The authorities are impartial when it comes to policing, we are told. 

Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, recently insisted that claims of “two-tier” policing in the United Kingdom were “absolute nonsense”.

Sir Thomas Winsor, a former chief inspector, was equally adamant. “It doesn’t exist”, he said when interviewed on LBC, a radio station, adding that “there should be criminal liability” for social media companies that tolerate “harmful material”. 

Sir Keir Starmer thinks that “two-tier policing” in Britain was a “non-issue”, insisting that policing was carried out “without fear or favour.”

To claim that there is no such thing, however, hinges either on forgetting the past, believing that our institutions are trusted, or both. 

As a reminder, Sir Keir and much of our police knelt to BLM at the height of the riots, during which twenty seven police officers were injured by mostly peaceful “anti-racist” protestors in June 2020.

Firstly, let us consider data. 

Polling about disorder released by YouGov on 13 August found that close to four times more people (36%) thought those described as “far right” were treated by the police more strictly compared those who thought they were treated more leniently (11%). 

 Secondly, let us reflect on personal experience. 

I stood for parliament in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. I spent three happy years living and campaigning there from 2007 to 2010. My favourite part of the process was door knocking, meeting my would-be constituents. In that time, we spoke to around 23,000 people. 

Behind each door existed a different worldview, shaped by all kinds of subtle dynamics, such as character, interest, affinities, profession, age, neighbourhoods, religion and much more. 

The admixture of all these attributes made the canvassed dweller, like a diamond, a unique and irreplaceable type. 

Not all discussions were friendly, of course, but most were enriching. 

Politically, Wakefield voted Labour from 1932 to 2019 when, like much of the rest of Northern England, voters lent their votes — briefly — to the Conservative Party. 

In 2016, the city voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union. 

Wakefield returned to the Labour fold in July 2024. 

Wakefield regularly makes it in the top ten of England’s worst places to live. Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, published data in 2019, which showed “Inner London” GPD per capital being over seven times higher than that of West Yorkshire, at £29,500 — a substantial wealth gap. 

The city has four major council estates: Eastmoor, Portobello, Peacock and Lupset. The latter recently ranked among the poorest neighbourhoods in the city. 

It is there, in the poorest part of one of Britain’s most impoverished cities, that a personal life defining occurrence happened, during a canvassing session, as the 2010 general election loomed.

A woman, careworn, fretting, rushed from door to door, distributing to each letter box an A4 piece of paper, produced from her own shoddy printer. 

In a rush, she had no visible commercial, religious or political affiliations. As she saw me, she crossed the street to speak to me. 

She pressed her home-made literature, dripping in despair, into my hand. In it, she had written that, for days, her daughter had gone missing. Nowhere to be seen. Her suspicion was that a local gang of Asian men had taken her. 

She had contacted the police, her elected representatives as well as council officers. On the leaflet, her address and mobile phone number were highlighted. She was begging for help. None had been forthcoming. 

I proposed to follow things up. I would go to the police to check things out. Hopeful, I said we would be able to receive the help needed.

She looked at me with a slightly despondent smile, thanking me at least for showing some concern, and resumed her Sisyphean task. 

Haunted by her desolation, I went to see the police. 

I told the officers about my encounter. They were indifferent. I showed them the leaflet. They looked at it first and then at each other. One of the officers said: “It’s nothing to worry about”. Her mental state was a probable reason for her activity, he said. I answered that she seems perfectly sane to me. More desperate than delusional was my observation. 

To put things in perspective, I then explained how time consuming it is to deliver leaflets door-to-door across such a vast area. In addition, she, unlike me, was doing it on her own.

Motivation is the only fuel for such an undertaking, I explained. She had it in spades. Their tone, however, became noticeably harder. 

After a while, the other officer, losing patience, said: “Look, we know her. She is a troublemaker.” That was it. 

To which my attitude, shamefully, changed. 

They were the police, after all, the experts in their field. By automatism, I sided with them.  Although some niggling doubts did remain. 

Indeed, in Wakefield, the local authorities had history. 

Only a few years before, Craigh Faunch and Ian Wathey, a couple, had been approved as foster carers by the council. They were Wakefield’s first gay duo to be given that privilege. 

After much celebration, they were eventually convicted on 12 counts of sexual offences against four of the eighteen children placed under their care from 2003 to mid-2005. 

The Parrot Report, entitled “Independent Inquiry report into the circumstances of Child Sexual Abuse by two Foster Carers in Wakefield”, found that the two “were left free to sexually abuse vulnerable boys in their care because social workers feared being accused of discrimination if they investigated complaints” and “being branded homophobic”. 

Yet, my faith in the police remained. After all, they were the thin blue line. The last line of defence against anarchy. Or so it seemed at the time. 

However, little prepared me for what was to come next. 

The general election of 2010 came and went. A new administration came to office. 

A few months later, in January 2011, The Times published a piece entitled “Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs”, written by Andrew Norfolk, a prize winning investigative journalist. 

Three days later, Jack Straw, formerly home secretary, appeared on Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship news programme at the time, telling an unready audience that Pakistani men tended to see white girls as “easy meat” for sex abuse. 

My fair policing illusions in Britain shattered instantly. The collusion between the police, the local authorities and much of our establishment had been laid bare. 

The sting of shame was unbearable. The vision of that forlorn mother in Wakefield came back to me. 

I had believed them, not her, whose child had gone missing. 

