Such a clear and insightful report on why we need a national inquiry to uncover the truth and cover ups and not rely on individual local authorities to do their own …. That won’t happen.
An excellent overview. Your summary of the Independent Inquiry led by Alexis Jay is spot-on. When that inquiry was happening I came to hold a dim view of it, because it seemed to be avoiding the crucial issue and instead focusing upon other situations. I strongly suspect that this was what it was instructed to do. Because of this, and because of inquiries into other issues that I have come across, that avoid crucial questions, I have no confidence that another official inquiry will do what it should.
"The public gets the police a handful of technocrats and opinion-formers think they deserve. During the Blair years, a clique of lawyers framed laws like the Human Rights Act to embed progressive politics, and politicised continental-style judiciaries, into our national life.
A flexible, Common Law system was replaced by all-knowing, all-seeing diktat, designed to ensure fairness and equality and unicorns dancing on rainbows. And with them came reams of forms and risk assessments and meetings and committees..."
Great link thank you. Tere was also another link within the piece by Hina Hussain, which was equally as informative of attitudes within the Pakistani community to CSA. Very good read also.
'Let us give these groups their correct name: they were rape and torture gangs.'
Blue Labour I understand has broken with Party Central and is now calling for a complete National enquiry, if so well done and I am sure you Paul played a part in this move.
This issue unaddressed will kill the Labour Party utterly.
Yet Starmer and his clown show continue to double down.
They treat the general populace with contempt thinking we’re ’thick’ yet I’m sure there are many out there with far higher intelligence than those weak, career focused self serving ‘individuals’, for want of a better description.
The time has come for those with a spine and principles to speak out and name and shame.
They’ll be able to look folk in eye and sleep easy knowing that this abomination is finally getting the attention it deserves…. I’ll wait!
Let us not forget that Jeremy Corbyn and the left of the Labour Party were also complicit in this cover-up and I say that as someone who has a general liking for him.
This is the article where a Labour MP and Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, Sarah Champion calls out the grooming gangs in Rotherham. She'd previously said on Radio 4 that "more people are afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse"
She then cowardly ran away from the statement and the article and tried, unsuccessfully to protect her shadow ministerial career. She claimed that The Sun had twisted her words despite the paper having an email from her saying that she "was thrilled" by the article.
As always when people apologise for their wrong speak, today's Left double down on them and she had to resign her post after she was viciously attacked by Labour MP Naz Shah who called it “incendiary and irresponsible”
One of the major problems with the Left of today is that they think that they know so much better than ordinary people and think that they’ve got to protect them from facts in case they come to the “wrong” conclusions and become racist hence Shah’s “incendiary and irresponsible” comment.
She’d rather cover up industrial scale child abuse than risk people thinking that all Pakistani men are child abusers.
Her, the police, the mainly Labour councils and the Tory administration have a massive amount to answer for but it’s still going on hence the delay in charging the Asians that attacked the police officers at the Airport because the CPS didn’t want to inflame “community tensions”.
It has probably been going on in Reading since 1990. I recall a social worker friend's lurid tales of taxi drivers who picked up vulnerable teenage girls from a local authority hostel.
There was a major incident of serious street violence in 1982 including the use of sawn off shotguns between outraged Sikhs and Kashmiri Pakistanis, the latter had been targeting Sikh girls for rape, and Sikh men were not having it, quite rightly. It was covered up very quickly but the news paper cuttings are still at the British Library
I'm totally confused about all the reports and inquiries. The Sun article says that Sarah Champion launched a cross party parliamentary enquiry into child sexual exploitation. Where is this report?? Is this related to Prof Jay's Inquiry? I thought Prof Jay's inquiry was published in 2022 and that she hadn't looked at Rotherham or Rochdale (according to Paul's article above). The Sun mentions Prof Jay's report into the failings in Rotherham in 2014. What is this report? Is it separate from the Inquiry from 2022?
There is so much noise out there at the moment and I'd love to understand the full timeline and what reports there were etc. It's totally confusing.
Also, if Sarah Champion wrote an email to the Sun article author saying she loved the article then where is this email? Why doesn't the author make it public so we have proof.
