How Britain forgot Keighley’s grooming gangs The town is a case study in exploitation

“If you want to write an article on grooming gangs in Keighley, please don’t.” The local councillor bristles. “Keighley is a pretty town,” he retorts. And he’s right.

Blanketed in two inches of snow, Keighley is a feast of pretty houses. Residents shuffle through its icy backstreets. Children throw snowballs. Deep in the Pennine moors of Brontë Country, Keighley once boasted a proud history: the birthplace of Yorkshire’s first cotton mill, a heritage steam railway, and Timothy Taylor beer.

But in 2002, it became the birthplace of Britain’s “grooming gangs” shame. It was in Keighley that Ann Cryer, the town’s Labour MP, became the first politician to expose how groups of Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls — drugging them, abusing them, raping them. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

Yet over the following decades, the town’s victims — some not even in their teens — were gradually forgotten. Attention was drawn, instead, to Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham and Telford, each suffering predatory horrors of their own. Of the 10 inquiries and reports that have since been held into the scandal, none focuses on Keighley. It has been much the same over the past fortnight. Spurred on by the wild tweets of an American billionaire, the subject of grooming gangs has again been turned into a game of political football — with Keighley again ignored.

In recent years, in fact, only one national newspaper has done any significant reporting on the town: The New York Times sent a reporter to write a soft feature about the Keighley Cougars, a Rugby League team with a new kit designed to match the colours of the trans flag. Before their first match, a drag queen performed “It’s Raining Men”. Today, the stadium’s gates are named after Captain Tom Moore, another child of Keighley.

One man shuffling along the ice is Martin Thompson, who has lived here for 50 years. He dismisses the past fortnight’s feverish debate. “Elon Musk is just jumping on the bandwagon,” he says. “This will die down and he’ll move on to the next thing.” An unenthusiastic Labour voter in last year’s election — Keighley and Ilkey is a rare bellwether that remained Conservative — he has little time for Nigel Farage or “hateful” Tommy Robinson. “None of them really care about us,” he says.

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Keighley’s exorcism began in 2002, when seven distressed mothers appeared one morning at Cryer’s constituency office on Devonshire Street. They didn’t know where else to turn. Their daughters, they explained, were being befriended by older men from Keighley’s Pakistani community, who make up roughly half of the town’s central ward. The girls were then taken to parties, plied with drugs, and sexually abused. The mothers handed Cryer a list of the names and addresses of 65 men they believed were implicated. They had made similar complaints to the police and social services — but had been ignored. They were desperate.

After Cryer was also stonewalled by the police, she spoke out publicly: about the girls, some as young as 11, who were being abused, and about the ethnicity of their attackers. Less publicly, Cryer tried to meet with religious leaders in the Pakistani community, after she learnt that the News of the World had offered the victims’ mothers £1,000 to tell their story. She feared the damage that a media paroxysm would inflict on the town. “We could have race riots,” she later warned. But when she approached elders at one of Keighley’s mosques with a smaller list of 35 alleged perpetrators, Cryer was told it had nothing to do with them. Members of her own party disowned her as a racist. After receiving threats to her life, she was advised to install a panic alarm at home.

Race riots didn’t follow, but tensions started to simmer. The following year, in November 2003, after the police finally launched an investigation, Delwar Hussein, a 24-year-old youth worker who groomed and had sex with a 13-year-old girl, became the first man on Cryer’s list to be convicted. It should have represented a grim act of closure for the girl and her family. Instead, the case was seized on by the British National Party, who used it to blame the local Labour council.

By May 2004, with a local election looming, the BNP were confident they could win. Three weeks before polling day, Channel 4 pulled a documentary about the area’s grooming gangs after anti-fascist campaigners and the police warned it could play into the hands of the far-Right. “A lot of them have a way with words to make you feel you’re gorgeous,” said one 14-year-old girl in the programme of her groomers. “He told me he loved me and how beautiful I was. I thought I loved him.”

Yet the BNP parlayed the censorship to their advantage, claiming that only they could protect Keighley’s girls. Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, held a rally at the town’s Reservoir Tavern, in which he described Islam as “a wicked vicious faith” and railed against the Muslims turning Britain into a “multiracial hellhole”. His rhetoric found purchase, and the BNP won the ward of Keighley West.

Their victory, however, was temporary, and the BNP were evicted almost as quickly as they arrived. In the 2005 general election, Nick Griffin was beaten into fourth place. The following year, after a by-election was held, Keighley West was won by Angela Sinfield, a mother of one of the grooming victims who had joined the Labour Party the year before. As she said at the time: “The BNP used [the scandal] for their own ends without ever doing anything concrete about it — and for me that is unforgivable.”

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Jean Gee was there at the start with Ann Cryer. Now 77, the former social worker helped to introduce the MP to the victims’ mothers in 2002. “I used to work with kids who were excluded from school,” she tells me. “And I’d see first-hand how they were picked up by men in their taxis.” At the time, Jean didn’t know that one of the girls would be a close family member.

Amber* was raped just over a decade ago by a man she believed was a friend of her father’s. Unlike a number of the town’s victims, who have left, fearful that their attackers still walk its streets, Amber still lives in Keighley. Every day is a reminder of her trauma. She suffers from a severe eating disorder that has left her unable to have children. Her body is skeletal, her arms tattooed. “It marks a girl for life,” Jean says.

