MP who first blew whistle on child rape gangs was smeared as a racist, says son

The son of a former Labour MP who was the first to raise the alarm about child rape gangs more than 20 years ago has described how she was smeared and attacked for being a racist, particularly by members of her own party.
John Cryer, a former MP who now sits in the House of Lords, highlighted the backlash endured by his mother Ann when she blew the whistle on the scandal in 2003.
Labour peer Lord Cryer said those who were complicit at the time and knew of the child abuse by a group of older men from the Pakistani community, but chose to cover it up, should face prosecution.
He was speaking after a nationwide inquiry was announced by the Prime Minister into grooming gangs following a major review by Baroness Casey.
Her report, published on Monday, found the ethnicity of perpetrators had been 'shied away from', with data not recorded for two-thirds of offenders.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper claimed officials had dodged the issue of ethnicity among the groups of sex offenders for fear of being called racist, even though available data showed suspects were disproportionately likely to be Asian men.
The Government has accepted all 12 recommendations made by Lady Casey, including the establishment of a national inquiry.
Mrs Cryer was MP for Keighley when she was alerted to the problem in her constituency by a group of concerned mothers, who said their young daughters were being sexually exploited by a group of older Asian men and the police and social services were refusing to act.
After going public she faced accusations that she was a racist and also received threatening notes and phone calls, leading police to install a panic alarm in her house.
She stood down as an MP in 2010.
In the years since, a series of high-profile grooming scandals have been exposed, including in Rotherham and Rochdale.
All followed a similar pattern with the large-scale exploitation of mainly white girls by groups of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage, which the authorities failed to tackle.
Responding to a ministerial statement on the Casey review, Lord Cryer said: 'I rise to speak principally because the first person who raised the issue of the rape gangs, in other words the first whistleblower, happens to be my mum, Ann Cryer MP, who started raising this in 2003.
'She was then smeared and attacked, particularly by Labour figures, I've got to say, for being a racist.
'I'm not talking about ministers in the then government, many of whom actually supported her, and in the case of David Blunkett, as then home secretary, went out of his way to make sure that prosecutions happened, which they did.
'I'm talking about councillors, councils and other institutions who went on the attack and lied and smeared about the rape gangs.'
He added: 'I think some of them were complicit. Some of them knew it was going on, and they decided to cover up.
'And in those cases, if there is evidence to that fact, then they should be brought before the courts and prosecuted.'
In reply, Home Office minister Lord Hanson of Flint said: 'Can I pay tribute to his mother. I served in Parliament with Ann and I know she raised these matters and faced extreme difficulties locally as result, and took a very brave stand at that time.'
Stressing the need to address the issue, he added: 'My party hasn't been in government for 14 years, but we have been in control of some of the councils.
'My party wasn't in control of government when a lot of these issues happened, but I have still got a responsibility to look at making sure we deal with these in an effective way.'
Earlier, he told peers other recommendations made by Lady Casey would be implemented 'in very short order'.
These included making it mandatory to collect ethnicity and nationality data of all suspects in child sexual abuse cases, a change in the law so all adult sex with under-16s would be considered rape, and a review of the criminal records of exploitation victims.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

BBC News

17 minutes ago

• BBC News

Sunderland man charged with attempted murder after two stabbed

A man has been charged with attempted murder after two men were stabbed.A man in his 40s and another man in his 20s were found seriously injured on Roker Avenue, Sunderland just after 16:40 BST on Saturday, Northumbria Police were taken to hospital where they remain in a stable condition. Adam Ahmed, 29, of Roker Avenue, has been charged with two counts of attempted murder and threatening with a knife in a private place and will appear at South Tyneside Magistrates' Court later. Follow BBC Sunderland on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.

New Statesman​

28 minutes ago

• New Statesman​

Should Labour copy the Danish Social Democrats on migration?

