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A BLIND MAN on a flying horse would be aware of the controversy surrounding Pakistani male grooming gangs who targeted vulnerable white girls over many years.
The controversy has been rumbling on for years. However, it recently hit the headlines again after Elon Musk attacked Sir Keir Starmer for failing to bring ‘rape gangs’ to justice when he was director of public prosecutions (DPP).
Musk has also called for the UK Prime Minister to be jailed #, claiming that “Starmer is complicit in the crimes” of child sex grooming gangs.
(For those who don’t know, Musk is the owner of several companies, including X – previously known as Twitter. He’s also a billionaire, and as we know, money talks & buys influence.)
The National Liberal Party believes that child abuse – indeed, any form of abuse – is wrong, no matter who does it. We also believe that any systemic failure to protect any vulnerable section of society must be investigated, halted & reversed.
Therefore, we believe that the authorities must grasp the nettle & order a fully independent national public enquiry into the grooming gang scandal.
Any enquiry must be based on evidence & not feelings. Nothing or no one should be allowed to influence it. There should be no point scoring from either ‘left’ or ‘right’. Its sole aim should be to follow the evidence & uncover the truth. If prosecutions follow, then so be it.
We also feel that there’s also a fair argument for instituting similar national enquiries into various religious – and non-religious – organisations that have been mired in scandals relating to abuse. (Readers will be aware that Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, resigned last week due to his failure to investigate allegations of physical and sexual abuse in the Church of England.)
With all the above in mind, we reproduce an article by Charlie Peters (a National Reporter with GB News) which appeared in The Standard on 8th January. You can read the original article here:
It goes without saying that there are no links between Charlie Peters, GB News, The Standard & the National Liberal Party.
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The Last Inquiry Failed Grooming Gang Victims – We Need A Full National Inquiry
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The scandal has been laid out by reports on places like Rotherham, Telford and Rochdale: thousands of girls, mostly white, were raped and abused, often in sadistic ways, by organised networks of abusers, who were disproportionately of Pakistani origin.
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The abuse, and the revelations that officials in local government and the police failed to stop it, in many cases out of a fear of looking racist, shame our country.
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Just some of those found guilty of sexually abusing vulnerable girls
However, there has been no definitive report looking at the issue on a national level.
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During this period, numerous reports were published on specific subjects, such as abuse in the Catholic Church and residential schools. However, there was no new report on grooming gangs, despite this being among the most horrific examples of child abuse in recent British history.
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The final IICSA report only mentioned Rotherham once, Rochdale only in relation to abuse there by the politician Cyril Smith, and didn’t reference Telford at all. That’s even though the report in Rotherham estimated there were at least 1,400 victims and the report in Telford estimated 1,000 victims at a minimum. In both towns, earlier reviews found that political correctness about race had chilled investigations –
https://www.iitcse.com.
IICSA lumped the grooming gangs in with other types of abuse in a report on organised networks. It chose six areas where there were no major reports of rape gangs, claiming that they had already been examined.
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Despite multiple reports and academic papers discussing the over-representation of abusers from Pakistani backgrounds, the report only used the term “Pakistani” once. There was no discussion of the way that political correctness had led the authorities to turn a blind eye to abuse, despite multiple reports having found this.
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When it came to the controversial question of ethnicity, the report found that the police failed to record the ethnicity of perpetrators in between 28% and 86% of cases. It said the lack of data meant that they couldn’t conclude whether there was a link between ethnicity and organised child abuse networks.
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It seems like this is the only sort of ethnicity data the public sector is unwilling to gather. Despite that, of the six significant prosecutions of organised networks included in the report, four involved Asians and only one involved white abusers.
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Whistleblower Maggie Oliver, who exposed the Rochdale scandal, has told GB News that when it came to abuse gangs, IICSA was a “cover up”. She pointed out that it relied on officials rather than the testimony of survivors, despite the failure of officials being a key reason why the rape gang scandals have happened.
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Two-thirds of the statement she gave to IICSA was cut out and many survivors weren’t even given a chance to testify, in part due to the inquiry taking place during Covid.
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None of the recommendations in the final IICSA report, which I think were far too weak to properly tackle the issue, have ever been adopted. Britain doesn’t need a Children’s Minister, it needs officials held to account for covering-up rampant child abuse.
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The government has said that local councils can organise their own inquiries. But these are major political battles. Reports in Telford, Rotherham, Rochdale and Oldham all took years to come to fruition. Survivors had to battle with politicians who sought to block or undermine them. The councillors who were accused of covering up the abuse had the power to vote against investigating it.
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Some Labour-controlled councils have voted down attempts to hold inquiries or pressured the government to ignore requests. As the IICSA report noted, many towns don’t want to be labelled as “another Rochdale or Rotherham”. They don’t want the bad press and the spotlight on their actions which an inquiry would bring.
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The local review in Oldham was called a “whitewash” by Maggie Oliver and it has failed to satisfy the town, with major questions about who knew what and when left unanswered. The result has been years of local political turmoil, with claims of a cover-up.
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There are many views on this issue but so many of the survivors I have spoken to have told me that they have little confidence in the current approach. IICSA wasn’t enough and they don’t want to have to wait years to get local reports that are quickly passed over by the media.
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They want a national inquiry, something ambitious which can investigate all of the relevant towns, to uncover everything across the nation in one aggressive review. It should be time-limited, with clear terms of reference, driven by survivors rather than officials, with a strong remit to force police and council employees to reveal everything they know — or face disciplinary action.
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Rather than letting this drag out further, causing the issue to fester and lending support to the view that the authorities just want this to go away, it would be best for the government to tackle the bull by the horns. Instead of muddying the waters with claims about the far-right and misinformation, Keir Starmer can act to finally end this scandal.
The Southport massacre was a horrific event that attracted significant media attention across the globe. The actions of the authorities have not been without controversy, and some members of parliament have expressed concern that information which ought to have been placed in the public domain is being withheld.
