A conversation on the grooming gangs.
JUPPLANDIA
The above shows text messages between grooming gang survivor Fiona Goddard and Labour minister Jess Phillips, during the chaotic preparations for a grooming gang inquiry. Goddard quit the inquiry survivor liaison panel with other survivors. Following that, the inquiry was in suspension. Yesterday the government announced it is to recommence under the stewardship of Baroness Anne Longfield.
Goddard’s descriptions of the first phase of the inquiry aren’t ones which suggest it will be a success:
“We were being pushed to accept a remit that downplayed the racial and religious motivations behind our abuse,” said Reynolds. “It was ultimately gaslighting us into thinking we shouldn’t be saying anything about where our abusers came from, what ethnicity, it was really awful,” Reynolds added. “We were very scripted. We were very structured in what we had to say. It was meant to be survivor-led, but you felt a little bit like you were treading on eggshells. You didn’t really know what you could say, what you couldn’t say.”
I return to this comment having today having had a conversation with someone insisting that the grooming gang scandal is a minor matter, not at all reflective of the nature of modern Britain. That belief of course is part of the exact same gaslighting Goddard found in the inquiry itself.
In the dark and benighted Britain of 2025, all kinds of monsters thrive. Looking out my window at a reasonably bright December day, it might seem as if this is a normal country. Perhaps a country with too many ugly concrete buildings and too many potholes in the roads, but still a normal, western, modern democracy.
This, of course, is merely an illusion of normality. Think of it like a video game. There’s some opening scene where things appears normal, but gradually the shadows stretch, the atmosphere builds, and horror enters the scene…..as it did, in full and spectacular fashion, at our last election. But as it did, too, much earlier and much more devastatingly, for white children in places like Rotherham.
I can’t for instance look out of my window and see a crowd of Muslim men raping children. Things haven’t got quite so blatant yet. Instead, I see some tawdry and pathetic attempts at Christmas decorations, and small groups of people moving between the shopping centres. At this distance I can’t even see how many of the shops are boarded up, and which have homeless tramps sitting besides the entrance.
But the grooming gangs did happen, and are still happening. And we don’t see it on our news. And it isn’t referred to in the polite papers. But it happened. It’s still happening. An American with British relatives told me today that the whole thing was exaggerated. There were just a few cases. His British relatives, who I assume must be leftists, told him that only malign racist people, Islamophobes, refer to it all, and that they are just stirring up trouble because they are bigots. The description paints Muslims as the innocent victims, with the actual victims, the girls who were raped again and again and again in the most brutal and disgusting fashions (yes, even exceptionally brutal by the standards of rape) completely forgotten.
This is the kind of forgetting that occurred while the rapes were happening. It occurs now, the same moral crime, because we can look out our windows and only see a normal scene. It occurs now, a repeat of the same moral crime, because nobody in media or politics, with a very few noble exceptions, wants to learn or change. Nobody wants to acknowledge the shadows, or look in the face of horror. The normality, even if it’s not true, is so much easier to face. The middle class tell themselves that Britain is still a pretty decent place, that Tommy Robinson is an awful oik, and that England flags are a more urgent and distressing example of racism than what was done to white children. A bus passes beneath my window, decked in Pride colours. What’s made public, what’s aired, are the prejudices and concerns of the middle class.
The wounded feelings of favoured groups still triumph over the wounded bodies of the disfavoured.
In my conversation with the ignorant American, I was reminded of how a betrayal like the betrayal of the white working class has all the characteristics of opposing claims that are entirely false. That’s one of the ironies involved. While the true and present horrors are ignored, our society dredges up an endless tide of old grievances and imaginary slights. These old or invented or often trivial experiences are treated as more relevant and a risk then the greatest race based sex crimes in British history, and are all given, still, more attention than the grooming gang scandal.
