Martin Hanson
Martin Hanson is a retired high school science teacher, born and educated in the United Kingdom, but spent most of his teaching career in New Zealand.
By 2017, gangs had been convicted for child sexual exploitation in 37 towns, and the list has since grown to over 50:
Accrington, Yeovil, Aylesbury, Banbury, Barking, Birkenhead, Birmingham, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Bradford, Brierfield, Bristol, Burton, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Chesham, Colchester, Coventry, Derby, Dewsbury, Gateshead, Glasgow, Halifax, High Wycombe, Huddersfield, Hull, Ilford, Ipswich, Keighley, Leeds, Leicester, Littlehampton, London, Manchester, Middlesborough, Nelson, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Preston, Reddich, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sheffield, Skipton, Slough, St Helens, Stockport, Telford, Walsall, and Wendover.
The sacking of Sarah Champion was proof, if any were needed, of the stranglehold Islam has on the Labour Party, not only at the level of local councils, but extending to the parliamentary leadership. There is now deep suspicion that deflecting attention from the grooming gangsters by the top brass of the Labour Party is not the whole story, and that the prime minister himself may have played an active part in protecting the gangsters from prosecution when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.
The story can be traced to an investigation into reports of sexual abuse of children in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.
Kicking the ball into the long grass: Operation Augusta
Victoria Agoglia was a 15-year-old girl living in Rochdale, and had been under the care of Manchester City Council since she was eight. She frequently ran away and fell into the clutches of Muslim grooming gangsters, who gave her cash in exchange for alcohol and hard drugs. In September 2003 she was overdosed with a heroin by 50-year-old Mohammed Yaqoob, and she later died in hospital.
Following her death, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) mounted Operation Augusta to investigate child sexual exploitation in South Manchester.
A preliminary (‘scoping’) investigation began in February 2004, with the aim of establishing the scope of the problem and the resources that would be needed. Investigators identified 25 potential victims, all of whom were girls aged between 11 and 17 and in the care of Manchester City Council.
The investigation also identified 97 suspects, predominantly Asian men working in the restaurant industry.
In June 2004, Operation Augusta moved to a full investigation, and involved the social services of Manchester City Council. But in April 2005, the investigation team were told by senior police officers that permanent staff were not being allocated to the operation, and that the operation would be closed down on 1 July 2005. This, despite the fact that at least 57 potential victims had been identified, all of them children.
Why?
In response to allegations on social media that Oldham Council knew about the activities of grooming gangsters in the town, but was covering the issue up, an independent inquiry was commissioned in 2019 to enquire into allegations of child sexual exploitation. When published in 2022, the inquiry found that children in Oldham were being sexually exploited and that services that were supposed to protect them had failed.
Among its damning findings, the review found that:
- Police failed to tell council about the arrest of a Rochdale grooming gang leader who was employed in Oldham as welfare officer, despite being accused of serious child sexual abuse.
- Social workers deflected blame by saying that girls who were being drugged and violently raped were ‘putting themselves at risk’.
- Oldham Council gave taxi driver licences to men convicted or accused of serious sexual offences involving women and children.
- GMP and Oldham Council failed to protect some children from grooming and sexual exploitation.
Anyone who had been paying attention would have known that the findings of the Oldham report were part of a nationwide, systemic problem that authorities had feared to confront, for fear of threatening ‘community relations’.
So in July 2024, Oldham Council voted to ask the Home Office for a public inquiry to give a voice to those impacted by child sexual exploitation.
On January 2, five months after Oldham’s request, came the reply from Jess Phillips, whose responsibilities as Minister for Safeguarding, it should be noted, include:
- tackling violence against women and girls
- child sexual abuse and exploitation
- sexual violence
In her reply she said:
I believe it is for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.
This was clearly not good enough for Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party. Posting on X on January 6, she called for a national inquiry into the UK’s rape gangs scandal:
I was serious when I said it’s time to get justice for victims. So on Wednesday, Conservatives will put forward an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing Bill to require a full national inquiry into the rape gangs grooming scandal. If the amendment is selected, I hope MPs from all parties will vote to support the inquiry, so we can do right by the victims and end the culture of cover ups.
Kemi Badenoch was speaking for the great majority of the British people, for a poll showed that 76 per cent wanted one.
The response was to impose a three-line whip, compelling Labour MPs to vote against the amendment, and to accuse those calling for a national inquiry of “jumping on a far-right bandwagon”.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, pulled no punches:
The Labour Party announcing they will whip their MPs to vote against a national inquiry into this scandal is total moral cowardice from Keir Starmer and his Labour Party. The victims of these heinous child rape gangs deserve honesty, and they deserve the truth.