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Photo by Omer Messinger / Getty Images Years before Keir Starmer's 'Nation of Strangers' speech I found myself on the doors at Labour's ill-fated Hartlepool By-Election campaign. A front row seat to the new leader's Labour Party and its floundering first steps in pro-Brexit Britain. Joining a slim team (made up entirely of Labour Party staff bussed in from the North West) I marched around the kind of council estates that were once reliable Labour strongholds. An inexplicably cold Spring afternoon with a colder welcome waiting behind each door. A series of hairdryer-strength rants about how the party had abandoned Hartlepudlians. Bafflement about taking the knee for Black Lives Matter. In an attempt to sell a changed Labour to one resident, a middle aged man in an England shirt. Whether he liked the new, patriotic flag-toting leaflets we were handing out. He mimed spitting on the floor in front of me, then spoke about how the Labour council had closed the local police station. The vacuity of Labour's new offer was palpable then, with Starmer still speaking mostly to Westminster press corps about how he wasn't Jeremy Corbyn. Little to say about the economic system that had left Hartlepool as one of Britain's child poverty hotspots. It was that teachable moment, encountering the pure disdain for Labour in one of Britain's most deprived neighbourhoods, that led me to wonder whether the left really was completely doomed, or whether another left wing party had turned the dire situation faced by Labour around. Enter Mette Fredriksen. In Denmark, Fredrikson's Social Democratic Party (SDP) was celebrated for leading her party back to government after beating the populist, hardcore anti-immigration Danish People's Party (DPP) – a rough analogue to Reform. By the mid 2010s, DPP were the second largest party in Denmark, largely drawing their support from rural, manual workers and pensioners. Stymying this flow of voters and returning them to the left is a miracle of European politics. A case for left-wing beatification. Denmark has become the laboratory for any left politician wondering how to win back the type of voter that used to be their most loyal. Frederikson's party has returned, aggressively, to the traditions of the social democratic covenant. In everything they do there's an emphasis that trust and integration are paramount; a prerequisite for any redistributive politics to exist. This pathos would be familiar to anyone who had knocked a voter's door in one of the post-industrial red wall towns, like Hartlepool, that have emerged as globalisation's marked losers in the winnowed field of British life. In these areas there is a longing for the sense of being knitted together by societal norms, values and friendships that has gone missing. In their place; a country where the state seems to exist as a mechanism to help someone else – someone that you feel little sense of shared endeavour with – first, if it ever gets around to helping you. Frederikson's gambit has been to restore the legitimacy of left politics through forced assimilation: either the population becomes more incontestably Danish or the social democratic tradition dies like an unwatered plant. In the front page of the SDP's 2018 strategy pamphlet Just and Realistic she appears above a quote reading 'You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This last chance saloon mentality led to dramatic policy shifts – significantly more coercive than any in the recent Labour tradition – paired with a language of morality and a sense of self-belief that contrasts the more apologetic tone and secrecy of Starmer's Labour. The Danes do not try to debate immigration with their working class voters. They spend their political capital at elections on arguing successfully for traditional left policy – increasing public spending in a society where 88 percent of voters are happy paying some of the highest taxes in the world. Could Frederiksen's example help Labour's least popular Prime Minister in generations? Could it help him win again in those white majority, working class areas the party is currently projected to lose to Reform in 2029? Where Labour needs to be careful is not to re-enact the same decade-long mistake it made with the wholesale adoption of the identity politics of America – without checking its relevance to Britain. The Danish political debate on immigration and multiculturalism orbits around the 'Ghetto Package' of 2018. Introduced by the right, Frederiksen's winning coalition of 2019 continued the policy with few adjustments, save it being renamed the 'Parallel Society Act.' The Act empowers the government to designate areas 'vulnerable' where they exhibit a mix of factors related to a lack of education, low incomes and higher than average crime rates. People that might in a less PC-era have been referred to as 'the poor'. There's a further factor common to all the 'vulnerable' areas – most of their residents are officially designated as 'Non-Western'. This group includes migrants from South America, Asia and Africa and their children. A cynic might argue that 'South America' is included in the list in order to muddy the waters on whether the policy is ethnically-targeted and discriminatory, something the European Court of Justice will decide later this year. When an estate receives the 'vulnerable residential area' designation, sanctions are enacted. The owning housing association or municipality must reduce the number of social housing units in its stock to 40 percent. Participation in crime becomes collectively and more harshly punished, with an entire family liable to be evicted for a crime committed by a relative. Since the act came into effect thousands of social homes have been lost. While thousands were sold to private investment firms, multiples more have simply been demolished. Thousands of families have been evicted, 11,000 are expected to be moved on by the time of the programme's end in 2030. The effect on Denmark's overall