Police Scotland caused uproar last weekend after it was revealed that the force had been hiding the true scale of crime in asylum hotels. According to reports, the force refused to release the number of call-outs to asylum hotels over concerns the data could “heighten community tensions”. The scandal was damning of the police’s failure to take migrant crime seriously, but it is hardly surprising.

That’s because Scotland has for years turned a blind eye to certain crimes where highlighting them might be perceived as racist. For instance, Police Scotland has consistently failed in its own investigations into grooming gangs, investigations that identified large numbers of potential victims. To make matters worse, last year the Scottish Government admitted that there had been no mandatory reporting of child sex abuse cases in the country.

The debate around Scottish grooming gangs has proved incredibly divisive. For example, Scottish Labour MP Joani Reid comes with an impeccable Left-wing pedigree, but for the past year she has been excoriated as a Right-wing shill, even a racist, over her lobbying for victims of grooming gangs in Scotland.

Reid persisted and, largely through her efforts, the Scottish Government has announced an inquiry into the activities of child sex-abuse networks across the country. Its reluctance stemmed from a prejudice, widely held by NGOs and the media, that this was an English problem and even a Right-wing dog whistle. In Parliament, SNP and Scottish Green Party MSPs repeatedly voted against even investigating whether or not there is a problem. Out of sight, out of mind.

The Scottish Government’s resistance extended to misrepresenting a respected authority on grooming gangs, Professor Alexis Jay, who conducted the inquiry into abuse in Rotherham. Scottish Justice Secretary Angela Constance claimed to have been told by Jay that Scotland “did not need an inquiry”. Jay wrote to First Minister John Swinney, pointing out that she had said no such thing and that there was an urgent need for just such an inquiry in Scotland.

Constance was reprimanded, though not sacked, and Swinney wrote to Reid promising that Jay would now conduct a national inquiry into grooming gangs. However, the Scottish Government insisted that this could only take place after an 18-month review of police evidence. Kicking an issue into the long grass has never been more blatant. The authorities resisted looking at this issue for the same reason they covered up grooming gang activities in the north of England: “community relations”.

These same Government institutions know the severity of the situation. Several police investigations have been conducted in the last decade, including Operation Cerrar, which identified 44 victims of an ethnic-minority grooming gang involving 55 suspects. This was only revealed in 2020 after an investigation by the Scottish Daily Express.

The Scottish Government has announced that it will indeed conduct a full-scale, statutory inquiry into “group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse”. However, the timetable for this, as with the promised public inquiry in England, remains vague, as do the terms of reference. The whole issue has been clouded by an unwillingness to investigate, and it will take time and effort to force the police and local authorities to even disclose the ethnicity of suspects.

Last week, Reid was suspended from the Labour Party after her husband was accused of spying for China. This affair will no doubt overshadow the work she has done on grooming gangs, but the point remains true all the same. Scottish authorities, from politicians to police, have for years tried to cover up and undermine the extent of the problem of grooming gangs.

Now, it appears that same attitude is bleeding into migrants in hotels. The problem is acute, given that Glasgow is quickly becoming the asylum capital of Britain, while Edinburgh residents have objected to more hotels in the city being used to house asylum seekers. Until this elite takes the problem seriously, victims will continue to be let down while perpetrators are allowed to roam free.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

iainmacwhirter

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