Around the same time as Amber was being groomed, a gang of 12 men were targeting a 13-year-old girl, Autumn*. The torment she would endure — over 13 months between 2011 and 2012 — would become Keighley’s darkest chapter. During one incident, she was gang-raped by five men; during another, she was raped in an underground car park next to a wall brazenly graffitied with the names of some of her attackers.

In 2016, Autumn’s 12 attackers were convicted — and the judge found she’d been failed by police and social workers. After one attack, officers dismissed her as a prostitute; after another, they failed to progress a medical assessment. As for her abusers, the judge concluded that “they saw her as a pathetic figure who… served no purpose than to be an object that they could sexually misuse and cast aside”. In their mugshots, two of her attackers are smiling.

Autumn’s younger brother, Adam*, now in his early 20s, believes the past fortnight’s debate over grooming gangs is fuelled by hypocrisy. “Politicians of all stripes colluded with the police to engage in a cover-up,” he tells me. He blames the Conservative Party for “failing to act on this issue despite so many cases occurring under them”. And he blames Labour, whose leader this week suggested it was a “far-Right” issue, despite the “most impacted areas being run by that party”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform — which registered 10% of the vote in Keighley in last year’s general election, well below its national average — is also trying to make political hay. “At least the SDP here have always prioritised the issue of grooming gangs,” he says. As for Elon Musk, who described Labour MP Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and called for Tommy Robinson to be released from prison, Adam views him as “clearly unstable” but welcomes his intervention. “Anything that brings attention to this issue is good,” he says.

Back in town, though, most are oblivious to this week’s political mudslinging, which culminated on Wednesday in a failed Conservative vote to force a new inquiry. Few of those I speak to — Pakistani and white, young and old — are aware of Musk’s recent comments. “If Tommy Robinson came to Keighley, he’d get beaten up,” says one white woman in her early-20s. “When will [Pretoria-born] Musk start tweeting about South Africa’s race problems?” jokes one bemused madrasah teacher.

There’s a similar lack of consensus over calls for a new inquiry into West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs. This is partly because people doubt its sincerity; neither the Conservatives nor Reform mentioned an inquiry in last year’s manifestos. But it’s mostly because few believe another investigation will be acted upon. “What would the value be?” says Gee, who voted Conservative last year. “How likely is it that something will happen? It’s not as if we have the money to change anything. Just look at our housing and social care system.”

Even Adam has his reservations. “What comes after? We need to deal with the source and not just address the past.” Typical was one stallholder in Keighley’s indoor market. “I know I’d feel different if my daughter was one of the victims,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s a priority now.” Keighley, she points out, may be pretty — but it isn’t thriving. In some neighbourhoods, 40% of households are classified as deprived.

Still, there are attempts to learn from the past. After school, youth workers patrol the shopping centre and adjoining bus station where many of the town’s victims were once ensnared. “There are still creeps around,” says one teenage girl. “But they’re not just Pakistani. To be honest, they’re more likely to be a 60-year-old white guy.”

There are those, however, who remain concerned that former groomers have gone unpunished. After all, if Cryer and those seven mothers were correct, and there were at least 35 offenders in the town, not all have been caught. “Membership of these gangs is informal and often it’s hard to pin down members,” says Adam, who still believes the abusers walk the town’s streets. “You also can’t blame girls who haven’t come forward given the police’s previous failures.” Jean agrees, though also believes many “grooming gangs” have been replaced by county lines gangs, whose members are both Pakistani and white. Just this month, more than 50 members of one such gang in Keighley — peddling heroin and crack cocaine — were arrested by police.

But such developments don’t fit into the narrative of Britain’s national debate — a binary war, fought mostly online, between those uncomfortable with highlighting the ethnicity of West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs and those who seek to exploit it. Meanwhile, the affected communities are viewed as collateral. As one fed up local told me: “We’ve got enough wars going on without your Tommy Robinsons starting another.”

In Keighley, few are worried about the return of the far-Right. Their Conservative MP, Robbie Moore, has been outspoken about the need for another inquiry, neutralising movements further to the Right. In 2017, the EDL tried to hold a protest in the town and were outnumbered by police. But there’s still disquiet. In 2022, three members of a neo-Nazi cell in Keighley were jailed after being caught buying a 3D printer to make a gun. The following year, a teenager was jailed after he planned to attack one of the town’s mosques while disguised as an armed police officer.

Nor has faith in its institutions been restored. Last November, the town was left horrified when a local police officer was jailed for having sex with a vulnerable domestic abuse victim whose complaints he had been tasked with investigating. When I asked West Yorkshire Police how it hopes to regain Keighley’s trust after decades of neglect, I was told the officer’s “offending was not connected to grooming gangs” and redirected to an old press release.

But it feels connected, feeding into a pattern of betrayal. Despite the best efforts of a noble MP, Keighley remains a case study in exploitation — first by a terrified establishment who ignored the abuse of the town’s young girls, and then by a far-Right menace who sought to capitalise on their cowardice. And now, as attempts are made to reheat their trauma, Keighley’s residents might be forgiven for their ambivalence. They’ve seen this before, and know how it ends. The fires of our digital ecosystem will consume its subjects. But in Keighley, cold resignation preserves them.

*Names have been changed

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Jacob Furedi is Editor of Dispatch.

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