A rational society, a just society, for instance, might consider it obscene that our media, who did nothing to expose and stop the industrial scale rape of children, are now trawling through Nigel Farage’s childhood for allegations of racism. The contrast in the enthusiasm with which they treat 50 year old allegations of verbal misconduct as a scandal, compared to their 30 year record of covering up grooming gangs, is truly revolting.
When I worked for the Fire Service I attended a meeting on racism. A black firefighter told us about racism he had experienced 30 years earlier, which included things like a white woman telling him she didn’t date black men. All very horrific, I suppose. But I’d venture to suggest considerably less horrific than being gang raped for years as a child, or than having the police laugh at you when you try to report your brutal rape, or than having devices forced into you to stretch your anal passage so that men can anally rape you more easily, or than having men piss and shit on you or stub cigarettes out on you after they have raped you.
Experiencing these things as a 12 or 13 year old child should be treated with more horror, by any sane reckoning.
I suggest too that (if they are even true) being called names by a 13 year old Nigel Farage in the playground 48 years ago, is a less urgent scandal, story and example of racism than the rape of thousands of children.
Because these are the comparisons we never make. The media tell us which matters to them, and when they do so they tell us how disgusting they are. Society frames one form of racism as deserving of obsessional focus, and another form of racism as a thing only racists care about. These double standards are themselves horrifically perverse.
We never note that there are for example 15,000 BAME advocacy groups in the UK, charities, NGOs, and professional bodies, all eager to defend black and ethnic minority groups from verbal insult or employment discrimination or mere offence. But there were no groups advocating for those white children, save when people like Tommy Robinson came along (and were roundly condemned for it). And there certainly aren’t 15,000 groups today ready to protect white people from any form of racism. In my meeting at my old job we all listened sympathetically to a grown man recalling 30 years earlier old verbal incidents….in the same society in which over 30 years of white girls screaming went unheard. This is not to say that the first was meaningless, but it is to say that obsessing on the first and ignoring the second is an obscenity, an obscenity which shows which skin colour is actually subject to deep and engrained societal racism in 2025.
Labour of course are working towards a public inquiry now, in the way that one works towards a thing you don’t want. Actual victims have quit in disgust, knowing that their stories still won’t be fully heard, knowing that the political establishment crafting the inquiry want to control and limit what it says and what they say. It will be like the COVID inquiry, which instead of looking at how horrific the things done turned out to be, told us that we didn’t go mad quickly enough. It will be like the earlier reports which concluded, completely dishonestly and against all the existing evidence, that since white males (40% of the population) commit more sexual offences overall than Asian males (9% of the population) white men are a greater sexual threat to children than Asian men. Look on search engines today and you will get this absurd kind of argument about sexual offences and grooming, which totally ignores that a much smaller group commit almost as many offences as the much larger group. Or you will be told that there’s no racial correlation in the grooming and rape of children, which is an outright lie.
The fact is, of course, that THOUSANDS of white children were gang raped by THOUSANDS of Muslim men of mainly Pakistani descent. There were no white grooming gangs targeting black children. There were no Jewish grooming gangs targeting Muslim children. All the horrific abuse was coming from brown skinned Muslim men, and all the suffering and agony was experienced by white girls (the sole exceptions being some Sikh victims, in much smaller numbers). Researchers who have done serious enquiries into these crimes suggest that they were going on in EVERY British town or city with a Muslim population. In just ONE, Rotherham, 1,400 children were victims in a roughly 10 year period. The lowest believable estimate I’ve seen of grooming gang activity cites 73 different confirmed locations.
So increase the 1,400 victims of Rotherham by hundreds of times (the number of other towns and cities it was happening in) and times that by 3 (the number of decades it went undetected or deliberately ignored). It’s absolutely certain, based on the number of prosecutions, that there are men walking around who took part who have never been detected or punished. It’s absolutely certain too that there are victims who have never come forward. And, in the end, we might say why should they?
Their voices are still ignored, their suffering is still dismissed, their lives are still treated as if they are worthless.
