On 9 January, Labour MPs were three-line whipped into blocking a national inquiry into organised gangs of Pakistani Muslims who raped and tortured vulnerable young girls on an industrial scale across multiple British towns: Rochdale, Rotherham, Oldham, Telford. If justice is to be served, this should prove the death of Sir Keir Starmer’s political career. The offences go back several decades. Yet, prosecutions were rare until recently, convictions often produced only light sentences, and many who were jailed have already been released. Occasionally, their victims run into them in public spaces and are traumatised all over again. The parliamentary motion for an inquiry was defeated 364-111. The government is running a protection racket for paedophile rapists and torturers and their enablers in Labour-run local councils and amongst mostly Labour-voting public servants. The scandal has the potential to reshape British politics owing to the heinous nature of the crimes, the widening realisation that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up, and the complicit haven’t suffered any consequences.

The 2014 Jay Report concluded that rape gangs operating in Rotherham alone between 1997 and 2013 had groomed, abducted, drugged, and tortured, ‘at least’ 1,400 children, some as young as 11, some of whom were murdered. Some had been serially raped by multiple perpetrators, passed around to friends and family networks and trafficked to other towns and cities.

For a glimpse of the utter depravity of the abuse, read paragraph 53 of the sentencing remarks of Judge Peter Rook QC in June 2013 (www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf) and the story of 12-year-old ‘Sophie’ in Oldham in 2006 (https://www.theoldhamtimes.co.uk/news/20221964.horrifying-story-sophie-12-year-old-abused-girl-failed-oldham-police) and weep.

No one knows how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s. Why? Because of the determination of the elites to defend a failed policy of immigration and non-assimilative multiculturalism. Politicians, police, councils, charities and the media lacked the courage and conscience to overcome the fear of being called racist and Islamophobic. Britain’s traditional class divide had fused with the new performative moralism of political correctness, with the plod busy policing speech- and thought-crimes and recording non-crime hate incidents. And it’s still going on. A taskforce to bring down the criminal gangs has led to hundreds of arrests in its first year, according to an official report in May.

The safety and welfare of white working-class girls, many from broken families and living in community care, were sacrificed to political and institutional cowardice. Labour bigwigs warned MPs and councillors not to raise the ethnicity, religious, or migrant status of the rape gangs, to protect ‘community relations’ and avoid ‘adverse electoral impact’. Often, victims were the ones blamed for their lifestyle choices, mirroring the contempt of the rapists for ‘white slags’. As the pattern and scale of the sexual brutalisation became clear, authorities directed their ire at the ‘Murdoch press’ and turned the perpetrators into victims of a smear campaign. And so a second pattern was established of cover-ups of ‘local’ incidents, threats to victims, whistleblowers, pesky reporters and academics, and political and police brass intervention on behalf of Muslim communities under siege. The scandal was broken wide open by Elon Musk with a tweet on 6 January that has garnered 70 million views. An earlier tweet said Jess Phillips, the Parliamentary Undersecretary for Safeguarding Women and Girls, ‘deserves to be in prison’ for refusing demands for a national inquiry.

Starmer was the chief prosecutor from 2008 to 2013. The rejection of a national inquiry in effect blocks investigation of his failure to prosecute the crimes. Maggie Oliver, a former detective who helped to expose the scandal, holds him to be as ‘guilty as anyone’ over failures to address the rampaging rape gangs. Reform leader Nigel Farage has joined calls for Starmer’s role to be investigated. Starmer’s lawyerly equivocations on non-prosecutions are political arse-covering. He has resorted to the default playbook of attacking those who allege a cover-up of peddling fake news, misinformation and disinformation (advocates of such a law in Australia: please take note). Anyone calling for a national inquiry is accused of jumping aboard the ‘bandwagon of the far right’. This is very telling. Smearing people demanding safeguards for vulnerable girls, punishment of rape-torturers and accountability for those enabling it all through a vast conspiracy of silence, is exactly how the crimes ended in a mass cover-up in the first place. Starmer appears to be more enraged at the verbal abuse of his ministers than by the decades-long violent rapes of girls on an industrial scale.

According to a YouGov poll on 9 January, a public national inquiry is backed by a whopping 76 per cent of the British public, including 65 per cent of Labour voters. The reputation and poll numbers of lawyer-not-leader Starmer are tanking. Yet equally, the rediscovery of a spine by the Conservatives raises the uncomfortable question of why no effective action was taken during the 14 years of Tory rule? Starmer is yet to learn the lesson of word-salad answers from the fate that befell Kamala Harris. He also resorts to the lazy disinformation of ‘an Asian grooming gang’ to obfuscate the ethno-religious identity of the gangs. My selfish interest in this is simple. Disguising the truth of the rapists’ identity means all Asian ethnics suffer the resulting backlash. Yet even now, Health Secretary Wes Streeting wants to turn perpetrators into victims. He warns that mention of the identity of rapists will lead to another Christchurch mosque-style massacre of Muslims. So a hypothetical future atrocity against one community is more important than a decades-long record of atrocities by members of that community.

The importance of perception as well as the administration of justice is captured in the familiar saying that justice must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done. This is because the sense of justice, fairness and equity is deeply ingrained in humans. A community denotes a group of people bound by a shared moral framework which distinguishes right from wrong conduct and regulates social behaviour to recognise the former and punish the latter. Justice has many roles to play beyond simply bringing wrongdoers to account: acknowledging the suffering of victims, educating the public, and deterring future atrocities. An open and transparent national inquiry takes a victim-centred approach to help establish the historical record. It summarises the findings, puts them in proper political and historical context and disseminates the facts of past atrocities to the public and the world.

A public national inquiry is warranted to bring justice to the perpetrators, closure to victims and accountability to those who covered up the crimes for decades while hounding the whistleblowers and truth-seekers. It will memorialise as epoch-defining the biggest crime and cover-up in British history and should help to deter repetition of the crimes and cover-ups in the future.