Then there are the reports of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse: https://www.iicsa.org.uk/
The Independent Inquiry investigated lots of situations but seems to have avoided specifically investigating the Pakistani Muslim gangs across the country (whilst publishing reports about sexual abuse in other contexts, such as Christian). I consider it to have failed in its duty, given that its existence was prompted by the Rotherham scandal.
In the first report 'ethnicity' is discussed, to some extent.
Another MP who tried to get an investigation into the grooming gangs was Lucy Allan, who was the Conservative MP for Telford. Here is a link to what she has written about the response to her request: https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1875912522965946870
In contrast to the official reports there is also the book 'Easy Meat - Inside Britain's Grooming gang Scandal', by Peter McLoughlin, that was published in 2016.
On the subject of Robinson, given that he's in the news almost every day with many on the Right like Reform trying desperately to slander him, my 18 year old nephew asked me to explain why he is in jail and so I looked into it last weekend for him. What I'd assumed - that he'd made up untrue stories about the Syrian refugee who was "water boarded by racist kids" actually has a far more nuanced narrative. Robinson had said that far from the Syrian lad being bullied that he was actually a bully himself.
The original defamation case is the starting point for his recent jailing.
This is what I sent to my nephew. The link to the transcript of the judge's summing up at trial is below.
"This is the transcript of the judge's summing up in original libel / defamation trial. The judge ruled that Robinson didn’t tell the truth regarding the refugee being a bully etc himself.
A libel trial is the only sort of trial where the defendant has to prove their innocence as opposed to the claimant proving the defendant's guilt. So the refugee didn’t have to prove that he wasn’t a bully but Robinson had to prove he was. It was a civil trial and therefore the burden of proof was 51% as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt as in a criminal trial.
Robinson defended himself. The refugee’s defence was funded by Hope not Hate which in turn is funded by both the Home Office and the trust funds of wealthy individuals who believe strongly in open borders. Hope Not Hate engaged one of the country’s top libel barristers, Catrin Evans KC who’d previously represented the likes of the Duchess of Sussex, Melania Trump and Naomi Campbell in libel cases. It was hardly a fair match but that’s always the case in a libel trial. Those that can afford the best lawyers tend to win. It’s a rich man’s law.
Robinson’s witnesses were mainly school kids because they were the ones who’d claimed to have witnessed the refugee’s bullying etc in school. They were obviously a little less reliable in their testimonies. The judge put massively more weight on the school disciplinary records (which might have been incomplete) than the witness testimonies. He basically said that the refugee had a clean disciplinary record however many of the kids said he was always in detention etc.
Robinson had also interviewed an ex teacher in the school and had secretly recorded the interview. The teacher corroborated the kids’ testimonies but would not say so in the open nor in court because they might be cancelled or targeted by Muslim groups. The judge refused to allow Robinson’s filmed interview with the teacher to be used in court despite it being a crucial piece of evidence.
Looking at the transcript, I think that the judge was looking for a reason to rule against Robinson.
The trial is important because the reason Robinson is in jail now is because he’s breached the ruling in this trial by repeating the defamation that he was found guilty of.
However, the trial has taken a simple political aspect with the intervention of Lord Hermer, the Attorney General who had taken it out of the civil process and ruled that it is of such national importance that it should be part of the criminal justice system enabling Robinson to be jailed for contempt of court and not merely to be fined for it. The AJ is a political appointment made by Starmer immediately after Labour's election victory and Hermer is a former colleague of Starmer and is also a renown human rights barrister and judge. He contributed to Starmer's leadership campaign. More on him here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hermer,_Baron_Hermer
The jailing of Robinson is undoubtably a political judgement and we should all be mad as Hell that our justice system is being turned á la America, into lawfare; of the Government jailing their political opponents more suited to a Tnird World banana republic.
The original trial judge's summing up can be found here. It would be interesting to hear what other commenters think of the trial and if it was fair or if the judge was doing his very best to find against Robinson.
