Is Jess Phillips Right About The Grooming Gang Scandal?

This disgraceful and in many ways unthinkable business has been suppressed by the media for literally decades. Worse still, police officers and even council officials were complicit in the scandal, some doubtless had their palms greased by the perpetrators or those protecting them, but most considered the victims to be beneath their contempt. They had made lifestyle choices, was one claim. After the death of Jimmy Savile, the same police forces and doubtless some of the same actual police officers began a witch-hunt not only of a dead man but of living celebrities, many of whom saw their lives and legacies destroyed, Dave Lee Travis and Rolf Harris to name but two.

Now that the lid has been well and truly blown off the scandal, the media is calling these gangs rape gangs rather than grooming gangs, and while some people are still in denial – Owen Jones, for example, who has lied and continues to lie about the men behind them - the subject is no longer taboo.

The latest call for action is for an official British Government inquiry into especially Oldham. Jess Phillips is not only the MP for Birmingham Yardley but the grandly titled Minister For Safeguarding Women And Girls as well as a truly horrible woman. She has come under fire for turning down any such inquiry, saying the “far right” would make capital out of it. In the 2024 General Election, Phillips held her safe Labour seat by a mere 693 votes on a turnout of less than 50%. In 2019, on a 54.8% turnout she won with a majority of over ten thousand, nearly twice as many votes as her nearest rival, the Conservative candidate. With Reform on the rise, she is also clearly afraid of alienating Birmingham’s massive Islamic population prior to the next General Election, which will hopefully be held well before 2029.

Regardless of her professed motives though, or the real ones, she is undoubtedly correct, although her suggestion that Oldham Council should hold its own inquiry is a bad idea. So what is required? First, let us consider what has actually been done.

There have now been many arrests and convictions of these rape gangs going back well over a decade. In November 2010, Mohammed Liaqat and Abid Saddique were convicted at Nottingham Crown Court and the following February they were given indefinite sentences whereupon, to his credit, former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw said there was a very specific problem of Pakistani men who regarded young white girls as “easy meat”. Note he made no reference to Islam. Recent hysteria about it aside, under Sharia, rape is a capital offence.

Naturally, Straw’s frank appraisal of the real problem didn’t go down at all well with the extreme left.

There has already been one inquiry of sorts into these gangs in Oldham. Released in 2022, it covered the period 2011-14 and was severely criticised by GB News especially for whitewashing the racial aspect.

Former detective Maggie Oliver has been responsible for exposing these gangs in nearby Rochdale. She has been quite scathing about the complacency of her former employer, Greater Manchester Police.

In recent years, there have been many convictions of these gangs the length and breadth of the country. For example, in 2017, eighteen members of a gang operating in Newcastle were convicted, while in March 2018, seven men were convicted at Oxford Crown Court after a five month trial.

Last month, the sentencing remarks from an earlier trial at Oxford Crown Court were released. They make horrifying reading.

It is clear now that the police have got to grips with the problem, they are no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to this outrageous abuse. It is now being tackled nationally through the National Crime Agency, and there is also international cooperation. We know now the scale of the problem, the kind of people perpetrating these crimes, and the people who enable them. This is a policing problem. A public inquiry would enrich many lawyers and generate a lot of hot air, but people who testify at these inquiries do not do so under oath. The place people need to testify is in a courtroom, and the people who can put offenders in the dock are police officers. They have the resources to do this already, including carrying out investigations of an historical nature. All they need now is the will to see it through.