Labour suspends Trevor Phillips because he identified who made up child grooming gangs

Any decent person would prefer to spend a lifetime accused of Islamophobia rather than permit paedo rapists to abuse. In this case the police chiefs stood idly by whilst paedo rapists did what they wanted for years.

It's also I think that often the policy, direction and culture in the organisation are set by those at the top, who aren't making direct decisions usually about a particular case. It can also be the political level that makes it clear they don't want certain types of problems. And yet at the same time this constrains what people on the front lines can do. It's really common in all kinds of organisations like this, including the police, for someone to want to make a different call but they simply aren't really allowed. It becomes a sort of whistleblower situation if they take that step, which is something for most people where they have to really be sure before they take that leap.

You see it in social services too. Cases where social workers see causes for concern but don't want to be accused of homophobia or racism and so don't report.

Its often far more nuanced that a fear of being judged discriminatory.
People have bias & those with Safeguarding responsibility are taught (rightly) to guard against their own possible bias. There may be an 'over-correction' which is sub-conscious.

Its also not uncommon that abusers who are educated middle-class white British are less scrutinised when concerns raised.

Here's a tweet from Robert Colvile, editor of CapX, that sums it up:
^
“Things that don’t get you expelled from the Labour Party: hosting IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah in parliament; sharing platforms with antisemites; picketing trial of Brighton Bomber; etc etc. Things that do get you expelled from the Labour Party: being Trevor Phillips.”^

Any decent person would prefer to spend a lifetime accused of Islamophobia rather than permit paedo rapists to abuse.

Let's face it Lino any decent person would also recognise that children having sex with adult men, with groups of adult men, were abuse victims.

Yes it was both. You see it in social services too. Cases where social workers see causes for concern but don't want to be accused of homophobia or racism and so don't report. Victoria Climbie's social worker (despite being black herself) admitted that what she saw and heard would have caused her concern if it had happened in a white family, but she never acted on this as she didn't want to be culturally insensitive. In another case, social workers saw causes for concern in the way a male gay couple were with fostered boys but didn't want to be accused of homophobia so did nothing, which meant young boys were abused. This is what is so terrible about Labour's reaction to Sarah Champion and TP. We need a cultural shift so that people feel confident about reporting concerns, without fear of accusation of ism's and phobias, yet Labour is reinforcing the culture of fear despite the fact that we know it results in vulnerable people being abused. Its' despicable.

Let’s face it, it was both.

The main reason girls were put at risk was because professionals like the police thought they were just "slags" rather than victims.

Exactly. Any decent person would prefer to spend a lifetime accused of Islamophobia rather than permit paedo rapists to abuse. In this case the police chiefs stood idly by whilst paedo rapists did what they wanted for years. The police chiefs should be doing time too.

One of the main reasons why the girls were put at risk was because the police and local authorities didn't want to intervene in case they were accused of Islamophobia.

Yeah right. If those girls had been upper class do you think the police would have done jack shit for so many years? It was a pathetic excuse for blatantly not doing their job for literally years. I can't believe they got away with it. (Actually I can.)

I've also heard such language and attitudes Kitten. Let's face it there are other countries and cultures where women are openly viewed as lower class and lower in importance than men - there are cultures and countries where female infanticide is routine. Why does it become impossible to say this when some of the men from those countries are practicing their culture here?

I am very grateful for the likes of Trevor Phillips and Sajid Javid as well who have not flinched from pointing out the link between racist misogyny and certain ethnicities, and I am disgusted that we cannot all do likewise. What is barely tolerated from them would be met with all the usual denial and hostility from white women. The number of facts that women - demonstrable, provable facts, from women particularly - are not allowed to state about men and the harm they do to women grows daily.

It's definitely not all Muslim men, nor is it a majority ime, but it's common enough as an attitude that pretending it doesn't exist and isn't factoring into what's been happening with the grooming gangs is stupid. Which is what Trevor Phillips was trying to say.

Exactly.

I was told "all white women are whores" once by an adult Muslim man (in a MENA country - the attitude was made clear enough on other occasions, that's just one where I remember it being said right to my face). I was about 11 at the time. It's definitely not all Muslim men, nor is it a majority ime, but it's common enough as an attitude that pretending it doesn't exist and isn't factoring into what's been happening with the grooming gangs is stupid. Which is what Trevor Phillips was trying to say.