In the event, on January 8, MPs voted by 364 votes to 111 against the amendment.
Most lay people think the word ‘vote’ has something to do with ‘opinion’, and ‘choice’. But with a three-line whip, ‘an offer they can’t refuse’ would be nearer the mark. Do as you’re told if you want to stay in the Labour Party.
Bizarrely, rather than submitting to the whip, Starmer and Angela Rayner abstained. If Starmer had actually believed that what was at stake was some sort of principle, he and his deputy would surely have voted against the amendment.
On Jan 16, Yvette Cooper spoke in the Commons, and part of her speech was as follows (emphasis added):
We will also work with mayors and local councils to bolster the accountability mechanisms that can support and follow up local inquiries, to ensure that those who are complicit in cover ups, or who try to resist scrutiny, are always robustly held to account so that truth and justice are never denied. This new package of national support for local inquiries will be backed by £5 million of additional funding to get further local work off the ground because, at every level, getting justice for victims and protecting children is a responsibility we all share.
and
As we have seen, effective local inquiries can delve into far more local detail and deliver more locally relevant answers and change than a lengthy nationwide inquiry can provide.
Tom Crowther KC, the chair of the Telford inquiry, has agreed to work with the Government to develop a new framework for victim-centred, locally led inquiries where they are needed. As a first step, he will work with Oldham Council and up to four other pilot areas.
The Conservative opposition were not impressed. Shadow home office minister Chris Philp was having none of it. In his speech in parliament (bold added to sections of the Hansard transcript), he said:
Previous reports and reviews did not go far enough. The IICSA [Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse] report itself was mainly not about these rape gangs. In fact, it barely touched on the issue and looked at only six towns. We now believe that as many as 50 towns could have been affected, so the IICSA barely scratched the surface.
The Home Secretary just announced government support for only five local inquiries. That is wholly inadequate when we know that up to 50 towns are affected. I have some serious questions for the Home Secretary. First, how are the other 40-plus towns supposed to get answers to the questions that they have, and how will these initial five towns be chosen?
Secondly, the Home Secretary said nothing in her statement about the powers that these local inquiries will have. It seems that they will not be statutory inquiries under the Inquiries Act 2005. That means that these local inquiries will not have the power to compel witnesses to attend, to take evidence under oath or to requisition written evidence. If that is the case, how can they possibly get to the truth when faced with cover ups? It was precisely that problem – the lack of powers – that reportedly led the chairs of the Manchester local inquiry to resign last year. They were not given the information that they needed by public authorities, and did not have the powers required to force its release, so they resigned.
Legal powers are needed, because these crimes were deliberately covered up in some cases. We heard just a week or two ago from the former Labour MP for Rochdale Simon Danczuk, who said that the then chair of the parliamentary Labour Party told him not to raise these issues for fear of losing Muslim votes – truly appalling.
Philp had pointed to the reason that lay behind the government’s refusal to hold a national inquiry – all but two of the towns in which grooming gangs were active were Labour-controlled, and heavily dependent on the Muslim vote. Appeasement is therefore essential for electoral survival.
The sincerity of the government’s apparent determination to protect Muslim-dominated councils from any investigation with teeth can be judged by what Yvette Cooper had said in 2013 when Labour were in opposition:
You can never allow any kind of sensitivities around race and ethnicity to prevent action on child exploitation and abuse.
For many people, such staggering hypocrisy is proof that the government has a king-sized skeleton in its cupboard, which would be revealed by a national inquiry that would threaten the survival of the government and arguably, the very existence of the Labour Party.
Despite this looming existential threat to its credibility as the protector of the oppressed, the government did nothing to change its course from appeasement of the oppressors. In fact, during a lull in the media headlines, it seemed to have forgotten about Tom Crowther, the barrister who, in Yvette Cooper’s words, had “agreed to work with the government to develop a new framework for victim-centred, locally led inquiries where they are needed”. But after three months, the BBC reported on April 2, Crowther asked a government official “do you still want me?”, and that in a Commons committee hearing on Tuesday, he suggested there had been little progress nearly three months later.
And as if the government didn’t appreciate the hole it had dug for itself, it continued to dig, for on April 8, the day before parliament broke for Easter, with only 45 minutes warning, Jess Phillips announced at the despatch box that the government would not be going ahead with the five local inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ that had been promised by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary. These would be replaced by a ‘more flexible’ approach, involving victim-led local ‘panels’, and avoiding the need for local authorities to name the individuals who either looked away or actively facilitated the rape, torture, and trafficking of thousands of working-class white girls.
