t is always interesting to watch a dam burst. In the past week, as Elon Musk and other prominent Americans discovered the British ‘grooming gang’ scandal, British politics has suddenly had to face up to something it has spent a quarter of a century trying to ignore. One would hope that the claim that thousands of underage girls had been gang-raped by thousands of men in cities across the country would be a subject of profound concern for our politicians. Who did this? Why? How can we help the victims and prevent any reoccurrence?

But no society asks questions to which it does not want an answer. The language used about this mass crime has been coyly euphemistic. Take ‘grooming’. Can you say that the girl in Oxford who was repeatedly drugged and raped by men who threatened to kill her and branded her buttocks with ‘M’ for ‘Mohammed’ was merely ‘groomed’?

And what of ‘Asian’? Did these towns see an outbreak of Japanese men prowling our cities for what former home secretary Jack Straw described as the ‘easy meat’ of white working-class girls? No such culprits have come to light. These obfuscating phrases were designed to cover up the fact that the perpetrators were almost all Muslim men of Pakistani origin and their victims almost all white working-class girls selected by their abusers because of their race.


If any government or political party wants to do something about the scandal, they will need to stop reviewing and start acting.

Where to begin? One good starting point would be to work out why Pakistani rapists in Britain seem to have more rights than their victims. Between 2008 and 2010, a nine-member gang of men in Rochdale abused 47 vulnerable girls as young as 13. On that occasion, the perpetrators were sentenced to between four and 19 years in prison. Five years later, only two of them were still in prison. The Home Secretary tried to remove British citizenship from four of the men who had dual citizenship. But Abdul Aziz (a taxi driver known as ‘the Master’) and other gang members used the excruciatingly slow justice and immigration review system to renounce their Pakistani citizenship. In 2018, the Home Office told Aziz he could stay in the UK.

Other convicted rapists such as Adil Khan and Qari Rauf served a few years in prison and were then released on licence. Rauf was a religious studies teacher at a local mosque, and a father of five. He trafficked one girl between ten and 20 times, mainly after using his taxi to drive the victim to a flat in Rochdale where the victim was gang-raped by him and his friends. Rauf was sentenced to six years in prison, served two and a half, and appealed against his deportation. So did Khan, arguing that he was innocent, had not committed ‘that big a crime’ and wanted to be a ‘role model’ for his son to whom he wanted to teach ‘right from wrong’.

Khan and Rauf lost their appeals against being stripped of their British citizenship, but they remained in the UK anyway. The men could only be sent back to Pakistan if Pakistan agreed to take them, and funnily enough Pakistan didn’t want them, so we get to keep them here. To date these men have appeared before more than 12 judges at three crown courts, immigration tribunals and the Court of Appeal. The British taxpayer has given them more than £550,000 to fund their challenges, though that is only part of the £2 million we have given to various members of the Rochdale rape gangs in their appeals against deportation.

One of Khan’s victims, who was a child when he raped her, happened to see him again in Asda in 2020. ‘I’ve never been so scared in all my life,’ she said. ‘I feel like my heart just stopped beating.’ Another victim described how, when she spotted one of her rapists in the local town centre, she wet herself in fear. Yet last September a judge at Sheffield Crown Court actually ordered a Rotherham rape-gang survivor to remove from her courtroom victim impact statement a demand for her abusers to be deported. Some reports say that to date there are no known cases of any of these offenders being deported from the UK, though others suggest three may have been.

Ed Davey @EdwardJDavey (leader of the British Lib Dem Party)
·
Jan 7
People have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country’s democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain.

It’s time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official is suggesting the UK government should be overthrown.



Elon Musk @elonmusk

What exactly do I fail to understand about your failure to stop the mass rape of little girls in Britain, you sniveling cretin?

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/1876258736131416409


Indeed.

Tommy Robinson to be released from prison early



Good. Britain should not have political prisoners like Robinson. It's a disgrace.