Lisa Nandy is on Victoria Derbyshire now discussing this while talking about the leadership contest. I can only back up what a few people have said about attitudes amongst some Muslim men. Years ago when I was involved with left wing politics and living in Birmingham a male friend who was Muslim by birth but an atheist told me about some of the attitudes to white women being easy and worth nothing in the eyes of some, this is about 25 years ago. He said because they will have pre marital sex and not cover up they were seen as no better than prostitutes. The person that told me this, way before any of the abuse and grooming gangs became public was himself a Pakistani male. A revolutionary Marxist who hated the Labour Party back then as they were reformists in his eyes.

And the problem is that the longer it's allowed to continue and the more het up the overenthusiastic young people get the harder it is to stop.

Prodigal I crossposted with you, I was typing Cultural Revolution while you were typing Red Guards. This is exactly it, isn’t it? This is being inflicted in the Labour Party because adults are allowing it. I mourn the Labour Party.

Agreed, Talking. It's why I'm glad Labour lost the election, which I couldn't have imagined myself saying even a year or two ago. I'm genuinely scared of what the wannabe Red Guard kids and their idiotic adult enablers would unleash on us all if they got anywhere near government.

That, and plain old fashioned misogyny. As with the TRA attitudes, women are disposable. Men are not: their needs must be considered at all times, and if possible met - especially if they tick an Equality Act box, and are therefore marginalised. Our marginalisation is so normalised, it's invisible to most men (and plenty of women, too). Conveniently enough. Even when 13 year old girls are plied with drugs and alcohol and passed around a group of adult men, and the police assume that's a choice.

Yy to this, wellbehavedwomen.

Agreed, Kittens. It’s astonishing that those old enough to have lived through the Cold War aren’t reacting responsibly to all this.

The only “comfort” is that they are making themselves totally and utterly unelectable, so at least we don’t need to worry about this becoming our future just yet. But that’s an odd sort of comfort, altogether.

This reminds me of student-age politics, where the most important goal was to show you were totally pure. I was always a bit intimidated by knowing I wasn’t pure enough, but I kept trying to be. I admired China’s Cultural Revolution (because I had no idea what the Chinese people suffered during the ’Ten years of Madness’).

Thank God people like me never came to power over here, back then. My only excuse is that I was very young.

The tragedy is, this is the Labour Party. This is the main opposition to the shitshower now in government. Run by teenage zealots, apparently.

If you're familiar with the history of how various communist governments veered into horror this is all extra disturbing. It would be lovely if people learned from history but apparently that's too much to ask. It's also why I'm angrier with the grownups about this than the kids even though the kids are effectively acting as the Red Guard in the current scenario - the adults should know better, and should never have let it get this far.

I think they are so convinced by their moral purity that they don't care what everyone thinks. It's not about being elected for this lot, it's about being superior. And they are so enjoying it, they have no perspective of how fascistic their authoritarianism seem to everyone else.

I know. I really can't tell which. I don't think it's necessarily a joined up approach. Some people are doing it for one reason and others for the other. Incompetence and malice.

It also appears to indicate that the people doing the attacking have no idea which Labour figures the public respects and which it does not. Or, alternately, that they know very well and are making it clear that they don't give a shit what the public thinks, which is all very well until the next general election rolls around.

I don't agree with everything Trevor Philips has ever said but this appears to be a deliberate attack on a decent, principled man, in the purity spiral of current Labour politics.

If you say all Pakistani men are like x, of course that makes you a racist.

Who has said that?? What an extraordinarily brazen use of the straw man.

No one is saying all Pakistani men are abusers, or that all abusers are Pakistani men, for that matter, before you try and sneak that one in too. That’s so far-fetched it’s actually offensive - I can’t believe you would even try to pretend that’s what anyone is saying. Is it because you can’t address what’s actually being said?

In any case, you have again demonstrated how and why the situation in Rotherham and other towns was allowed to continue unchecked for so long. Any reference to the abusers’ (and the victims’) ethnicity and the part that played in the dynamic of the abuse being falsely categorised as racism against all the members of that ethnic group.

People scoff when certain people say they’re ‘not allowed’ to say anything, and then these same people sit in wonderment at how the likes of Tommy Robinson become so popular.

Exactly. If mainstream politicians and journalists will not comment then those outside of it certainly will. It gives them a credibility that is frightening to think about. People start to think “if they’re right about this then what else are they right about?” It’s very unhealthy for a society.