And the forgetting doesn’t end there. Not only do we all live in a society where people still dismiss what happened, we live in a society that won’t admit it is STILL happening. The idea that these crimes completely ceased when the first few legal cases started putting some of the child rapists in prison is false. The Grooming Gangs TaskForce found 4,000 new victims and made 550 arrests in its first year of operation (2023/4), and a further 9,000 historic cases are being investigated, but the Metropolitan Police offer excuses and racial evasions, no data seems to be being kept on the number of active grooming gangs in operation, and the Mayor of London repeatedly and falsely insisted that London didn’t have ANY grooming gangs.
So when I look out my window and see an average town, when I see the people going about their Christmas shopping, this normal scene is in many ways less real then the reality that won’t be acknowledged. It’s less real than the fact that now grown victims have to live in a society that is still pretending they don’t exist and still refusing to offer them full justice and full honesty. It’s still a place of horror and shadows where an untold and unexamined number of child raping gangs operate. There still might well be rooms in my town or any other where Muslim men gang rape white girls. The whole thing is treated as historic…which makes it all the easier for it to continue.
The scandal is still, for the middle class, mentioning it, rather than that it happened. The reaction is still to ‘shut up for the sake of diversity’, and the forgetting encompasses and drowns out the reality that these crimes are still occuring.
And people are still telling themselves and others that it was a few isolated cases that are only discussed by those nasty white Far Right racists who are so unjustly mean to Britain’s wonderful and integrated Muslim community.
This article (The Forgotten Victims: When Do Their Lives Start to Matter?) was created and published by Jupplandia and is republished here under “Fair Use”
See Related Article Below
Labour’s New Grooming Gang Inquiry: Why I am Concerned
MATT GOODWIN
This newsletter has consistently called for a full national inquiry into Britain’s grooming gang scandal—the most horrific scandal in modern British history.
Thanks to your generous support —and alongside many other campaigners—for the last two years we have used our platform and social media to relentlessly campaign on this issue, helping to keep up the pressure on a truly dismal Labour government.
And earlier this year Labour was finally forced to commit to hold an inquiry.
I don’t know about you but I still find the fact that the Labour Party had to be dragged by the rest of the country —kicking and screaming—to agree to an inquiry into the mass rape and abuse of hundreds of thousands of children utterly appalling.
But there we are.
And now, yesterday, we have scored another small victory of sorts.
Yesterday, finally, Keir Starmer’s Labour government was also pushed into appointing a Chair for the inquiry and outlining its terms of reference.
On paper, this represents a long overdue attempt to confront one of the gravest safeguarding failures in modern Britain.
Make no mistake: it is a step forward, a step closer to the truth.
But I have to say, after reading the fine print and listening carefully to what Labour ministers are saying, I also have some very serious concerns about the direction of the grooming gang inquiry
As I explain below, it is clear that Labour’s grooming gang inquiry now risks repeating the very patterns of avoidance, bureaucratic evasion and political self-protection that allowed these hideous gangs to operate in the first place.
Here’s what I think is important:
1. A Chair who inspires little confidence
The Chair of the inquiry, Baroness Anne Longfield, is a respected figure in children’s services. But she is also a long-standing Labour Party insider.
She is a Labour peer.
She is not a neutral person —far from it.
Even more importantly, she is not a judge. She has limited experience handling complex evidential processes and adversarial institutional scrutiny.
In a country where public confidence in authorities is already badly damaged, what signal does this send —especially to the victims and their families?
An inquiry of this scale and sensitivity requires not just competence, but independence that is beyond question. That is not what we have been given.
Personally, having watched Labour councils and Labour areas duck this scandal for the last thirty years I am amazed that we have been given an inquiry headed by … a Labour peer.
2. The Inquiry may sidestep key questions
The terms of reference instruct the grooming gang inquiry only to “consider the background of perpetrators and victims.” That is astonishingly timid.
