Don’t wait for a grooming gangs coverup

Miles Faber

Telford and Wreakin Council

The release of the Casey report and the subsequent announcement of a national inquiry into the rape gangs’ scandal has resulted in much justified optimism. When before has a state body admitted “flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about Asian grooming gangs as sensationalised, biased or untrue” or that “assertions that the majority of child sexual abuse offenders are White, even if true, are at best misleading."? Statistics cited in the report, such as that the Pakistani 4% of Rotheram’s population was responsible for 64% of the child sexual abuse and exploitation investigated by Operation Stovewood, will finally disempower sinister out-riders for the cover-up like the Centre for Media Monitoring, an offshoot of the Muslim Council of Britain, from colluding with regulators to silence these facts.

The report once again highlighted how widespread these abuses were and remain just as the Tom Crowther QC Inquiry (2022), which found at least 1,000 girls abused in Telford alone over a 40-year period and the Jay Report (2014), which identified 1,400 victims over 16 years in Rotherham, did before it. The report doesn’t offer a number but estimates of the total number of victims now range from 40,000 to 70,000. This not only implicates tens of thousands of rapists and their abettors but also tens of thousands of social workers, police officers and councillors who worked to perpetuate these crimes.

It is at this point however that the report falls short. Despite twelve worthy recommendations on information collection and management, adjustments to criminal law and a national police operation, no mention is made of prosecutions against the facilitators of the rape gangs. The government response to the recommendation of an inquiry even says that the aim of the new Independent Commission on Grooming Gangs will be “holding institutions to account for current and historic failures”. Institutions did not tip-ex out the word “Pakistani”, they didn’t advise Channel 4 to pull a documentary on rape gangs and they didn’t record “no further action” when they knew children were being raped. When police officers were tipped off that a house, just like those discovered in Operation Chalice, was being used by rape gangs at night they knocked on the door at midday and recorded “no further action”. Social workers called victims prostitutes to their parents faces. Councillors, apart from being rape-gang ringleaders themselves, blocked inquiries into grooming gangs and requested criminal inquiries into those leaking evidence to Andrew Norfolk. This is all a sickeningly familiar story by now yet there are still no arrests. No consequences for individuals beyond early retirement, which is no punishment at all.

Why expect this inquiry to be any different? I don’t. A far more adversarial attitude must be taken toward this commission if it is to be effectively influenced by those interested in truth and justice. But for the first time the victims and those advocating for them have significant advantages in this inquiry. There are sympathetic members of Parliament who can submit both oral and written questions under parliamentary privilege, a partisan national broadcaster and most importantly the means and funding for an unofficial “parallel inquiry” as began by Rupert Lowe.

A private and non-statutory inquiry obviously has no legal power to compel testimony but contra its detractors, it doesn’t need to. There are hundreds of survivors and whistleblowers who want to come forward to give testimony if only they were asked, but even more numerous are the countless eyewitnesses and officials living in these towns who have never been interviewed and would never be summoned by a Royal Commission to give evidence. Twenty years ago, when the notion of “Rape Gangs” was an object of mockery by Russell Howard and the Blairite cover-up was at the height of its power, people were relaying their first-hand experiences of Pakistani rape gangs to David Aaronovitch completely unprompted. Naturally he blithely dismissed their observations.

“The Rape Gang Inquiry” has announced it has already submitted over 9,000 freedom-of-information requests and written to Jess Phillips, ministers, council leaders and every NHS trust and police force in the country requesting co-operation. All useful work but unlikely to uncover anything new. Less passive tactics which are not reliant on the government’s own organs are necessary. Therefore it may be instructive to see how an adversarial, private inquiry in the past forced the government to punish its own agents when the British establishment wanted a cover-up.

Probably the greatest British atrocity in India, the Amritsar massacre, took place on the 13^th of April 1919. As late as the 22^nd of May, the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, under pressure in the House of Commons, declared 'Let us talk of the inquiry when we have put the fire out.' It was October before a committee was announced. Unlike our present inquiry which will investigate tens of thousands of separate atrocities committed by disparate and often unlinked perpetrators over a span of decades, this one dealt with a small number of martial law abuses out of which emerged one emblematic villain. Reginald Dyer;

Lord Hunter: "When you got into the bagh, what did you do?"
General Dyer: "I opened fire."
"At once?"
"Immediately. I had thought about the matter and don't imagine it took me more than 30 seconds."
General Dyer had earlier admitted many in the park hadn’t heard the proclamation prohibiting public gatherings and so Lord Hunter asked,
"Did it not occur to you that it was a proper measure to ask the crowd to disperse before you took that step of actually firing?"
"No, at that time it did not. I merely felt that my orders had not been obeyed..."
"Before you dispersed the crowd, had the crowd taken any action at all?"
"No sir, they had run away, a few of them."

And later:

"Did the crowd at once start to disperse as soon as you fired?"
"Immediately."
"Did you continue firing?"
"Yes."

