a government audit to tell people this. The victims of these gangs have been saying for years that most of their groomers and rapists ‘were Pakistani men’. I guess ‘Believe Women’ doesn’t apply when the women are working class. There was an undeniably racial element to this misogynistic rampage that lasted decades. The girls were branded ‘white slags’ and ‘white trash’ as they were passed around for drugging and raping by their tormentors. How striking that the left loves to hold forth on racism except when it’s a vulnerable girl from the working class being called a white slut by gangs of men who consider her their moral inferior.
The spluttering reaction to Tapp’s comments is a reminder that there are still people out there who think protecting the ideology of multiculturalism is more important than telling the truth about what was done to working-class girls. It was precisely these warped moral priorities, this moral depravity, that let the rape-gang scandal go on for so long. Officials turned a blind eye to the violent subjugation of working-class girls because they feared being called Islamophobic, and they feared the response of the bovine masses – as they view us – if we found out that gangs of largely Pakistani men were assaulting largely white girls.
The government deserves no plaudits for finally talking about the ethnicity issue. It’s less than a year since Starmer described concern about rape gangs as a ‘far-right bandwagon’. Not long ago, Labour MPs were shamed and sacked for saying what Mike Tapp now says. Across the Blob and in most of the mainstream media, anyone who used the phrase ‘Pakistani rape gangs’ risked being unpersoned. For decades, virtually the entire establishment veiled the truth about the rape gangs out of an unhinged devotion to the multicultural ideology and a bigoted fear of the masses and our supposed racism.
That was always the true bigotry in the rape-gang scandal – classism. It was the elites’ savage lack of concern for the ‘white trash’ victims, and their sleepless dread of the ‘white trash’ public, that led them to ignore, downplay and outright lie about one of the gravest crimes ever committed against the girls of the United Kingdom. It seems some on the left are still riddled with such classist nonchalance in the face of mass rape. It seems some still prize their own ideology more highly than the security and dignity of working-class girls. To sacrifice truth at the altar of dogma is bad enough – to sacrifice working-class girls at the altar of political correctness is infinitely worse.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