As far as I can see, it is not being forced to specifically examine whether certain backgrounds played any role in motivating the offences. Nor is it instructed to assess whether backgrounds, networks or community dynamics —including those not mentioned in the document, such as extended family structures— were significant factors either among offenders or between offenders and those in state institutions.
If you are trying to understand why authorities failed, this omission is not a footnote. It is a central flaw. We need to shake off political correctness and get to the truth.
3. The Inquiry cannot unearth new cases
The inquiry has no mandate to identify fresh instances of group-based child sexual exploitation. It will only examine known cases where institutional failure is already evidenced. This is not an inquiry that will uncover what has previously been hidden, in other words. There will be no major revelation, for instance, about dozens of new gangs or London potentially being riddled with grooming gang abuse. It is an inquiry that will only rake over ground that is already familiar. That is not good enough. When victims have spent decades being ignored, the least an inquiry can do is look for what has not yet been seen.
4. Central government departments are excluded
The local investigations in the inquiry will examine councils, local police forces, health services, social workers, youth services and voluntary groups. But the role of central government departments, including the Home Office and the Department for Education, looks like it will not be examined under these local investigations.
This is a stunning loophole. The separate National Review is also barred from examining central government conduct. It may only make recommendations based on what local inquiries find, even if those findings logically point upward to national policies, guidance or political directives. The result is that central government is insulated from scrutiny at precisely the moment we need to understand whether national decisions contributed to the scandal.
Widespread rumours, for instance, about the Home Office presenting misleading evidence to cover-up the ethnicity and backgrounds of perpetrators, or the Department for Education allegedly downplaying the scandal, will not be seriously examined. This too is deeply problematic.
5. No clarity on investigative powers
There is no explanation of how local investigations will be carried out, who will lead them, or what powers they will have to compel witnesses or documents. Inquiries live or die on their investigative teeth. At the moment, we do not know whether this one has any —which is pretty shocking given the gravity of the scandal.
6. The Chair chooses which areas to investigate after appointment
The terms of reference do not set out criteria for selecting local areas. Instead, the Chair must agree them with the government within three months. This invites political interference. Will Labour push the inquiry to focus on areas that are less problematic for the Labour Party? As I asked on GB News last night, will we get major inquiries into areas like Bradford and London, which have so far escaped scrutiny? The public should know the criteria now, not after ministers have negotiated behind closed doors.
7. A three-year hard deadline hands control to the police
The inquiry must finish within three years, even if certain lines of inquiry are obstructed by ongoing police investigations. That gives policing bodies enormous power. If they choose to delay action on a particular case, the inquiry may simply run out of time and be unable to examine it. In effect, departments under scrutiny could time out the very evidence that matters most.
8. A constrained budget signals the government’s priorities
Money does not guarantee quality, but symbolism matters. The grooming gang inquiry received £65 million which, interestingly, is barely a third of the Grenfell Inquiry’s £170 million. The message is unmistakable: this is to be contained, not expansive. It is not an exhaustive inquiry; it is a limited one —and one that clearly many people in Westminster still do not consider to be as important as other issues.
I am raising these concerns not to be difficult but because all those girls, their families and the communities affected deserve the best inquiry the British state can provide. They deserve transparency, courage and truth, not hedged commitments, constrained mandates and political risk-management.
And I am being blunt because the Labour government had to be dragged into delivering this inquiry at all. That is not a foundation for trust. It is a warning.
For this Inquiry to succeed, its flaws must be fixed now, not exposed later when it is too late to act. Victims deserve more than symbolism. They deserve a real reckoning.
The question is simple: will Labour deliver one? Or will this Inquiry become yet another exercise in institutional self-protection?
Only time will tell. But we should not sit back and hope. We should demand better, loudly, persistently and without apology.
As always, with your support, we will continue to push all these points in the public domain and explain them to the British people.
This article (Labour’s New Grooming Gang Inquiry: Why I am Concerned) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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