Allison Pearson
How does Yvette Cooper sleep at night? Reacting to the Government’s new crackdown on abominable grooming gangs, the shadow home secretary said, as if butter wouldn’t melt, “You can never allow any kind of sensitivities around race and ethnicity to prevent action on child sexual exploitation and abuse.” The Government, she huffed, should have done something eight years ago.
Well, I think Yvette and I can agree that you certainly shouldn’t allow ethnic sensitivities to get in the way, because the priority must always be protecting vulnerable youngsters, obviously. Where we disagree is in that it seems to have slipped Yvette’s mind that thousands of attempts by victims, social workers and other concerned adults to report predatory behaviour by British Pakistani grooming gangs have repeatedly been stymied by – oh, look! – Labour politicians, Labour councillors and police forces in Labour-controlled towns. Nazir Afzal, when he was chief crown prosecutor for North West England, told the BBC that, in 2008, the Home Office under Gordon Brown’s administration sent a circular email to all police forces calling on them not to investigate the sexual exploitation of young girls. In 2011, the then home secretary Jack Straw let the cat out of the bag when he said that white girls were “seen as easy meat” by Pakistani rapists. Straw was swiftly shut down.
And look what happened to Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham. In 2017, Champion was forced to resign from her position as shadow women and equalities minister over what she called her “extremely poor choice of words” in an article she wrote for The Sun. The piece came after 17 men and one woman were found guilty of committing nearly 100 offences, including rape, against vulnerable women and girls in Newcastle. Champion’s article began: “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?” Dear, oh, dear, can’t have her going around spreading truths, can we?
The Labour Party is mired in shame over “cultural sensitivity”, which always means sensitivity to one culture and one culture alone, and it sure as hell isn’t the culture of white working-class girls. One thing we can say with total confidence is that there has never been a white girl so distraught, so despicably abused, so trafficked or so tortured that Labour has not been prepared to sacrifice her on the altar of preserving their Muslim block vote. That is the depth of collusion and depravity we are talking about here. It is a monstrous stain on our nation. No wonder Suella Braverman came under attack from the Left this week. Promoting the Tories’ new policy of mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse (a sensible idea), the Home Secretary was brutally honest about the cancer of grooming gangs and their composition. “There is a predominance of certain ethnic groups – and I say British Pakistani males – who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values,” she said, “Some of these councillors in Labour-run areas over a period of years have absolutely failed to take action because of cultural sensitivities.”
Normally, such heresy would provoke shrieks of, “Racist!” Slightly tricky to do that with a home secretary who has Indian-African heritage. The next best term for shutting down debate is “dog-whistle”. Former Labour MP and Mayor of West Yorkshire Tracy Brabin did the honours. Speaking on the Laura Kuenssberg show, Mayor Brabin said, “It does feel like it’s very headline, it’s very dog whistle – if I may say – and it doesn’t actually deal with what’s on the ground.” Sorry, that’s exactly what it does. Tracy, love, why don’t you pop down to your nearest kebab shop or minicab office and ask the girls hanging around there if they’re having consensual sex or if they’re in fear of their lives?
Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, gave the game away when he admitted to the BBC’s World At One that “there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that. Perhaps, yes, as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.” Much better to hang on to your impeccable liberal credentials than save a few girls from being raped or having petrol poured over them, eh? In an effort to hide their true agenda, Labour always claims research proves the majority of child abusers are white. Our favourite mathematician, Diane Abbott, tweeted this week: “Disgraceful Tories are going on about ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’. Home Office research shows majority of child abusers are white. Nothing else to say, Tories are playing the race card.”
Keir Starmer echoed the same disingenuous sentiment, telling LBC that the “vast majority of sexual abuse cases do not involve those of ethnic minorities”. Well, it very much depends on the type of “child abuse”. In 2013, Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command published a study looking at “contact sexual offending against children by non-related adults”. They found that there are two types of group-based abuse. Type 1 is group abuse which involves targeting a teenage victim, or victims, based on their vulnerability, rather than as a result of a specific preferential sexual interest in children. Type 1 offenders are unlikely to be paedophiles. They molest young girls because they are easy prey.
Type 2 group abusers are defined as having “a longstanding sexual interest in children”. They operate in a way that’s often characterised as a paedophile “ring”. In other words, these offenders are not simply targeting children because they are vulnerable, but because they are children. The CEOP study reported 57 cases of Type 1 group abuse in 2012, and police provided ethnicity data on 52 of those. Half of those Type 1 cases involved all-Asian groups. 21 per cent were all-white groups, and 17 per cent were groups containing multiple ethnicities. Some 75 per cent of recorded Type 1 group abusers, who target victims based on their vulnerability, were Asian. You can set that against figures from the Office for National Statistics which estimates that 7.5 per cent of the UK’s population are Asian. Just 17 per cent of Type 1 offenders were white, compared with 86 per cent of the UK population.
Apologies for citing a rather dry study, but I think it makes the point rather well. Labour continues to claim that the “vast majority of sexual abuse cases do not involve ethnic minorities”. That is true of paedophilia. It’s certainly not true of grooming gangs. It seems brutally clear, to anyone who has eyes to see, that certain men from a sexually repressed “honour” culture are happy to slake their lust on young white girls whom they regard as subhuman. When their community fails to integrate, or to at least expose its boys to values that are acceptable in an equal, 21st-century society, then you have a recipe for disaster. Congratulations to Suella Braverman for having the courage to point this out, and say we will no longer tolerate it. No one has a right to shut down this debate. No one. “You can never allow any kind of sensitivities around race and ethnicity to prevent action on child sexual exploitation and abuse,” says Yvette Cooper. But that’s exactly what her party has done for years, and, shamefully, it’s what Labour continues to do.
The Telegraph