It's also interesting that Robinson has a further court case coming up when he's being tried for an offence under the Terrorism Act of refusing to give police the PIN to his phone. The police can demand this under the terrorism legislation, but whatever people think about Robinson, he's obviously not a terrorist and the police probably want access to his phone to either track down who his supporters are or to go on what the lawyers call a "fishing expedition" which isn't normally allowed under normal, non terrorist law.
Also interesting is how Robinson was arrested at the Jewish Gaza rally attended by Boris Johnson amongst others. The organisers had told police that they didn't want him to attend as if they have the right to decide who walks our streets. Robinson was then subject to a police order banning him from attending the march in The City of London. However, the police completely mucked up the paperwork by stating the wrong rally (they'd said that it was the anti Israeli Gaza protests), not realising that the Jewish rally was held in the City of Westminster and not the City of London and they got the date wrong!
Robinson was having his breakfast in a cafe and not even attending the rally at that time when a scrum of police officers burst in and gave him about 90 seconds to disperse before promptly arresting him for breaching the incorrect order they'd obtained against him attending the wrong rally in the wrong city on the wrong day. Robinson won in court when the magistrate ruled that he had no case to answer because of the obvious errors in the order, because he was operating as a journalist and because the police didn't give him a reasonable amount of time to comply with the order that he didn't know anything about until 90 seconds earlier.
Almost everyone, from Starmer, to the press to TalkRadio to Nigel Farage have accused the bloke who actually broke this story that the Times eventually picked up on of "nearly collapsing the trial of one of these gangs in Leeds".
This simply isn't the case at all.
What Tommy Robinson did was to read a BBC article on the trial to a Facebook live audience. The article was still on the BBC website years later. He was arrested and put before the trial judge with no representation and slung in the clink for 18 months. Nothing happened to the BBC nor the BBC journalist and editor who wrote and published the story that Robinson was jailed for.
Robinson appealed and won. All those accusing him of nearly collapsing the trial either aren't aware of this fact or choose to misrepresent it.
You raise some great points and clarify things amongst the noise of the recent days. I've been trying to do some background digging to work out what is going on.
Interesting that this has all kicked off following Oldham Council's request for national help. And indeed a national inquiry rather than individual Council lead ones would be much better in terms of dot joining and resource sharing.
I have a few questions which hopefully you or someone can help with. I am not questioning you but I'm keen to get some source material and evidence to help convince skeptical friends.
Is there any evidence that the victims were chosen because they were white? I'm sure they were but evidence will make it concrete.
You say: "Teachers and social workers were discouraged from reporting the abuse, and police officers did not properly investigate allegations because of ‘nervousness about race’." - was this one of the conclusions of the 2022 inquiry? If so do you know which individual report this was in?
"A report into events in Rochdale..." - do you have a link to this report?
Finally, I really need to call out how utterly sick I am of the Tories calling out Labour for not tackling immigration, for not holding a public inquiry specifically into rape gangs. I mean don't get me wrong, Labour and Starmer are utterly atrocious but it makes my blood boil when The Tories could have done all this themselves. The 2022 inquiry was initiated by the Home Secretary so why didn't the Tories, as part of that inquiry, or even subsequently whilst still in power, call for the very inquiry they are now demanding from Labour.
Hi, Tracy. Sorry for (very!) slow reply. The 'nervousness about race' comment, and teachers and social workers being discouraged from reporting, related to Telford. See here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-61983584
The truth of the matter here is that all the major UK political parties (with the exception of Reform as they didn’t exist) have failed on this specific issue. Not one of them has addressed the issue of why predominantly white girls were targeted specifically by Pakistani men, nor the cover up that has clearly been allowed to take place.
Yes the Tories could and most certainly should have investigated this awful mess properly. However, it’s now Labour’s chance to do something and they have failed to pick up this up. Given the abysmal support the government has at present, one would have thought they might jump at the chance to improve things.
I fear the approach will be to let this simply play out, mutter a few platitudes but do absolutely nothing. Having read the recommendations they intend to implement, none of them actually addresses the problem, but we will end up with a level of reporting.
This is not good enough from any of these politicians. The hypocrisy stinks and the level of anger from the public is palpable. I hope the general public continues to keep this scandal in the forefront of U.K. news until we get some answers. I won’t hold my breath though.
