February 26, 2025 - 1:30pm
What is Labour’s position on a rape gangs inquiry? At the start of the year, it was reported that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips had refused Oldham Council’s request for a Home Office-led inquiry into the town’s historic rape gangs scandal. The Labour politician stated that “it is for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the Government to intervene.”
Following that, under immense pressure, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper caved. While stopping short of a full national inquiry, she instead announced plans for a nationwide review of grooming gang evidence, alongside five Government-backed local inquiries — including Oldham. She introduced the plan by arguing that “effective local inquiries can delve into far more local detail and deliver more locally relevant answers, and change, than a lengthy nationwide inquiry can provide”.
But what if the councils decide not to commission an inquiry?
Yesterday in City Hall, London Mayor Sadiq Khan rejected calls for an inquiry into the presence of grooming gangs in the capital. Tories on the London Assembly proposed an amendment to allocate £4.49 million for an “Independent Inquiry into the Exploitation of Children in London”. The proposal follows accusations last month that Khan was “stonewalling” questions from his Tory rival, Susan Hall, about grooming gangs. Hall had repeatedly pressed the Mayor on whether these sex abuse rings were operating, or had previously operated, in London; Khan simply responded by saying he was unsure what she meant by “grooming gangs”.
Labour’s prioritisation of empowered local inquiries as the most effective way to deal with rape gangs ring hollow when one is denied by the Labour mayor of the British capital. If local councils are in fact the best vehicles to deliver rape gang inquiries, what grounds are there for a Labour politician to refuse one in their own city?
There is a narrative that rape gangs are primarily focused in post-industrial towns and cities. One list compiled earlier this year includes 50 towns, primarily former mill towns around Manchester and West Yorkshire, as well as a large number of cities in the Midlands. This perception, however, is based on two flawed premises. For one, the list also includes cities as far south as Aylesbury, Bristol, Oxford and London. But the second premise is perhaps even more flawed, and even more dangerous: that we have already discovered the full extent of Britain’s rape gang phenomenon.
Although one of the six “case study areas” examined by the Jay Inquiry in 2022 was Tower Hamlets, there has been no city-wide investigation into rape gangs in London. As well as historic examples of abuse rings, another, in Stratford, was discovered in January. Given that London is home to the UK’s largest Pakistani community — the ethnic group responsible for an overwhelming proportion of grooming gang cases across the country — there is little reason to believe the crimes are not as widespread, systematic or horrifying as those in other cities.
But without an inquiry, the full extent of any grooming gangs operating in the capital cannot be ascertained. Given the sheer size of London, it is possible that the number of overall victims would be pushed to stratospherically high figures. This may be Khan’s primary reasoning in voting down the request. Discovering the extent of London’s problems would firmly implant in the minds of the public that grooming gangs are not a regional phenomenon, limited to rarely-visited and seldom-thought-of Northern reaches, but instead an active and ever-present threat across the entire nation. The ramifications of this may simply be too much to contemplate.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeWhy? To protect his friends and please his supporters.
If the Pakistani rape gangs were subject to a national inquiry that would bring down the Labour Party. It would be finished. The Muslim funding of mosques for votes would be brought into the open. The familly connections between the mosques and the Labour councils and the rape gangs would come out into plain sight.
Labour cannot afford for any of this to get out into the mainstream media.
The country cannot afford for it to be covered up.
Unherd could play a positive role in the painful process of healing and recovery of national self respect.
Start with Tommy Robinson and Raja Miah.
Report what they are bravely saying.
Well expressed.
I think you meant “Labour funding of mosques” though?
Yes. The councils hand over money and the mosques organise the votes to keep the councils in power. Raja Miah talks about how they do it in Oldham.
Fact is though that so called “Conservative” government did nothing about it either for decades.
What about Police forces and MSM?
Are we supposed to believe that no one complained to them and ask for investigation?
So it is whole of British establishment which ignored the problem while importing millions of additional Muslim savages.
Here’s a prediction: an inquiry into grooming gangs in London will happen, if not under Khan’s watch then in the not too distant future. I further predict it’ll find evidence that it’s still happening.
Khan’s already plummeting reputation will finally hit the dirt floor, including that he knew about it.
I bet you won’t offer me good odds on that!
Better than evens.
I wish I had your confidence. An image sprang to mind. Certain footballers were very adept at using a time wasting tacticwhich was infuriating but effective. When pretending to retrieve the ball after it had gone out of play they would bend down to pick it up but then knock it forward with their foot.* They would repeat this until the referee would intervene. However today’s match official is Mr Khan from Central London and VAR is controlled by Mr K Starmer from Islington.
