Yesterday was a shameful day for Britain.
364 MPs have voted against having a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal. No Labour, Lib Dem or Green MP voted in favour of the amendment. In order to prevent the amendment, the Labour Party whipped their MPs to vote against the inquiry. During the parliamentary discussions, MPs mocked, shamed and blasted the Reform MP, Rupert Lowe, for speaking out against the grooming gangs.
To anyone paying attention to British politics over the past decade, this shouldn't be a surprise. The authorities and the institutions have been ignoring the mass rape and abuse of young white girls for decades for the sake of political correctness. They even admit that the reason why they’ve been silent on this issue is because of fear of raising community tensions.
Meanwhile, anyone who has dared to speak out about this has been labelled a racist or a bigot. This is particularly true for the working class, who have witnessed their girls be groomed, and when they’ve spoken out about it, they’ve been dismissed as stupid and xenophobic. Take, for example, when the media laughed at a working-class man in 2011 who spoke to the press about the issue, mocking him for saying “Muslimic Rayguns.”
Honestly, the fact that we can’t even have a national inquiry about the race-based rape and abuse of thousands of girls in the UK shows how doomed we are. In a sensible country, the groomers would have been given the most severe sentence and this should have impacted the nation’s policy on immigration.
Labour’s reasoning for voting against the amendment was that it would torpedo Labour’s schools Bill. Starmer said, “The time has passed for more inquiries and consultations, especially for victims and survivors who clearly want action.” This would be true if the liberal establishment didn’t constantly deny the existence of Pakistani grooming gangs to begin with.
Jess Phillips, the Under-Secretary of State for Safegarding and Violence Against Women And Girls, argued that it should be done better on a local level. However, if Jess Phillips had listened to the people of Oldham, she would have known the inquiry needed to be carried out on a government level. Local authorities have failed. Victims have spoken out, saying Oldham Council did not have the finances to conduct a full review, and they worried about the independence of any inquiry.
The horrors of the grooming gang don’t just come from the volume of Pakistani men specifically targeting British girls but also from those in positions of authority trying to silence the stories of the victims. Pakistani Grooming Gangs are operating all over the country, with each case having the same stories of horrific abuse and cover-ups. It deserves a national inquiry.
You can also see this in Telford, where officials have denied the ongoing rape and abuse of young girls. According to Charlie Peters, there were at least 1,000 victims - most of these victims were in Telford alone white, and most of the abusers were Pakistani. In one of these cases, according to Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “abusers used the murder of a pregnant child and her family as a threat against victims. The police were worried that acting against the gangs would see them labelled racist.”
This is a disappointing day. But it doesn’t mean the fight is over. While we may have lost the battle, we’ve gained significant ground. Nigel Farage has already said that Reform UK will raise the money and hire independent arbiters to conduct their own enquiry. Similarly, the attention Elon Musk has provided towards the horrors of the grooming gangs and the corruption around them has ultimately been a step in the right direction to getting the girls justice.
There is still so much to do. I’d strongly recommend you donate or even volunteer at the Maggie Oliver Foundation to give the victims the support they need. Tweeting is easy - put your money where your mouth is. Keep the momentum up. Have difficult conversations around this with friends and family. Make this the key issue it deserves to be.