In response, Conservative front bencher Katie Lam’s evisceration of the government’s cover-up could not have been more incriminating. As her words were not reproduced in the mainstream media, I reproduce them here (emboldened retrospectively):
I thank the Minister for advance sight of her statement.
In January, the Home Secretary said that the government would conduct five local inquiries into the rape gangs who have terrorised so many innocent children. More than three months since the government announced those local inquiries, Tom Crowther KC, a barrister invited by the Home Office to help establish them, knows almost nothing about their progress, and neither do we. Why is the framework for local inquiries now being led by ministers, rather than by independent voices such as Tom Crowther? Why is the £5 million set aside for inquiries no longer being allocated, but instead delivered on an ‘opt-in’ basis? What does the government intend to do about local leaders who say there is no need for an independent inquiry, as they do in Bradford and in Wales?
The girls we are talking about are predominantly white. The men who preyed on them were predominantly Muslim, generally either from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage. One of the victims from Dewsbury was told by her rapist: “We’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government.”
Does the minister accept that in many cases these crimes were racially and religiously aggravated? How, without a national inquiry, can we understand what part those factors played?
There is no question but that the state has failed these children time and again. Take the case of ‘Anna’ from Bradford. Vulnerable and in residential care, at the age of 14 she made repeated reports of rape and abuse to social workers who were responsible for her. Just the following year, aged 15, she ‘married’ her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding ceremony. Far from stepping in to stop it, her social worker was a guest. The authorities then arranged for her to be fostered by her abuser’s parents. The ringleader of the Rochdale rape gang, Shabir Ahmed, was employed as a welfare rights officer by Oldham council. Yet not one person – not one – has been convicted for covering up these institutionalised rapes. Why have ministers refused to establish a dedicated unit in the National Crime Agency to investigate councillors and officials accused of collusion and corruption?
I am sorry to say that that unit must also investigate police officers. In one case, the father of an abuse victim in Rotherham was arrested by South Yorkshire police when he attempted to rescue his daughter from her abusers. He was detained twice in one night, while on the very same evening, his daughter was repeatedly assaulted and abused by a gang of men. It is clear that these criminals were unafraid of law enforcement. In Kirklees, Judge Marson said: “You were seen with your victim on at least three occasions by the police… none of that deterred you, and you continued to rape her.”
How, without a national inquiry, can we know how and why these monsters enjoyed effective immunity for so long, and how can we be sure that it will not happen again?
Conservative members have voted for a national inquiry, and tabled amendments that would guarantee the publication of ethnicity data on a quarterly basis, terminate the parental rights of convicted sex offenders and make membership of a grooming gang an aggravating factor during sentencing, so that offenders get the longer, harsher sentences that they deserve. Will the minister commit to accepting those amendments to protect our children?
Finally, I would like to read to the House one particular ordeal – just one example of what these children have suffered. I must warn colleagues, and especially those in the Gallery, that this is extremely graphic, but we must not look away or sanitise this evil. Sentencing Mohammed Karrar of Oxford to life in prison, Judge Peter Rook said: “You prepared her” – that is his victim, a 13-year-old girl – for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to gang rape by five or six men. At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet. … When she was 12, after raping her, she threatened you with your lock knife. Your reaction was to pick up a baseball bat with a silver metal handle, strike her on the head with it, and then insert the baseball bat inside her vagina.
This is not about me, the minister, the Home Secretary or any Hon members in the Chamber: it is about the little girls, up and down our country, whose brutal and repeated rapes were permitted and hidden by those in the British state whose jobs were to protect them. They deserve justice. In five towns, those children and their families may get partial answers, but I have mentioned five towns in the past few minutes alone, and there are at least 45 more. In those places, children and their families will get no answers at all, so what does the minister have to say to them? The British people deserve to know the truth. What darker truths does the suffering of those girls reveal about this country – and why will the government not find out?
The best Phillips could muster in the opening statement of her reply was:
I thank the Hon Lady; I think it is a shame that she referred to only one sort of child abuse victim, when the statement is clearly about all child abuse victims. There should be no hierarchy; we are also talking about children raped by their fathers or raped in other circumstances, such as in children’s homes and institutions, over many years. It is a shame that she did not speak about any of their experiences, notwithstanding the very graphic and upsetting stories that she did tell.
She would have been better off remaining silent, for by opening her mouth she removed any lingering doubts about the Labour government’s determination to conceal the truth about Muslim organised crime.
