Let’s get one thing straight before we begin: I refuse to personally use the odious term grooming gangs. Like many media-political euphemisms – Islamophobia, collateral damage, climate change, biological man/woman, or the revolting cis- – it’s a phrase designed to be as simultaneously anodyne and misleading as possible. Its sole purpose is to pre-frame the narrative.
Screw that.
I’ll call them exactly what they are: Muslim child-rape gangs.
With that in mind, then, it’s a decidedly curious aspect of the whole, revolting phenomenon that, if we’re to believe its Muslim mayor, Britain’s most Muslim city has absolutely no Muslim child-rape gangs. Sure, dozens of towns the length and breadth of Britain have been plagued with this horrific crime and its enablers: but the biggest city, and one of the most crime-ridden, in Britain? ‘Nothing to see here,’ says Sadiq Khan.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has taken the position that “there are no reported cases and also no indication of grooming gangs in London.”
Does anyone who doesn’t work for the BBC really believe that?
That seems a crazy stance to take, given the grooming gang scandals which have occurred in towns across the UK that are a fraction of the size of the capital. It stands to reason that London, which is connected to some of these criminal groups, would have issues too. In fact, I know it’s the case because I’ve interviewed victims of London’s grooming gangs and spoken to whistleblowers who say grooming gangs in London have gone ignored. Now we are starting to see the signs that, rather than there being “no indication” of a London grooming gang problem, any evidence that the opposite might be true is being hidden from the public.
I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Who ever would have thought it?
Hounslow Council revealed in a Freedom of Information request, probably by accident, that it knew of a three-year police investigation into a grooming gang that affected one of its residents. However, when they were asked about grooming gangs in June, the Labour council said it had “no concerns.”
Confronted with the information they’d let slip in an FOI, the local authority’s leader clarified that they’d not disclosed the case because they “didn’t want to create panic.”
Or they didn’t want anyone to know?
Here’s the thing, though: child abuse cases should (with proper safeguards for privacy of minor victims) be made public. Because publicity invariably leads to more hidden crimes being exposed.
I’ve interviewed lots of police officers who specialise in sexual offences and nearly every single one of them has told me that publicity is one of the single biggest tools in enabling more victims to come forward.
Reporting a sexual offence to the authorities is a terrifying experience, especially for those who’ve suffered as children. But knowing that the police are taking a case seriously and there are others can be crucial.
Their needs should be the priority, not whether “panic” might ensue. If there are suspicions that a grooming gang is operating in a particular area, the focus should be on bringing them to justice, not worrying about upsetting people.
Worse, this litany of excuses and coverups is all-too grimly familiar. For decades, police, politicians and welfare bureaucrats deliberately hid the industrial-scale crimes of the Muslim rape gangs. At least tens of thousands of girls, maybe as many as a million, were repeatedly raped by Pakistani Muslim men, while those in turn carefully concealed what they knew.
We know, too, that the coverup goes all the way up in the current Labour government. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips has stated in parliament that she ‘knew’, and did nothing, for over a decade. PM Keir Starmer was director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service for at least part of the time that cases were still being covered up.
Does it go all the way to the top in London, too?
Sadiq Khan likes to present himself as a leading voice in the fight to end violence against women and girls.
So it is strange that he is so evasive when it comes to grooming gangs. Time and again he’s been asked in the London Assembly to comment on whether the capital city has suffered the same type of systematic trafficking of girls as has occurred in towns like Rochdale or Rotherham.
But each time he finds a way to slither out of it. In fact, the capital's mayor refuses to even say the phrase “grooming gangs.”
The question is why? Why would a man who spends hundreds of thousands of pounds on ads telling men to say “Maaate” to misogynists be so testy about grooming gangs?
Why, indeed?
And why does he go as far as to accuse a former Met detective of lying?
Jon Wedger is a retired officer turned whistleblower. He is calling for a proper investigation into an apparently “huge number” of Muslim child-rape gangs he identified while working as a Metropolitan Police officer.
He showed me his police notebook from the time, reports he prepared for other agencies and a raft of evidence submitted to the 2022 inquiry into child sex abuse. As information goes, it’s hard to find anything so solid.
Given what we know about coverups everywhere else in Britain, it’s an allegation that must be taken extremely seriously.
Yet Khan is dismissing his claims outright. He is, in effect, calling a respected senior police officer a liar. He’s calling girls who claim to be victims liars, too.
It’s almost as if he’s trying to hide something.