Possibly because the areas which have the highest incidence of this problem are solid Labour ones, who would not reach out to a Conservative government for help if their lives depended on it.
Now there is a Labour government, so they expect favourable outcome.
I'm in two minds on the enquiry issue. On one hand we'd like to expose those who were complicit in this but it will just delay any action on the issue and nothing will happen to them anyway.
I'm probably more in favour of an urgent introduction of the recommendations of the Jay Report.
I'm wrong on this and Allison Pearson's brilliant article in the Telegraph has put me right.
" What now? The Government tells us there is no need for another national inquiry, instead they will implement the recommendations of the 2022 Jay report on child sexual abuse (CSA). But CSA is not the same as Group Localised Child Sexual Exploitation (GLCSE), which describes the horrendous and co-ordinated abuse by primarily Pakistani-heritage Muslim rape gangs in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford, places the 2022 inquiry didn’t even take into account. This is not about mainly white paedophiles, bad though they are. And it certainly can’t be left, as Jess Phillips suggests, to councils like Oldham to investigate themselves when many councillors are drawn from the same intensely tribal community as the offenders."
"Apparently, thousands of survivors who endured mass rape as children (20 men awaiting their turn downstairs, one woman recalled) are far-Right for wanting answers and accountability. Is it far-Right, Prime Minister, to object that your primary torturer was released early after a derisory sentence and now lurks menacingly outside your home?
"That’s what has happened to Liz, who still lives in Rotherham. Liz tells me she wants a “collective inquiry to show the depth of what’s happened and to go after those who failed us”. Like other victims of Pakistani rape gangs, Liz is disgusted with the strange, soulless man who had the chance at his Monday press conference to speak for the whole nation. He could have expressed the shame and devastating sadness we feel that such bestial crimes should have been committed here, and for so long. Instead, Sir Keir spoke out of narrow party self-interest, only sounding vaguely passionate when addressing what really troubles him: Islamophobia."
So in a sense its not about a public enquiry being a fudge production its about the response to it. Jay was just an apology for underfunding making social workers drilled in CRT shit at their jobs. The fact that it covered past abuse and totally neglected the 50 towns where Pakistani rape gangs operated with impunity and out pumps up the arses of care home girls shows that it was nothing more than a literal whitewash. This was a systematic islamic strategy to use powerless white girls a safety valve for the insanely inhuman edicts of their backward faith.
It it was a broad enquiry into sexual abuse. It hardly focused on the most egregious example of in towns across the U.K. by the Pakistani rape gangs. labour and those who are generally against lifting the stone on the complacency and collusion of public authorities are using it as a shield. Its recommendations should of course be implemented. A public judge led national public inquiry is needed because we do it for much less disgraceful policy failures. The Jay recoomendations wouldn’t even need to be specified in a system which worked for ordinary people. The complacency of the Labour Party is shown in the fact that Barry Gardiner MP assumed that Jay was a he. I have debated with friends (just ) in senior social work and policing roles who have been told to use Jay to deflect a public enquiry, but haven’t read it. They don’t need to as they didn’t need to read the Sharrman or McPherson reviews to know how to low tow to multiculturalism. An enquiry is necessary, and since I posted the pathetic response of pilot local enquiries, announced by Cooper shows the need is even more pressing.
Such a clear and insightful report on why we need a national inquiry to uncover the truth and cover ups and not rely on individual local authorities to do their own …. That won’t happen.
Hi Paul
An excellent overview. Your summary of the Independent Inquiry led by Alexis Jay is spot-on. When that inquiry was happening I came to hold a dim view of it, because it seemed to be avoiding the crucial issue and instead focusing upon other situations. I strongly suspect that this was what it was instructed to do. Because of this, and because of inquiries into other issues that I have come across, that avoid crucial questions, I have no confidence that another official inquiry will do what it should.
I have just read an interesting article by an ex-policeman: https://unherd.com/2025/01/why-the-police-ignored-the-rape-gangs/
A quote from it:
"The public gets the police a handful of technocrats and opinion-formers think they deserve. During the Blair years, a clique of lawyers framed laws like the Human Rights Act to embed progressive politics, and politicised continental-style judiciaries, into our national life.