I have emboldened Judge Peter Rook’s words because the mainstream media have, as Katie Lam put it, ‘sanitised the evil’ by preventing the British people learning about the full horrors of what these Muslim perverts did to those little girls. The Daily Express mentioned an “extremely graphic” case (Daily Express April 8 2025), but gave no details. Kelvin Mackenzie in GB News couldn’t bring himself to manage more than an allusion to a pump and a baseball bat. As far as I have been able to determine, the Independent the Daily Mail did not even mention Katie Lam’s speech. And as for the Guardian – don’t even ask.
Earlier in this account, I mentioned the role of the media in minimising the scale of these atrocities. Their failure to give publicity to Katie Lam’s speech indicates that the deep fear of offending Islam has not changed.
The mask slips
On May 2, 2025, BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, panellists included Tim Montgomerie, a Reform UK commentator, and Labour front bencher Lucy Powell, MP for Manchester Central. On the topic of rape gangs, Montgomerie mentioned the Channel 4 documentary “Groomed: A National Scandal”, which had just been broadcast. Lucy Powell quickly interrupted: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, let’s get that dog whistle out.”
The “dog whistle” comment amounted to a contemptuous dismissal of the suffering of thousands of rape gang victims, and provoked an outraged response from the opposition.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said, “Labour’s Lucy Powell thinks it’s a “dog whistle” to demand arrests and accountability for the rape gangs. What a disgusting betrayal of the victims. They are part of the cover-up.”
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “This shocking outburst from a Labour Cabinet minister belittles the thousands of girls and women who were raped by grooming gangs over decades.
We have consistently called for a national enquiry in parliament, which has been blocked by Labour ministers who don’t seem to know or care about the disgusting crimes which have been perpetrated.
Anyone who has seen the shocking Channel 4 documentary will know that it is clearer than ever that this is not a “dog whistle”. To dismiss thousands of victims who were raped and the cover up that followed is sickening.
Allison Pearson perceptively pointed out in the Telegraph that, with bitter irony, Powell had just repeated the deflection and denial that the documentary had exposed.
Quickly realising her howler, Ms Powell issued a statement on X saying she wished to clarify her remarks, tweeting:
In the heat of a discussion on AQ, I would like to clarify that I regard issues of child exploitation and grooming with the utmost seriousness. I’m sorry if this was unclear. I was challenging the political point scoring around it, not the issue itself. As a constituency MP, I’ve dealt with horrendous cases. This government is acting to get to the truth and deliver justice.
This was not an apology in any meaningful sense of the word. It was damage control after she had inadvertently revealed what she and the Labour government really think, and in reality are. Why she and the Labour Party do regard the grooming gang issue “with the utmost seriousness” is the existential threat to the Labour Party posed by the cover-up.
Labour’s complicity all-but proved
The identity of Labour’s skeleton was made clear when Andrew Gold of Heretics interviewed Raja Miah, a lifetime Muslim member of the Oldham Bangladeshi community, in which he said that showed how the Labour elites are in bed with Islamist gangs.
Miah has been working on exposing the gangs in Oldham for six years, and wrote on X:
What’s playing out in parliament isn’t just a scandal. It’s a reckoning. Let’s not pretend we don’t see what’s happening here. Jess Phillips and her Labour government, dependent on the Muslim bloc vote, is burying the Rape Gang scandal in broad daylight. The questions that must be asked are this: Who exactly are they protecting? – and why?
And in February, posting on X, he named Deputy PM Angela Rayner, Jim McMahon, Minister for Local Government and former leader of Oldham Council, and Debbie Abrahams MP, as complicit in the cover-up.
Miah also savaged the proposed inquiry into the gangs in Oldham, one of the five scrapped by Jess Phillips.
On January 11 he had posted on X:
Sources inside Oldham Council contacted me overnight distraught that Labour leaders had secretly met with sectarian Muslim opposition councillors. Their goal? Sabotage the judge-led Telford-style inquiry into grooming gangs that was agreed to take place in Oldham after the government had refused a public inquiry. In Telford, independence was key to exposing the truth – the council couldn’t interfere. But in Oldham, [Council leader] Shah Arooj’s corrupt administration is reportedly plotting yet another cover up, ensuring they control the investigation’s outcome. This isn’t just the council marking its own homework – it’s writing the questions, marking the answers, and publishing whatever suits them.
End of Part 2. Part 3 will be published on DTNZ this week.
See also:
This article was originally published by the Daily Telegraph New Zealand.