Dyer had rejected the advice of his military superiors and refused to be represented by legal counsel at the inquiry. Of the over 350 witnesses interviewed by the Hunter Commission it is only Dyer’s that is still remembered today, due as much to the efforts of the Indian National Congress’ own private inquiry into the massacre as to Dyer’s own lack of skill. He was even rash enough to volunteer answers to hypothetical questions:

Sir Chimanlal: “Supposing the passage was sufficient to allow the armoured cars to go in, would you have opened fire with the machine guns?”
General Dyer: “I think probably, yes.”
“In that case, the casualties would have been much higher?
“Yes”

Out of the thousands of social workers, police officers and councillors who could be summoned by our present committee would any be so arrogant or tactless during cross-examination? I think probably yes. But this relies upon having as many as possible being interrogated as thoroughly as possible. It is here where a parallel inquiry could be the most useful. Forget spamming the Home Office or the Stevenage NHS trust with FOI requests which are inevitably refused because “cost limit exceeded” or “cannot breach of data protection laws”. Form a fact-finding mission, go out to the towns where these atrocities are still taking place, find out where the hot-spots of activity are and interview eyewitnesses. Find the defendants listed in court proceedings and the various public servants who protected them. Collect credible accusations. Compile them into a report the statutory commission cannot ignore.

The Hunter commission only interviewed 26 Indian witnesses and despite the above astonishing testimony General Dyer was not relieved of command or given any formal reprimand. It was the independent and private Congress sub-committee inquiry that went out to interview eyewitness and obtained 829 statements, complete with names and addresses, listed in volume II of their report. (I am of course aware names and addresses of accusers in our present-day inquiry could not be published publically). Almost immediately after the private sub-committee’s report was published in March 1920 General Dyer was relieved of command, had his CBE recommendation cancelled and was eventually removed from his appointment entirely and banned from employment in India. This was all achieved after the Hunter commission had published it’s final report which recommended no penal or disciplinary action against Dyer. This campaign was also able to secure monetary compensation for 700 civilians, mainly the injured and the victims families. Such a remedy is the minimum I believe should be considered for rape gang victims and their grieving families.

Unlike inquiries conducted by the ICS this inquiry will likely take years, but this could be to our advantage if the opportunity to directly influence it is fully taken advantage of. If the commission were delivered a packet of witness statements implicating an official, how could they refuse to summon them? To do so would be to invite another scandal and would demolish all public trust in their committee. The opportunities here number in the tens of thousands.

The official Disorders Inquiry Committee 1919 was appointed with three Indian civilians, three British civilians, a British general and Lord Hunter the former Solicitor-General for Scotland presiding as chairman. It took only five months to collect evidence and publish the report, though unanimity proved difficult during preparation and so the committee split along racial lines and a minority and majority report were published under the same cover. If an American Judge is to preside, as was suggested in both these pages and by Rupert Lowe a week before, or if it is to be some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the (mid) twentieth century, the sympathetic commissioners must not be brow-beaten into signing off on a whitewash. Although we of course hope a truly independent commission and chairman will be appointed, we should not give up on it entirely if a paid-up thirty-third degree mason and Little-St.-James timesharer is announced. With the co-operation of a parallel inquiry which feeds names and credible accusations to the statutory committee and commissioners who are willing to pose them the right questions in the manner of an interrogation, rather than friendly chat, very revealing and incriminating testimony could be generated. If the chairman doesn’t want it in his report then the other commissioners can author a minority one, with its own findings and attendant recommendations.

We do not want a statue to the victims under which the same rapists and murderers can victimise a new generation with impunity. We do not want truth without justice. If anything “radicalised” me as a teenager it was reading transcripts from these cases. I do not want to be approaching thirty years old when this commission publishes yet another report recommending ineffectual trivialities which aren’t acted upon. This time the Dutch paper of record, De Volkskrant, didn’t even bother to report Baroness Casey’s findings as it had done for past reports. There is a real risk that so many inquiries without conclusive prosecutions and which do not stop these atrocities will create a fatigue or desensitisation to them. I believe this process has already begun. Conversely, a successful inquiry with attendant prosecutions in Britain could have a knock-on effect to neighbouring countries where these atrocities are just as prevalent. It is a travesty that the commission and police operation will not investigate Scotland and Northern Ireland, but almost identical rape gangs operate across Western Europe where in many the omerta has not yet been broken by an Andrew Norfolk.

Of course I am not convinced the Labour Party has had a damascene conversion to the side of truth and justice on paedophilia and rape gangs and will not attempt at least a partial cover-up but nevertheless I am cautiously optimistic of this inquiry’s success. The private investigations and campaigns which have recently proliferated will be very influential in bringing the Committee toward a successful conclusion if properly channelled; that is, away from venal self-promotion and toward names and evidence. The parallel inquiry set up by Rupert Lowe is the best conduit for directing these loosely co-ordinated investigators and activists presently existing and therefore I urge you to support it.