A flexible, Common Law system was replaced by all-knowing, all-seeing diktat, designed to ensure fairness and equality and unicorns dancing on rainbows. And with them came reams of forms and risk assessments and meetings and committees..."
Great link thank you. Tere was also another link within the piece by Hina Hussain, which was equally as informative of attitudes within the Pakistani community to CSA. Very good read also.
Thank you for this
'Let us give these groups their correct name: they were rape and torture gangs.'
Blue Labour I understand has broken with Party Central and is now calling for a complete National enquiry, if so well done and I am sure you Paul played a part in this move.
This issue unaddressed will kill the Labour Party utterly.
Yet Starmer and his clown show continue to double down.
They treat the general populace with contempt thinking we’re ’thick’ yet I’m sure there are many out there with far higher intelligence than those weak, career focused self serving ‘individuals’, for want of a better description.
The time has come for those with a spine and principles to speak out and name and shame.
They’ll be able to look folk in eye and sleep easy knowing that this abomination is finally getting the attention it deserves…. I’ll wait!
Another brilliantly written piece, Paul, hitting all the targets.
Let us not forget that Jeremy Corbyn and the left of the Labour Party were also complicit in this cover-up and I say that as someone who has a general liking for him.
This is the article where a Labour MP and Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, Sarah Champion calls out the grooming gangs in Rotherham. She'd previously said on Radio 4 that "more people are afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse"
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4218648/british-pakistani-men-raping-exploiting-white-girls/
She then cowardly ran away from the statement and the article and tried, unsuccessfully to protect her shadow ministerial career. She claimed that The Sun had twisted her words despite the paper having an email from her saying that she "was thrilled" by the article.
As always when people apologise for their wrong speak, today's Left double down on them and she had to resign her post after she was viciously attacked by Labour MP Naz Shah who called it “incendiary and irresponsible”
One of the major problems with the Left of today is that they think that they know so much better than ordinary people and think that they’ve got to protect them from facts in case they come to the “wrong” conclusions and become racist hence Shah’s “incendiary and irresponsible” comment.
She’d rather cover up industrial scale child abuse than risk people thinking that all Pakistani men are child abusers.
Her, the police, the mainly Labour councils and the Tory administration have a massive amount to answer for but it’s still going on hence the delay in charging the Asians that attacked the police officers at the Airport because the CPS didn’t want to inflame “community tensions”.
It has probably been going on in Reading since 1990. I recall a social worker friend's lurid tales of taxi drivers who picked up vulnerable teenage girls from a local authority hostel.
There was a major incident of serious street violence in 1982 including the use of sawn off shotguns between outraged Sikhs and Kashmiri Pakistanis, the latter had been targeting Sikh girls for rape, and Sikh men were not having it, quite rightly. It was covered up very quickly but the news paper cuttings are still at the British Library
Rumours go back to the early 70's.
I'm totally confused about all the reports and inquiries. The Sun article says that Sarah Champion launched a cross party parliamentary enquiry into child sexual exploitation. Where is this report?? Is this related to Prof Jay's Inquiry? I thought Prof Jay's inquiry was published in 2022 and that she hadn't looked at Rotherham or Rochdale (according to Paul's article above). The Sun mentions Prof Jay's report into the failings in Rotherham in 2014. What is this report? Is it separate from the Inquiry from 2022?
There is so much noise out there at the moment and I'd love to understand the full timeline and what reports there were etc. It's totally confusing.
Also, if Sarah Champion wrote an email to the Sun article author saying she loved the article then where is this email? Why doesn't the author make it public so we have proof.
They want you to be confused this rolling 40 year cover up is very well designed.
Hi Tracy
Here are some links to sites with the reports:
The first is the report by Jay on the Rotherham cases:
https://committees.parliament.uk/work/1954/jay-report-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham/
Then there is the Casey report on Rotherham council's response to that: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/inspection-into-the-governance-of-rotherham-council
Then there are the reports of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse: https://www.iicsa.org.uk/
The Independent Inquiry investigated lots of situations but seems to have avoided specifically investigating the Pakistani Muslim gangs across the country (whilst publishing reports about sexual abuse in other contexts, such as Christian). I consider it to have failed in its duty, given that its existence was prompted by the Rotherham scandal.