As with the abusive foster carers with young boys, the authorities sacrificed young girls on the altar of the stable community relations mirage all to avoid being “branded”.   

The authorities ignored parents, attacked those who insisted, imprisoned victims and sided with the aggressors. 

When the topic of mass rape was tentatively broached, cowardly euphemisms were the closest acknowledgment that something was awry. 

In strategy meetings in council, the perpetrators were described as “men of a certain ethnicity, engaged in a particular occupation”.

On the aforementioned “occupation”, two stories stand out for their heartless cruelty. 

Speaking to his audience, Norfolk told of a 13-year-old girl, who went missing in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a stone’s throw away from Wakefield. The mother called the police, who told her: “don’t worry love, she’ll turn up as soon as she gets hungry”. 

 At 2.30am the following morning, a woman on the other side of Rotherham called 999 “because she heard a young girl screaming in the house next door”. 

The police found two “almost completely naked” 13-year-old girls, blind drunk “with seven adult Pakistani men”. “South Yorkshire police arrested the thirteen-year-old girl for being drunk and disorderly”, after which she was charged and convicted. 

Andrew Norfolk then added, teary-eyed: “They did not even question the men”. 

The other tale, among thousands, is of an Essex girl, who was placed in a children’s home in Rotherham. 

Plied with alcohol, she was taken to an upstairs bedroom in the city. “Cars had started arriving from all across Greater Manchester”. 

“Men were queuing on the stairs and on the landing outside the bedroom. The jury heard that 50 men had had sex with that girl in one night”. 

“She was a child”, Norfolk noted. 

In time, only seven men were convicted. 

In a subsequent document entitled Report of Inspection of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council to the House of Commons, published in February 2015, Dame Louise wrote “the children were sexually exploited by men who came largely from the Pakistani heritage community”.

In direct contradiction with Sirs Mark, Thomas and Keir, an unnamed police officer confirmed what we all knew: “they were second class citizens. The girls were blamed a lot for what happened.”

Another police officer was recorded as telling a young victim: “Don’t worry — you aren’t the first girl to be raped by XX and you won’t be the last.” 

As a witness clarified “the view was that they were little slags.” 

The corollary was “a normalisation of pregnancies, miscarriages and terminations in children under 16”.

South Yorkshire police officer, Hassan Ali, would have told us much more but he unfortunately died when a car drove into him as he was being investigated for his handling of child sexual exploitation in town. 

A prior report by Professor Alexis Jay estimated at least 1,400 young girls had been abused between 1997 and 2013. This, the report repeated ominously, was only a conservative estimate. 

Norfolk agreed. Only a “tiny, tiny number” of perpetrators were ever convicted. 

Perhaps more depressingly, these horrific crimes had been known and suppressed for years as a 2002 unpublished home office report shows. 

“How many lives could have been protected if swift action had been taken” asked Sarah Champion, MP for Rotherham. 

In a fit of righteous outrage, she wrote a column for The Sun in 2017. 

“British Pakistani men are raping and exploiting white girls… and it’s time we faced up to it,” she said. “Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”

Barely a week later, Sarah Champion MP resigned from the Labour frontbench. The article had caused offence, suggesting that no lessons were learnt at all, however much human collateral damage this extraordinary and deeply troubling never-ending scandal caused.

Investigations after investigations pointed to conversations between the police, civilian authorities, and the Pakistani heritage community being “brokered” through “elders” – a Pashtun Jirga in England in other words.   

When the police prodded, the elders denied everything, a tactic the police and civil servants themselves subsequently espoused with gusto. They never looked back.

They spoke through elders then; they speak through elders now.

Nothing, in short, has changed.

In vindictive desperation, the authorities however lashed out at the bearers of bad news.

Then it was Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Times and The Sun, who was out to get them, today’s equivalent complaint of “spreading misinformation”, and therefore attacked; now it is Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter.

Rotherham, as we know, was followed by a slew of similar stories: Rochdale, Manchester, Newcastle, Telford, East Oxford, and many more. Thousands of young girls, on a very conservative estimate, and families had to suffer at the hands of official cowardice. 

Using the police’s track record on solving burglaries as the benchmark, the total number of actual underage rape victims is probably many, many times more than reported. 

With a larger lens, we notice that “recorded sexual offences” in England and Wales have tripled in 20 years to close to 200 000 per annum.  

In April 2024, in Wakefield and surrounding areas twenty four men were jailed for child sex abuse in “Rotherham-like” grooming scandal in which young girls were “traded like commodities”. The judge called the abuse “abhorrent in the extreme”.

The ghostly memory of the forlorn mother from Lupset, Wakefield, betrayed by those, who were tasked with her and her family’s protection haunts me still. 

Lessons learnt? Not quite. 

The pattern, like a user’s manual, has not changed. 

Victims are blamed, pressured into keeping quiet, and whistleblowers are pursued. In short, after an initial flurry of activity, we have taken the Rotherham vaccine and become inured to the plight of our young girls, who are foolishly looking to us in hope of salvation, imploring us for help and daily praying for justice – a vain yearning in today’s Britain.

Mentioning the scandal carries a “branding” sentence, which an increasing number of people feel unable to bear, preferring to throttle the source of the sound of suffering than to deal with the root of the problem. 

One thing is for sure: it is for us, not the authorities, to judge them on their record. 

The mother in Wakefield lived through two-tier policing, as have many thousands of other desperate souls. That is a fact.