The disappeared and the damned
A reflection on Roger Scruton’s neglected “grooming gangs” novel
The “grooming gangs” reignited as a national issue over New Year’s 2024/5, as court transcripts from the Oxford sentencing were shared on X, showing what actually lay behind the coy euphemism. It seeped into Elon Musk’s feed somehow and exploded as an international cause of national shame. The industrial scale sex trafficking and systematic mass rape of mostly white working-class girls by mostly Pakistani Muslim men in towns and cities up and down the country cannot be pushed aside. Righteousness demands that this be named properly: it was (and still is) a form of abuse that would be considered a war crime if committed in any of the world’s conflict zones.
This is a wound on the soul of the nation, one allowed to suppurate and fester for far too long in service to our antiracist state, our multicultural society, and our inverted moral order. It implicates, through the perpetrators, victims, and complicit actors, the whole of our state and society from top to bottom. The numbers of girls trafficked, abused, raped, injured, and even killed likely reaches into the tens of thousands. It is difficult to hear, much less comprehend the depths to which the perpetrators’ depravity sank.
Given the enormity of what has happened, it is hard to gain perspective. The sense of atrocity is almost too great. Literature might seem an odd way of dealing with this, but the imagination can help us gain a greater sense of what we face in our lives. This is why Roger Scruton wrote his so-called grooming gangs novel, The Disappeared. In this book, Scruton uses fiction to reveal “the deepest truths in the mystical language that turns prose to poetry and poetry to prayer”. I’d never read one of Scruton’s novels, as they’re not what he’s known for or spent most time on. After reading this, I wish he’d written more fiction, as his prose style in novelistic form is a pleasure to read, lambent in its power to convey the heart of things and draw portraits of peoples’ lives at a moment in time.
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Works of the imagination like this novel are important not simply for their direct political impact, but for how they shape the environment within which politics takes place. Novels like Scruton’s are not mere passing fancies or wistful time wasters. As philosopher Claes Ryn writes, “The power of even the ablest and most knowledgeable wielders of political influence is sharply circumscribed by another power. That power does not marshal and deploy resources in a utilitarian political fashion. It works in a more subtle and yet efficacious manner: it shapes the fundamental sensibilities, desires, and views of a people.”
Art and culture, broadly construed, shape the moral imagination of a people. In Ryn’s words, “Every society and individual has a vision, however inarticulate, of what life is like and might become … We live by what we thrill to, says D. H. Lawrence. The imagination is more generally at the bottom of our sense of the whole, of how we see human existence, its opportunities, dangers, joys, and sorrows.” It is on this basis for the inner landscape of life that we form ideas about how life should be lived. How we are governed also depends on this formation. How artists and intellectuals see and portray the world affects how elites govern the world. Politics and culture are not upstream or downstream of each other; politics and culture are intertwined. The culture absorbed by elites matters to how they govern. The fact that Scruton’s novel has not had the readership it demands, especially now, is indicative of much that is wrong with our elite culture. This essay is a small attempt to rectify that lack.
This book was published in 2015, in the wake of the 2013 revelations about what actually happened in Rotherham. Scruton has been criticised and condemned by those on the more radical right for what they see as his sentimental philosophising which is portrayed as a form of defeatism. It should be noted that what Ben Sixsmith calls the “conspiracy of murmuring” meant that with a few brave exceptions like Julie Bindel and Andrew Norfolk, Scruton was a rare exception in Britain for writing in public about what happened. That can’t be said of many, and he deserves credit for this alone.