In the first report 'ethnicity' is discussed, to some extent.
Another MP who tried to get an investigation into the grooming gangs was Lucy Allan, who was the Conservative MP for Telford. Here is a link to what she has written about the response to her request: https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1875912522965946870
In contrast to the official reports there is also the book 'Easy Meat - Inside Britain's Grooming gang Scandal', by Peter McLoughlin, that was published in 2016.
And here is a report on Telford:
https://www.iitcse.com/documents/chairs-final-report
I can add a link to the Oldham case in 2022.
https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/news/the-review-into-historic-safeguarding-practices-in-oldham
Excellent detail Ian
Nazi Shariah is a total racist.
On the subject of Robinson, given that he's in the news almost every day with many on the Right like Reform trying desperately to slander him, my 18 year old nephew asked me to explain why he is in jail and so I looked into it last weekend for him. What I'd assumed - that he'd made up untrue stories about the Syrian refugee who was "water boarded by racist kids" actually has a far more nuanced narrative. Robinson had said that far from the Syrian lad being bullied that he was actually a bully himself.
The original defamation case is the starting point for his recent jailing.
This is what I sent to my nephew. The link to the transcript of the judge's summing up at trial is below.
"This is the transcript of the judge's summing up in original libel / defamation trial. The judge ruled that Robinson didn’t tell the truth regarding the refugee being a bully etc himself.
A libel trial is the only sort of trial where the defendant has to prove their innocence as opposed to the claimant proving the defendant's guilt. So the refugee didn’t have to prove that he wasn’t a bully but Robinson had to prove he was. It was a civil trial and therefore the burden of proof was 51% as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt as in a criminal trial.
Robinson defended himself. The refugee’s defence was funded by Hope not Hate which in turn is funded by both the Home Office and the trust funds of wealthy individuals who believe strongly in open borders. Hope Not Hate engaged one of the country’s top libel barristers, Catrin Evans KC who’d previously represented the likes of the Duchess of Sussex, Melania Trump and Naomi Campbell in libel cases. It was hardly a fair match but that’s always the case in a libel trial. Those that can afford the best lawyers tend to win. It’s a rich man’s law.
Robinson’s witnesses were mainly school kids because they were the ones who’d claimed to have witnessed the refugee’s bullying etc in school. They were obviously a little less reliable in their testimonies. The judge put massively more weight on the school disciplinary records (which might have been incomplete) than the witness testimonies. He basically said that the refugee had a clean disciplinary record however many of the kids said he was always in detention etc.
Robinson had also interviewed an ex teacher in the school and had secretly recorded the interview. The teacher corroborated the kids’ testimonies but would not say so in the open nor in court because they might be cancelled or targeted by Muslim groups. The judge refused to allow Robinson’s filmed interview with the teacher to be used in court despite it being a crucial piece of evidence.
Looking at the transcript, I think that the judge was looking for a reason to rule against Robinson.
The trial is important because the reason Robinson is in jail now is because he’s breached the ruling in this trial by repeating the defamation that he was found guilty of.
However, the trial has taken a simple political aspect with the intervention of Lord Hermer, the Attorney General who had taken it out of the civil process and ruled that it is of such national importance that it should be part of the criminal justice system enabling Robinson to be jailed for contempt of court and not merely to be fined for it. The AJ is a political appointment made by Starmer immediately after Labour's election victory and Hermer is a former colleague of Starmer and is also a renown human rights barrister and judge. He contributed to Starmer's leadership campaign. More on him here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hermer,_Baron_Hermer
The jailing of Robinson is undoubtably a political judgement and we should all be mad as Hell that our justice system is being turned á la America, into lawfare; of the Government jailing their political opponents more suited to a Tnird World banana republic.
