“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” goes the saying. It can be true. Many are the kind words that have been spoken at the worst possible time. Many are the charitable causes that have had the opposite effect to that which was intended.

But it can also be too kind. In 2015, the historian Tom Holland, reflecting on the Rotherham grooming gangs, posted:

The true nightmare of #Rotherham is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.

“It wasn’t the indifference that was noble,” he clarified, “But the concern not to demonise a minority. Caring for the weak. The Christian thing.”

Amid renewed interest in the subject of grooming gangs, this week, Mr Holland has received a lot of criticism. He replied:

My position remains:

• The authorities have a responsibility to preserve good race relations.
• This is a noble goal.
• In the context of the grooming gangs, this goal resulted in fatefully wrong decisions being taken.
• 10 years on, the tragedy of this is even more evident

To be clear, I am a fan of Holland’s, and am quite aware — unlike some of his fiercer critics — that he is not claiming that the failure to stop the rape and abuse was noble but that it sprang from a misplaced noble impulse. But the fact remains that this is outright wrong. The officials in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere did not have a high-minded concern for social cohesion — they had a selfish and small-minded desire not to rock the boat. 

In defence of Holland, the author and lecturer Adrian Hilton wrote:

He isn’t speaking about individual motives, but social virtue, and he is absolutely right: the King’s peace—pax regis—is a noble pursuit. You can cavil with his hierarchy of nobleness, but public order is indeed a noble pursuit. And so is child safeguarding.

Obviously, when a concern for “public order” is enabling mass child rape, “public order” is not the virtue that it might have been. If my concern with litter in the park is causing me to hurl abandoned puppies into the bin, that “social virtue” has warped into something perverse. Still, Hilton is hinting towards that with his reference to a “hierarchy of nobleness”, so I’ll ask again — to what extent was that a motivation?

Now, it is true that officials were concerned about public order. Turning to page 112 of the independent inquiry into the grooming gangs in Telford, for example, one finds:

Between 2006 to 2008, senior management within the Council were concerned that allegations about Asian male involvement with CSE in Wellington had the potential to start a “race riot” …

But what else does one find? One finds the fear of “complaints of racism” and of being “politically incorrect”. That doesn’t sound noble to me — it sounds cowardly and self-centred. Indeed, it makes it sound like the concern with public order had less to do with virtuous ideals than with protecting their careers and their institutions. There is a difference between being concerned with peace for its own sake and being concerned with peace because your arse is on the line if there turns out to be violence.

Yet the failure to stop the rapes had many causes — and they don’t get any nobler. In the Jay Report into the grooming gangs in Rotherham, for example, we hear appalling details about the classism and misogyny of police officials. According to one witness, the attitude of some police officers was that the victims were “undesirables” who could not be trusted. “Police weren’t arsed with us, really,” said one victim who was key to the belated investigations in Rochdale, “They don’t give a fuck when you’re not from a wealthy background.”

Then there is the whiff of outright corruption — the laptops and documents that were stolen in Rotherham, with, in the latter case, “no signs of a forced entry to the key-coded and locked security doors”. Whatever went missing, one doubts that it was evidence of a sincere concern for the public good.

Again, the desire to explain a sin is not the same as the desire to excuse it. I am not suggesting that Messrs Holland and Hilton are anything but appalled by the failure to stop the rapists. But it is a mistake to ennoble that failure. That failure was not just tragic but actively wicked and it is important to appreciate that if appropriate accountability is going to be achieved.

The road to Hell is not always paved with good intentions. Some of its paving stones are also cowardice, venality and spite.