The story plays out on the stage of the fictional Yorkshire town of Whinmoore, a symbol for the economic decline inflicted on and social breakdown suffered by what French geographer Christophe Guilluy might have called “peripheral England”. The cast numbers five main protagonists, the threads of their lives intertwining to weave a tapestry of triumph and eventual redemption. There are two youngish Englishmen, Stephen Haycraft, an English teacher at St Catherine’s Catholic secondary school, and Justin Fellowes, head of a green energy consultancy. Then there are several younger women: successful lawyer Laura Markham; Afghan refugee and attempted free spirit Muhibbah Shahin; and Sharon Williams, a waif of a sixth-form girl lost in the foster care system and abandoned with a family in a tower block mostly inhabited by immigrants and asylum seekers on a sink estate, teetering on the edge of one of the ever-widening cracks in the social order, prey to her abusers from a gang of Afghans, and the East European traffickers with which they collaborate.
Laura Markham has been hired by Justin Fellowes’ green energy company to audit their books, which have shown discrepancies caused by Muhibbah funnelling money to her brothers to fund their part of the trafficking network. Fellowes falls for Muhibbah, but the sharp edges of cultural difference cut the gossamer strands of their burgeoning love to shreds. Markham stays in the same tower block as Sharon, Angel Towers, and is mistaken for the girl, kidnapped to be traded into modern slavery through the interconnected network that stretches from England to Kaliningrad and thence to the Middle East and Central Asia. Sharon Williams is the real target of this shadow side of globalisation, where a person becomes a thing to be traded, bought and sold along the same arteries of commerce that goods and currency flow.
Sharon however refuses to acquiesce in her total depersonalisation. She has already been raped by the local gang of Afghan refugees that funnel vulnerable girls across continents; she refuses to let go of what dignity she has held to herself. Stephen Haycraft appears as her saviour, spinning out the narrative of The Tempest in his classes, from which Sharon gains the words to write the letters to him that bind the narrative of the play to her own situation. We learn of her abuse, the threat to her life, and the murder of another girl in a similarly precarious situation. Haycraft’s story becomes bound up with hers, ending with him saving her but condemning himself. The whole narrative shows itself as a prose interpretation of The Tempest itself, and likewise holds out the possibility of redemption for those who come close to damnation.
Around these individual lives revolves the larger story of a changing society, where newcomers clash with old-timers, over things which have been dismissed as “right-wing culture wars” but which strike at the heart of what it means to be human: who are we, where do we come from, what is the point of our life, is there an ultimate reality which orders the good? There will always be a vision of the highest good, and it will always guide the shape and form of the public square and political regime. The only question is what form this takes, and who gets to decide.
There will always be a throne upon which sits what the culture considers sacred. Britain has had an empty throne for decades if not a century. As a result, its people have been rendered replaceable and disposable through liberalism’s placeless and timeless vision of life. When you introduce into such a vacuum en masse a people whose culture orients around a strongly cohesive sense of self and a determined vision of the transcendent good, the results should not be a surprise.
It is in light of this that Scruton portrays a protest organised against the school by local Islamic radicals and malcontents who despise the teaching of what they consider immoral material around relationships. This mob is supported and joined by leftist radicals who see them as the downtrodden wretched of the earth transplanted to the source of white supremacy and therefore the means to bring in the antiracist post-national utopia.
Meanwhile, the trafficking and grooming gangs move in the shadows of these new populations, protected by a wall of silence at best and direct complicity at worst. Such silence is deepened by the police who show no interest in the danger in which Sharon is placed, along with the social worker Iona who at first sees such mass rape and abuse as simply the result of cultural friction and something we shouldn’t notice or protest lest we raise the corpse of mass racism from the grave of WWII and give it new life. The ideological veil is ripped from her eyes only just in time.
Back at the school, Stephen Haycraft escorts his pupils past the baying crowd, showing physical courage despite his fear which leaves him trembling. In him, we see Western man’s grappling for something solid to hold onto, in the wake of secularisation and disenchantment and the iron cage of his supposedly rationalist age. Haycraft can hear the crowd as he sits in the school chapel, seeking solace in the face of Mary, doing “the work of mourning” that Scruton believes we all must do to make a life and a world out of the ruins of late modernity. This novel constitutes Scruton’s note added to the music of lament that is now in turn fading away.