The original trial judge's summing up can be found here. It would be interesting to hear what other commenters think of the trial and if it was fair or if the judge was doing his very best to find against Robinson.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2021/2008.html#para5
It's also interesting that Robinson has a further court case coming up when he's being tried for an offence under the Terrorism Act of refusing to give police the PIN to his phone. The police can demand this under the terrorism legislation, but whatever people think about Robinson, he's obviously not a terrorist and the police probably want access to his phone to either track down who his supporters are or to go on what the lawyers call a "fishing expedition" which isn't normally allowed under normal, non terrorist law.
Also interesting is how Robinson was arrested at the Jewish Gaza rally attended by Boris Johnson amongst others. The organisers had told police that they didn't want him to attend as if they have the right to decide who walks our streets. Robinson was then subject to a police order banning him from attending the march in The City of London. However, the police completely mucked up the paperwork by stating the wrong rally (they'd said that it was the anti Israeli Gaza protests), not realising that the Jewish rally was held in the City of Westminster and not the City of London and they got the date wrong!
Robinson was having his breakfast in a cafe and not even attending the rally at that time when a scrum of police officers burst in and gave him about 90 seconds to disperse before promptly arresting him for breaching the incorrect order they'd obtained against him attending the wrong rally in the wrong city on the wrong day. Robinson won in court when the magistrate ruled that he had no case to answer because of the obvious errors in the order, because he was operating as a journalist and because the police didn't give him a reasonable amount of time to comply with the order that he didn't know anything about until 90 seconds earlier.
The excellent BlackBeltBarrister deals with this in his short YouTube https://youtu.be/vnYnzJs7I9Q?si=RSCXDMRUdz7Cv24q.
Is Robinson a political prisoner? It certainly looks that way to me.
Almost everyone, from Starmer, to the press to TalkRadio to Nigel Farage have accused the bloke who actually broke this story that the Times eventually picked up on of "nearly collapsing the trial of one of these gangs in Leeds".
This simply isn't the case at all.
What Tommy Robinson did was to read a BBC article on the trial to a Facebook live audience. The article was still on the BBC website years later. He was arrested and put before the trial judge with no representation and slung in the clink for 18 months. Nothing happened to the BBC nor the BBC journalist and editor who wrote and published the story that Robinson was jailed for.
Robinson appealed and won. All those accusing him of nearly collapsing the trial either aren't aware of this fact or choose to misrepresent it.
You raise some great points and clarify things amongst the noise of the recent days. I've been trying to do some background digging to work out what is going on.
Interesting that this has all kicked off following Oldham Council's request for national help. And indeed a national inquiry rather than individual Council lead ones would be much better in terms of dot joining and resource sharing.
I have a few questions which hopefully you or someone can help with. I am not questioning you but I'm keen to get some source material and evidence to help convince skeptical friends.
Is there any evidence that the victims were chosen because they were white? I'm sure they were but evidence will make it concrete.
You say: "Teachers and social workers were discouraged from reporting the abuse, and police officers did not properly investigate allegations because of ‘nervousness about race’." - was this one of the conclusions of the 2022 inquiry? If so do you know which individual report this was in?
"A report into events in Rochdale..." - do you have a link to this report?
Finally, I really need to call out how utterly sick I am of the Tories calling out Labour for not tackling immigration, for not holding a public inquiry specifically into rape gangs. I mean don't get me wrong, Labour and Starmer are utterly atrocious but it makes my blood boil when The Tories could have done all this themselves. The 2022 inquiry was initiated by the Home Secretary so why didn't the Tories, as part of that inquiry, or even subsequently whilst still in power, call for the very inquiry they are now demanding from Labour.
Hi, Tracy. Sorry for (very!) slow reply. The 'nervousness about race' comment, and teachers and social workers being discouraged from reporting, related to Telford. See here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-61983584
The Rochdale report is here: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/9148/operation-span-report-january-2024-v3.pdf
The truth of the matter here is that all the major UK political parties (with the exception of Reform as they didn’t exist) have failed on this specific issue. Not one of them has addressed the issue of why predominantly white girls were targeted specifically by Pakistani men, nor the cover up that has clearly been allowed to take place.
Yes the Tories could and most certainly should have investigated this awful mess properly. However, it’s now Labour’s chance to do something and they have failed to pick up this up. Given the abysmal support the government has at present, one would have thought they might jump at the chance to improve things.
