Why liberals ignored the grooming gang scandal
For many years, liberals refused to talk about the grooming gangs scandal. The systematic sexual abuse and rape of hundreds, possibly thousands, of vulnerable children by offenders from ethnic minorities was a story that too many people were happy to ignore. There was an effective prohibition on discussing it in left and liberal circles. Grooming gangs was a subject guaranteed to silence a dinner party. So, we decided to pretend that it wasn't happening.
Finally, the so-called great and the good have woken up to a scandal that was happening in plain sight
Finally, the so-called great and the good have woken up to a scandal that was happening in plain sight in towns and cities across Britain. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer accused those calling for an inquiry into grooming gangs of jumping on a 'bandwagon of the far-right'. Now, his government is promising a national inquiry. It's about time.
The damage is done, of course: victims' lives have been ruined. And while some offenders were brought to justice, many weren't. Those in positions of authority who should have stopped the abuse did not do so. Too many of those people are still in their jobs. Too many have retired to enjoy their public sector pensions, having utterly failed the most vulnerable people in society.
I can't excuse the refusal to listen up to the victims, but I think I can explain what happened.
The truth is that too many liberals like me are guided by an instinct to protect ethnic minority communities from being targeted. That, in itself, is not a bad thing. We feared that, if a certain group of people was blamed for the abuse, then that group could become the victims of racial hatred, perhaps even violence. The thinking was this: 'I don't want blood on my hands, let's close this conversation down, now.'
But what is clear to see now is that the desire to keep people safe meant that we became blind to the evils carried out by a small minority of people from the Pakistani Muslim community. In our desire to avoid offence, and keep people safe from violence, liberals turned a blind eye to an industrial scandal.
Call it 'woke', call it what you like, but the essence of this mode of thinking that was too common among liberals was that white people are the oppressors, while ethnic minorities are the victims. This lens through which people viewed the world removed class and even economic inequality pretty much entirely from the mix; it allowed upper-middle class people to feel good about themselves, while not having to worry about the poor any longer.
This is relevant to the grooming gangs scandal since, by this ideological framework, ethnic minority men were perceived as victims, when they weren't. And young white girls were viewed, absurdly, as the oppressors. The fact that these children – and, remember, that many of them were children – were utterly powerless was of no consequence to the people that mattered.
Only by exposing this absurd characterisation can we begin to understand why liberals ignored this story – and why those in positions of authority in the police, on councils and in schools didn't see what should have been obvious: that these girls were being abused and, in many cases, those responsible were from ethnic minority communities.
The crimes inflicted upon the victims of the grooming gangs – the real victims, just to be clear – were the end result of a horrible ideological experiment.
'I was following through on a child's file in (the) archive and found the word 'Pakistani' tippexed out,' Baroness Casey, whose national audit on grooming gangs was published on Monday, revealed this week. There is a real world, non-woke term for this sort of thing: racism. In other words, the judging of someone's moral character via their ethnicity.
Liberals, and those on the left, will try and equivocate over the coming weeks. They will say things like 'White Britons engage in this behaviour too, so targeting ethnic minorities who do this sort of thing is racist'. That, of course, completely misses the point. No one other than the most ardent racists are saying that all Muslim or Pakistani men are child rapists. But what is clear is that some people who fit this description have committed horrible crimes and got away with it.
No one rational is saying that the men who perpetrated these crimes should be punished because of their ethnicity. We are saying that child rapists should not be allowed to escape censure because of their culture or skin colour. If we want our multi-ethnic society to survive – and I desperately do – we cannot have any type of person treated differently because of their religion or the colour of their skin.
Sadly, what is now clear to see is that too many people weren't colour blind in how they saw things. Their perspective was essentially to try and avoid offence by ignoring the mass abuse of white, working-class girls by sexual predators from minority groups.
The whole episode is disgusting and should be a wake-up call for the left. Sadly, I doubt it will be. We need to discard the twisted ideology that decides innocence and guilt along racial lines. What happened with the grooming gangs scandal is possibly the clearest ever example of why that is the case. Too many children have paid the price for the silence of liberal do-gooders.
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