Well, it’s hats off to Elon Musk then, isn’t it? What are the chances that the PM would actually have commissioned and now agreed to Dame Louise Casey’s report recommending a proper national inquiry into the mass rape of white girls – some as young as 12 – by men of Pakistani/Bangladeshi heritage if it hadn’t been for Elon having the bad taste to raise the issue?
When Elon did put it on the radar, the PM condemned people who spread “lies and misinformation”. Doesn’t look like misinformation now, and it didn’t then either. I know memories are short, but are they so short that we’ve forgotten that back in January, when the Tories tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill to secure a national investigation, there was not one Labour MP – not one – who voted in favour?
Jess Philips, safeguarding minister, last October rejected out of hand the appeal by Oldham Council where abuse on an horrific scale took place, for a national inquiry. Deputy PM Angela Rayner, who never loses an opportunity to talk about holding the actual hands of abuse victims, tried to fob us off with five local inquiries with nothing like the same powers to summon witnesses, when the number of towns affected was more like 50.
It seems only the other day that the Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, was dismissing the calls for a national inquiring into rape gangs as “Dog whistle” politics. Actually, it was only the other week. Bear in mind then, when you see MPs baying in support of a national inquiry in the Commons that they were precisely the people – both main parties – who did their best to ignore the issue for years – remember it first came to light in 2001.
We want people named and held accountable
And the reaction to these horrors has been one cover up after another, right from the start, when a Channel Four documentary on the issue in Bradford in 2003 was put on hold for months after police warned it could inflame community tensions. The notion that turning a blind eye to the mass rape of girls as young as 12 chiefly by Pakistani Muslim men might not be terribly good for community relations did not seem to occur to them.
In April, Chris Philp, Tory MP for Croydon, told the Commons:
“There is now clear evidence that those in authority covered up these rapes because the perpetrators were mainly of Pakistani heritage. Last week, I met retired Detective Chief Inspector John Piekos. In Bradford, he witnessed the abuse of a young girl in a car, but he was then instructed by a chief superintendent to drop the matter in order to avoid antagonising Bradford’s Muslim community. Covering up the rape of young girls for that reason is one of the most immoral things I have ever heard, yet not a single person—not one—has ever been held to account for these cover-ups.”
It was not just Labour. Dominic Cummings, who had a front seat in Downing Street from 2010 gave a talk in Oxford last week in which he discussed “the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast cover-up of industrialised mass rape of white English children by Pakistani and Somali gangs over decades, while Whitehall continues to import people from the exact same tribal areas responsible.
… In January, No. 10 Downing Street claimed that Elon Musk was spreading conspiracy theories about national cover-ups. This is wrong. I witnessed the attempts at these cover-ups myself when I was in working in Whitehall – including the deliberate attempt by government departments to use courts to block reporting of the entire story.”
I’d like to know quite a bit more about this – wouldn’t you? Because it does seem absolutely remarkable that 24 years after the issue was first raised it is only now, a full generation later, that we’re getting a national inquiry. And I think we want a little more from this one than the usual – lessons have been learned etc. I think we want people – local councillors, police chiefs, social services heads, the lot – named and held accountable.
And by accountable, I mean facing actual penalties for their action and inaction. I want them prosecuted if they impeded the course of justice, I want them named for refusing to prosecute people credibly accused of rape, I want them sacked if they blamed victims rather than perpetrators; if they have peerages and honours I want them stripped of them.
I want more, far more, of the perpetrators brought to justice
I want their photographs in the papers. The victims went ignored, unknown and shamefully unpublicised except by the likes of Times journalist Andrew Norfolk; well, let’s have the full blaze of publicity for those who colluded in the cover up, who, by inaction, enabled mass rape to continue.
I want more, far more, of the perpetrators brought to justice – there have been far too few convictions for such a widespread problem over decades. I want some sort of justice done. I want the politicians that Dominic Cummings referred to named and held to account. It is the very least the thousands of girls brutally abused deserve. And if these revelations raise community tensions blame the people who did their best to suppress them rather than deal with the rapes of very young, very vulnerable girls.
National inquiries operate at glacier speed – let me refer you to the Covid inquiry – and this one should be different. What we need are a series of interim reports – every six months to a year – to share what has been learned and provide the information which could lead to prosecutions of those responsible, or their sackings.
Dame Louise Casey has done us a service by reminding us that these young vulnerable girls were the victims of institutional racism. The political class, the police, social services, they’re all acutely sensitive to the issues of racism… but it seems it all depends on who’s doing the crime and who are the victims. It’s time for righteous anger.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