I fear the approach will be to let this simply play out, mutter a few platitudes but do absolutely nothing. Having read the recommendations they intend to implement, none of them actually addresses the problem, but we will end up with a level of reporting.
This is not good enough from any of these politicians. The hypocrisy stinks and the level of anger from the public is palpable. I hope the general public continues to keep this scandal in the forefront of U.K. news until we get some answers. I won’t hold my breath though.
Possibly because the areas which have the highest incidence of this problem are solid Labour ones, who would not reach out to a Conservative government for help if their lives depended on it.
Now there is a Labour government, so they expect favourable outcome.
Simples? Dunno, you tell me
The Govt strike-back has begun. They will use all the resources available to them to squash this. I've noticed MSM already falling into line.
I'm in two minds on the enquiry issue. On one hand we'd like to expose those who were complicit in this but it will just delay any action on the issue and nothing will happen to them anyway.
I'm probably more in favour of an urgent introduction of the recommendations of the Jay Report.
Why can’t we go down both paths - implement the recommendations of the report and undertake a swift inquiry into the cover up
I'm wrong on this and Allison Pearson's brilliant article in the Telegraph has put me right.
" What now? The Government tells us there is no need for another national inquiry, instead they will implement the recommendations of the 2022 Jay report on child sexual abuse (CSA). But CSA is not the same as Group Localised Child Sexual Exploitation (GLCSE), which describes the horrendous and co-ordinated abuse by primarily Pakistani-heritage Muslim rape gangs in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford, places the 2022 inquiry didn’t even take into account. This is not about mainly white paedophiles, bad though they are. And it certainly can’t be left, as Jess Phillips suggests, to councils like Oldham to investigate themselves when many councillors are drawn from the same intensely tribal community as the offenders."
"Apparently, thousands of survivors who endured mass rape as children (20 men awaiting their turn downstairs, one woman recalled) are far-Right for wanting answers and accountability. Is it far-Right, Prime Minister, to object that your primary torturer was released early after a derisory sentence and now lurks menacingly outside your home?
"That’s what has happened to Liz, who still lives in Rotherham. Liz tells me she wants a “collective inquiry to show the depth of what’s happened and to go after those who failed us”. Like other victims of Pakistani rape gangs, Liz is disgusted with the strange, soulless man who had the chance at his Monday press conference to speak for the whole nation. He could have expressed the shame and devastating sadness we feel that such bestial crimes should have been committed here, and for so long. Instead, Sir Keir spoke out of narrow party self-interest, only sounding vaguely passionate when addressing what really troubles him: Islamophobia."
Yes, by the time any huge rambling report at vast expense emerges, the guilty parties will be deceased or quietly retired on index linked pensions.
So in a sense its not about a public enquiry being a fudge production its about the response to it. Jay was just an apology for underfunding making social workers drilled in CRT shit at their jobs. The fact that it covered past abuse and totally neglected the 50 towns where Pakistani rape gangs operated with impunity and out pumps up the arses of care home girls shows that it was nothing more than a literal whitewash. This was a systematic islamic strategy to use powerless white girls a safety valve for the insanely inhuman edicts of their backward faith.
Interesting. However what do you disagree with about the recommendations of the Jay Report?
It it was a broad enquiry into sexual abuse. It hardly focused on the most egregious example of in towns across the U.K. by the Pakistani rape gangs. labour and those who are generally against lifting the stone on the complacency and collusion of public authorities are using it as a shield. Its recommendations should of course be implemented. A public judge led national public inquiry is needed because we do it for much less disgraceful policy failures. The Jay recoomendations wouldn’t even need to be specified in a system which worked for ordinary people. The complacency of the Labour Party is shown in the fact that Barry Gardiner MP assumed that Jay was a he. I have debated with friends (just ) in senior social work and policing roles who have been told to use Jay to deflect a public enquiry, but haven’t read it. They don’t need to as they didn’t need to read the Sharrman or McPherson reviews to know how to low tow to multiculturalism. An enquiry is necessary, and since I posted the pathetic response of pilot local enquiries, announced by Cooper shows the need is even more pressing.