A 'reckoning' on grooming gangs won't satisfy the right
Whoever is punished, mass migration has already happened
The renewed focus on the grooming gangs scandal has been instructive. For one, it has vindicated Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter – a purchase that most pundits (myself included) regarded as a $44bn mistake, especially when he set about sacking half the staff, bodging feature tests in public, and enacting one of the worst rebrands in corporate history.
As Helen Dale has written, Musk’s billions “purchased a significant part of the site’s ability to ‘make the weather’ in current affairs terms”. While Twitter increasingly resembles a doomscroller’s 4chan, it has turned Musk into the 21st century’s version of a newspaper proprietor, able to steer the conversation to whatever he’s thinking about at 2 o’clock in the morning.
It will nonetheless not be Musk, nor the American right, who continue to cause the government problems with this story. Far more troublesome is the brigade of British rightwingers who see the scandal as an ideal cudgel to beat back multiculturalism with. But while their immediate aims are clear enough, I’m murkier about what they ultimately hope to achieve – or what plausibly could be achieved off the back of this outrage.
Noting that a story has been weaponised is not to deny its innate importance, or in this case its horror. The scale of child sexual abuse perpetrated in Britain over the past few decades by men of mostly Pakistani heritage is shocking. Thousands of young white teenage girls became victims of these grooming gangs, allegedly being gang raped, kept in cages and even branded. In the unsolved disappearance of Charlene Downes, a man even allegedly joked about putting the remains of her body into kebabs1.
Robert Jenrick, the runner up in the latest Tory leadership campaign, was right when he wrote in the Telegraph that the scandal “is perhaps the greatest racially-motivated crime in modern Britain, perpetrated predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage against vulnerable white girls”. This much has been acknowledged for a while, with Conservative politician Sayeeda Warsi (a Muslim of Pakistani heritage) saying in 2012 that some men with Pakistani backgrounds see white girls as “fair game”. In Pakistan white women are both fetishised and dismissed as sexual objects – the kind of ingredients you need for a genuine ‘rape culture’, to quote the phrase.
As Telegraph comment editor Poppy Cockburn said recently on a podcast, the result of this culture landing in Britain led to something comparable to a war crime. It is of course telling that war crimes are atrocities committed by one side against another. Some on the right would like the scandal to be understood as conclusive evidence that British multiculturalism has failed.
Calls for a “reckoning” summarise the mood. There is a justifiable feeling that some of the perpetrators got off far too lightly – though that may be eclipsed by the rage against leaders of councils, police forces and other public services who were not punished for negligence and wilful blindness in their failure to stop these crimes. As the conservative writer Ben Sixsmith wrote last year: “Sarah Champion MP resigned as shadow equalities minister in 2017 after an article published in her name said ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping white girls’. There were no such high profile consequences over public officials failing to prevent the rape itself.”
This sense of justice not being served underpinned the calls for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs. While I’m sceptical about inquiries, I can see a case for a reckoning with the officials who failed victims over the past few decades. More cynical Conservatives also see it as a chance to embarrass the prime minister Keir Starmer, with suggestions that as director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 he was insufficiently zealous in dealing with the crimes. (This is probably false: Starmer appears to have actually improved how the Crown Prosecution Service dealt with such cases.)
Perhaps the national review ordered by the home secretary Yvette Cooper will serve justice and embarrass Labour. But many conservative writers clearly hope for something more: a scandal that will fatally weaken Britain’s liberal governing order. To take the suggestion of Ed West, at its most explosive the grooming scandal could have the same role as that of Chernobyl in toppling the Soviet Union.
This seems a stretch to me, and I say that while sharing the scepticism about the benefits of diversity and mass migration.
It’s clear the grooming gangs scandal is part of a wider tension between British Muslim communities and wider society. Polling data has long shown that Muslims are more socially conservative than others in the UK, being likelier to think women should stay in the home and that homosexuality should be illegal. Muslims are also enthusiastic about criminalising blasphemy, as shown in polling data and cases like the hounding of a religious studies teacher into hiding for showing images of Muhammad. (Another stranger story involved schoolboys being sent death threats after damaging a Quran as part of a dare. The threats went unpunished.)
In the last general election, which came after nine months of regular pro-Palestine marches in London, several independent Muslim candidates were elected with a focus on protesting Israel’s military response to Hamas’s attack in October 2023. Campaign groups have also sprung up with a view to promoting openly sectarian politics, with one subtly called The Muslim Vote. The prospect that mainland Britain will see elections that more closely resemble those in divided Northern Ireland is hardly an enticing one.
Much of this is regrettable – but it has already happened. British migration policy for decades has led to some ethnic communities that sit uncomfortably alongside mainstream society. Even if the grooming gangs scandal is successfully incorporated into a wider pushback against migration – finally “treated like A Big Deal”, to quote the writer Louise Perry – this is what Britain is now like.
That will not change unless mainstream political parties start to advocate for what the rightwing Alternative für Deutschland terms ‘remigration’: moving ethnic minorities back to their ancestors’ countries, irrespective of where they were born. And for all the obvious reasons – moral, political, legal, practical – I do not want and cannot see this happening. Despite the longstanding popular support for reducing migration levels, Britain is not about to turn to such extreme measures.
The right can have their national inquiry, summary justice, and even a landslide general election win for Reform: the above problem remains. Every perpetrator and witless official could be jailed and all the above would still be true. Indeed, more publicity on this subject – however justified – is only likely to boost ethnic tensions and sectarian voting. And the ‘reckoning’ which the right wants is unlikely to achieve closure.
This claim has been cited as if it were true by some rightwing pundits, but I couldn’t find anything that suggested it was more than a joke. Even with the state of kebab meat at some of Britain’s charcoal grills, I think the punters would have noticed.