Peoplehood and place are erased and dissolved, leaving the majority lost in their own land of strangers
Haycraft “believes in belief”, and like many of our 19th and early 20th century forebears, tried to salve the pain of longing that marks the human condition through the power of art and high culture as a substitute for religious faith. Haycraft struggles to reconcile this loss of faith in faith and culture’s degeneration into the globalised, homogenised world he now lives in, the warehouses of Whinmoore that serve the new world economy testament to the fact that what was once particular and sacred has been rendered universal and profane. Justin Fellowes follows a similar path, coming to see that his environmental advocacy and the renewable technology his consultancy funds is destroying the land in which he lives, and that the “real battles were with himself. He fought against the soft and indiscriminate compassion through which he kept all commitments at bay.” Fellowes’ telescoped morality has done little for those he does not know while leaving to ruin what is closest to him.
What Haycraft and Fellowes confront is our uprootedness, made so by politics, commerce, and the withdrawing of the sacred. In Arabic there is the idea of the ghurba, the land of strangers in which one wanders between two worlds. Those British Pakistanis, now among many other groups, whose parents and grandparents moved to Britain are very often in but not of Britain, inhabiting a land of strangers. This has increased over the decades, different communities walling themselves off in an ethnoreligious archipelago across the country. Those directly responsible for the rape gangs are de-territorialised and detached from those who still comprise the majority, often adopting a global underclass culture steeped in violent imagery and music, Islam as form of gang membership. Meanwhile, those natives already here are stripped by the culture of repudiation of their past and its heritage, the present and its culture, and the future and its possibility. Peoplehood and place are erased and dissolved, leaving the majority lost in their own land of strangers, homeless in the place they used to call home.
Such an uprooted, atomised, and bereft people means that those who would have had a social fabric to protect them from danger from hostile elements are now easy pickings. As Scruton writes, “It was inconceivable that in a town dedicated to prosperity, comfort and English order, a girl might simply disappear, smuggled into slavery under far distant skies. But the inconceivable would not be noticed when it finally occurred.” This is why Sharon Williams is vulnerable: she has been left to fend for herself by the collapse of the social ecology which would have protected her had it been maintained, and the state is often at best the enabler, or at worst directly complicit with the perpetrators. This isn’t to blame the victims by saying that if only our society hadn’t been de-moralised then this wouldn’t have happened. The point is that those “on the ground” who perpetrated the industrial-scale abuse and rape of girls like Sharon were predators picking off the vulnerable from the herd, exploiting a weakness.
The question that the novel forces us to confront is whether, if individuals can find some measure of redemption, can a nation?
Whether redemption is possible in the face of all this is a question the characters in this novel face, reflecting the reality of our own lives. Can Haycraft save Sharon and justify the trust and affection she has for him without condemning himself? Can Fellowes redeem his need for love after his burgeoning relationship with Muhibbah is torn apart by the sharp edges of two vastly different cultures? Will Laura Markham find redemption and consolation after being kidnapped and seeing into the abyss of international human trafficking? Can Iona see and find redemption from how she has served impersonal, bureaucratic evil in service to brutal personal evil, and so nearly lost her soul? Can Sharon find a sense of redemption and peace through her love of literature and truly escape her tormentors? All do, in some way, although the scars on the soul they all accrue are now part of their inner landscape. Scruton’s resolution of the interwoven storylines is profoundly moving. When I finished the book, given the context in which I’d turned to it, I felt my eyes briefly burn with emotion.
The question that the novel forces us to confront is whether, if individuals can find some measure of redemption, can a nation? For this is what we are facing in the wake of the grooming gangs, in our own eyes and the eyes of the world. For justice to be done it needs to be properly retributive against those perpetrators and enablers who deserve it and restorative for those victims who need it. It needs to be seen to be done. And for this to happen, our ruling class and their stenographers in the media need to be held to account and themselves replaced. We must then repair and recover our sense of self as a people. Otherwise, we will continue to see more girls like Sharon, and they won’t be saved in body or spirit.
