Britain’s Götterdämmerung

Is Britain a country worth defending? It’s not a question we’ve have had to ask ourselves for a while, not perhaps since the days of the slave trade and sending children up chimneys. But it’s a question we’re certainly asking now. For two decades, the British establishment has lied to its people, smeared critics as racists, and mired itself in corruption and cover-up. The crime? The very worst one there is: the systematic rape and abuse of children.

The names of old industrial towns have become symbols of national shame — Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford. Not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of young girls were abused in ways too horrible to imagine. And, indeed, those who governed us did not want to imagine it was happening. That one of the largest ethnic minority groups in the country was disproportionately implicated in the pedophilic exploitation of white children is a fact that so utterly unseats the assumptions and platitudes of our ruling class that they could not allow themselves to know it. 

At every level, from social workers to police, from councils to courts, from mayors to ministers, the British establishment upheld an omertà over grooming. There are cases of victims and their parents themselves being arrested, with one child prosecuted for the racial abuse of the man who abused her sexually. On the scales of justice, between white working class child and Pakistani rapist, the British state placed its thumb firmly on the side of the latter.

I cannot believe I am writing this, it sounds like some raving, racist conspiracy theory. But it is entirely, utterly true. Baroness Casey has just published her report into the grooming gangs, and amongst the flood of horrific findings, one astonishing fact stood out. 

For these past 20 years, the terrible details of this abuse were not unknown, but the reception they received was very different. Journalists and politicians continually denied that these crimes were disproportionately committed by Pakistanis or other ethnic groups. With huge confidence it was again and again asserted that the vast majority of suspects were white. The Casey report has utterly shattered that narrative, and revealed it for what it was: a cynical lie. 

According to Baroness Casey:

The 2020 Home Office paper, ‘Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation: Characteristics of Offending’, which we discuss in chapter 4, reached a conclusion that “it seems most likely that the ethnicity of group-based CSE offenders is in line with CSA more generally and with the general population, with the majority of offenders being White.” It is quoted and requoted in official reports, the media and elsewhere as proof that claims made about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ are sensationalised or untrue, although this audit found it hard to understand how the Home Office paper reached that conclusion, which does not seem to be evidenced in research or data.

Essentially, we do not know the full picture of the ethnicity of grooming gang suspects because for decades, the authorities have made sure we don’t know it. According to Casey: “It remains impossible to provide a definitive assessment of the ethnic profile of the perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation, a failure of successive politicians and policymakers over many years. The data – particularly on ethnicity – remains inadequate at the national level.”

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a good idea of what it might show: that Pakistani men are committing such crimes at a wildly disproportionate rate. In the in-depth reviews that occurred in Rotherham and Telford, it was shown that Pakistani men were committing the majority of grooming crimes in these towns, despite making up a small minority of the population. 

Whatever the true and full picture, the one that has been presented to us so far is, and I am going to say this again, a conscious lie. Anyone who doubts this need not believe me, but can simply read what the Casey Report says about it:

Other reports on perpetrator ethnicity which we reviewed as part of this audit seemed motivated by a desire to dismiss media coverage or other reports as selective, biased and part of a divisive political agenda, and/or to suggest that such coverage has led to bias in reporting by the public and investigation by the police (e.g. the notion that the BBC ‘Three Girls’ docu-drama on Rochdale led to a spike in reporting of offending of a similar profile), thereby skewing police records of reported offences.

According to the report, research into the cultural factors driving this abuse has simply never been conducted. Nobody would touch this, nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to think about it. 

Every part of our establishment, press, police and politicians, is implicated in silencing this

That, thank god, is finally over. But what now begins is a very fearful business indeed. Every part of our establishment, press, police and politicians, is implicated in silencing this. The British state systematically betrayed its own people, especially the children in its care, rather than confront the emerging problems of immigration and integration in this country. 

This betrayal, now exposed for all to see, will erode already scant trust in central pillars of public life. It will add explosive fuel to the fire of populist political sentiment, driving votes away from traditional parties, and increasing the likelihood of civil unrest and intercommunal violence. 

And there are worrying signs that it may be too late for our rotten establishment to mend its ways. Keir Starmer has belatedly accepted the need for a national inquiry, but many in his own party are neck-deep in it. Shaun Davies, MP for Telford, tried to shift blame onto the Tories, but it was soon revealed that he himself, when was council leader of Telford, wrote to the Home Secretary begging that an inquiry not take place. And yet the Tory record is hardly better. That 2020 Home Office report that fudged the figures? Produced under supposed hardliner Priti Patel. 

Everybody is caught in the same mire. Casey’s report is damning and explicit about the pernicious influence of an institutional priority of racial sensitivity over basic justice for victims. But these attitudes are bone deep and have been inscribed into the DNA of British officialdom. British police forces, like all areas of public service, are committed to DEI principles, with several forces publishing a handbook that advised officers to learn about concepts such as “white fragility”. The Sentencing Council is currently plotting a two-tier policy in which minority groups could be given lighter sentences, a step that is now being desperately challenged by a government under a new kind of pressure and scrutiny. Yet Labour remains committed to implementing the Wendy Williams report, which would oblige the Home Office to set equality and diversity as strategic priorities in every area of policy making (though this is already in effect urged and mandated by many other reports, strategies and pieces of legislation). When setting policy, officials have to “consider the equalities implications of what they are proposing, making specific reference to the public sector equality duty.” There is an obvious issue here — how can the home office possibly implement Casey under such circumstances, when this means, by definition, inflicting disparate impacts on the Pakistani community? 

The inertia of the British state is vast. But something has changed. This pernicious, toxic establishment agenda of managing us through identity groups has been exposed and is now being challenged on a huge scale. The press — The Critic very much included — is now aggressively reporting on these issues, and is not going to stop. New political parties, like Reform, will see politicians who ignore public anger punished at the ballot box. This scandal is dynamite in the foundations of our public life, and already the towers of the old order are starting to tumble down.