*Didier Drogba used it a couple of times.
Reality is that savages are now majority in London, so they will always vote for another savage as Major of London.
‘Pakistani’ is not an ‘ethnic group’.
Crucially. most Northern English ‘Pakistanis’ are Mirpuris. The London ‘Pakistani’ demos is much more mixed being made up of Punjabis, Pashtuns, Muhajirs, Sindhis, and Balochis.
Even then, Muslims of Pakistani heritage make up only around 20% of London’s Muslim constituency. Greater London as a whole may have the largest Pakistani population (as it is an anomalously huge public authority in Britain) but at the local authority level Birmingham has by far the largest ‘Pakistani’ population followed by Bradford and Kirklees.
The problem, if it has a plausible ethnic component, must be placed more closely in the context of Mirpuri clannishness, if it is to bear meaning.
I am willing to doubt, for a number of reasons, that the same pattern of ethnically based crime would be found in London.
I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted for this – the Mirpuri community is disliked amongst Pakistani Muslims for its attitudes and behaviours, and unfortunately shares the Aghan love for Bachi Bazi.
Since the remaining 80% of London’s Muslim constituency are composed in no small part of Syrians, Afghans and Somalis, you’ll have to forgive the good folk of London if they fail to be reassured.
Fortunately an enquiry could clear it all up, and establish that it’s just the Mirpuri community, and not Muslim men from all the various -stans that view white women in particular, and women in general, with contempt unless they kowtow to oppressive dress codes and other restrictive behavioural requirements, as demanded of them by the Religion of Peace.
I imagine the Islamic community would wholeheartedly therefore welcome such an investigation. Odd that Sadiq Khan’s political instincts seem to have led him to another conclusion.
As one of the ‘good folk of London’ myself and from precisely the constituency that one would expect to have been targeted by Rape Gangs if they were prevalent in London – I have never heard of it happening here. No rumours, no suggestions. Up North it was an open secret. Grooming by gangs in the drug trade in London? everyone knows about that. But not ethnically or religiously targeted Rape Gangs.
Mind you It could equally be because there are just so few white British children here in the first place.
But you refused to answer his obvious question.
If Muslim community is as law abiding as you claim, they surely would welcome open enquiry about rape gangs?
You would imagine so, I suppose. As much as any law abiding community likes being investigated for wicked crimes.
I restrict myself to merely pointing out that many of the obvious grounds for suspicion which made the conspiracy so foul in Yorkshire and Lancashire are absent in London.
I watched an interview with Raja Miah recently, in which he said that fifty seats were contingent on the Muslim bloc vote. Labour will not do anything to make their political power perilous. Like many progressives, those at the top shun and disdain the white working classes, seeing in them little value. Their apathy is horrific. The Victorians took more care of minors than the governments in this country over the past forty years.
Up to a point Lord Copper. Victorian authorities were just as keen to hush up embarrassing evidence of child grooming.
W T Stead started a crusade against child prostitution by publishing a series of articles entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ in the Pall Mall Gazette and arranged the ‘purchase’ of Eliza Armstrong the 13-year-old daughter of a sweep. While his campaign contributed to the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 his reward from the “elite” of those days was to be convicted of abduction and sentenced to three months in prison on the technical grounds that he had failed to secure permission for the “purchase” from the father.
Plus ca change plus ce la meme chose.
You mean:All change and choose your meme. Sounds much better in English. 🙂
So, a non-white Islamic leftist who can barely contain his hatred for the native population is blocking an inquiry into the racist rape epidemic of white children in London—yet people are asking why he’s doing it?
The deeper issue here is the persistent lack of organisation among the native population to defend their interests—while other groups have vast mechanisms protecting theirs. This is why blatent anti-white racism continues unchecked.
Also, Noel Gallagher called him a “weasel-faced c***”.
It’s because the issue in London is different. There hasn’t been the same issue in london so why waste greater london taxpayer’s money on it. Central government are doing an investigation. There are other forms of child exploitation going on here like children having to deal drugs. The tories are just posturing. Its so sad.
Racist.
There hasn’t been the same issue in london
How do you know?
Why is Sadiq Khan preventing a London grooming gangs inquiry?
Do we really need to ask?
He must have a dog in the fight?
Typo in the headline. It’s spelt “rape”, not “grooming”.
Can everyone here stop calling them ‘grooming gangs’. They are RAPE gangs, no question.
When living in North London I didn’t witness any myself but good friends of mine from West London were talking about it happening in their area from the early 1990s. We have all moved from London since and I have to say what was happening to the culture was part of the motivation.