stock of social housing is small and the 'ghetto laws' apply to a comparatively small amount of that population, less than 1 percent. However, it is hard not to see these punitive measures mostly as a means to make an example of communities based on their ethnic heritage. The accompanying, much-maligned policy of taking assets from refugees had only ever been applied in four recorded cases by 2022. These are policies designed to make an example in rhetoric more than they are designed to make progress with integration into Danish values. What could Labour learn from Frederiksen's success? Could the party create its own equivalent vision equivalent to 'Just and Realistic'? Not a 'Nation of Strangers' but a more positive and hopeful proposition, that showed a belief in Danish society's ability to absorb and overcome its issues, so long as everyone feels a sense of shared purpose? Any leader of the left today must be able to face up to the collapsing consensus of the liberal political era, acknowledge the difficult reality between the politically convenient myths, as Denmark did. Among those myths; most parties of the Left in the Western World are parties of the working class. They aren't. Most have spent a generation haemorrhaging working class support and members. Further, after a rate of migration outpacing the rate of housebuilding for a parliament, the majority of the public thinks immigration levels are too high. Especially so those in the left-behind areas that notionally left wing parties should feel a natural compassion and solidarity toward. Another myth is that a multicultural society leads to integration by default. We are beginning to see parallel societies in England – as evidenced by the exceptionally poor levels of English spoken in places like Leicester, a recipe for pariah status. Alongside this, the emergence of a form of politics that votes along ethnic, racial and religious lines more so than by ideology. It is difficult to imagine the kind of cultural chauvinism whereby Danes see their society as superior taking root in Britain, but it's exactly this that leads to both their approval of high taxation, high trust and to their unforgiving focus on integration. But just like we are not America, we are not Denmark. Danish ghettos are a result of the country's quietly unacknowledged, decades long, nativist approach to housing. In the supposedly liberal nordic countries, Asian and African migrants and asylum seekers have been pushed into conurbations of undesirable housing and became second-class citizens. The Danish Left has been more forthcoming than Britain about the effects of this ghettoisation, phlegmatic when it comes to publishing the racial details of criminality and working backwards from the numbers. But Britain, by contrast, has not developed a culture of sublimating morality to statistics and that is a strength – Britain loves a triumph over the odds, we give second chances. At no point in history was there a working class life that wouldn't be doomed by quick statistical contextual rundown. Britain has done significantly better, historically, in creating a country where migrants contribute and become part of the country's social fabric. Contrary to the dominant liberal left view of Britain as an avowedly racist country that has barely moved on from the 50s, the most diverse areas of Britain are the most socially mobile. Almost every ethnic group out-performs white working class children at school. We have fewer 'ghettos'. Our housing policies have largely mixed social tenants with private tenants in the same estates. It's almost certain that Britain would never tolerate a racialised idea of a person as 'non-western'. If applied as in Denmark, this label would encompass the former Prime Minister, celebrities like Mo Farah, Linford Christie, Idris Elba, Bernadine Evaristo and the Reform chairman Zia Yusuf. Most of all, it would be an enormous mistake to interpret the SDP's success as solely oriented around issues of immigration. By 2022 the issue had largely fallen away from Danish political debate, with only the rump of Danish Democrats (the DPP successor party) still citing it as one of their main political motivations. Frederiksen had succeeded in neutralising the issue, but she had won on a platform of reducing cuts to social welfare and maintaining taxes much higher than in Britain. Her voters in 2022 placed welfare as their highest priority. Labour, boxed in by fiscal rules and an unwillingness to make the case for taxation, is about to enact the biggest cuts to social security since the coalition. Where Frederiksen did truly excel was in leading her party openly and authentically into this new era. Starmer has so far chosen to hold this conversation in the back offices of Labour HQ, ignoring his party's members, winning consent to lead with a fake mandate. Now, trailing in the polls, time has run out for back room meddling. Labour needs its own reckoning. Related

The Sun

44 minutes ago

• The Sun

Woman dies and nine injured in horror M4 crash as motorway shut ‘for most the day' with cops launching urgent hunt

A WOMAN has died in a car crash that hospitalised nine other people last night. The fatal crash happened on the M4 between junctions 16 and 17, just before 11.30pm last night. 1 A womanin her 40s sadly died at the scene, and another woman in her 70s was seriously injured Five other people in the car had minor injuries. There were also three people travelling in the second car who were hurt and were taken to hospital with minor injuries. Wiltshire Police's Serious Collision Team are at the scene carrying out an investigation into what happened. The motorway is likely to be closed westbound for most of the day, likely causing disruption for a large number of people. Cops received reports that a white vehicle may have been involved and left the scene. Any witnesses to the collision or anyone who may have dashcam footage are asked to contact the serious collision investigation team on 01225 694597, quoting log number 399.