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

[jadefinch]

Trevor Phillips is the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission - and he's recently been accused of 'transphobia' for saying women's same-sex spaces should be protected.

He's now been suspended by Labour for accurately saying that the majority of members of northern grooming gangs, which sexually abused tens of thousands of vulnerable girls, were Pakistani Muslim men.

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.

Labour's war on both women and the freedom to say things that are true is not going away.

news.sky.com/story/labour-veteran-trevor-phillips-suspended-over-islamophobia-allegations-11953457

Hear hear.

I grew up in an area with a large Muslim population. The openly expressed attitude of some Muslim men towards women is absolutely disgusting and it is more prevalent and tolerated than in other communities. Let's not pretend it isn't. You are doing victims of abuse a great disservice if you refuse to let them speak openly about the facts surrounding their abuse.

Yy to this Clymene

Go into any secondary school in certain parts of West Yorkshire and witness the abuse that female teachers have to put up with from teenage boys from the local Pakistani community. It is absolutely shocking and terrifying.

Islam is no more or less patriarchal than Christianity or Judaism. Conservative Islam is as misgynistic as any other kind of conservative religion.

Absolutely true in terms of the origins of all three religions. The difference is that Christianity, in most parts of the western world at least, has evolved to a fair extent, as has Judaism. Still patriarchal but Christian women in Europe are no longer expected to cover their hair as they were in the Middle Ages, for example. I think we all know there are some significant differences between the status - legal, and socio-economic - of women in Western European countries, and in many majority Muslim countries.

Of course Christianity can still be deeply oppressive and misogynist - look at many of the countries in Latin America, for example - but there was a Reformation in the west, and the gradual evolution of democracy alongside that means that while patriarchy is indeed still embedded at a deeper level, cultural attitudes are nonetheless different, and less overtly misogynist than those in countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran etc.

The problem is religious fundamentalism of all types (and not just in the three religions “of the Book”). The type of Christianity that predominates here in the UK is not the fundamentalist kind.

Islam, however, has never undergone any kind of reformation, as Aayan Hirsi Ali noted in 2015, when she called for that very thing to happen in her book Heretic. While there are a significant number of liberal Muslims, studies, including the one in 2016 show that Muslims on the whole are more socially conservative than the rest of the UK population.

52 per cent believed homosexuality should not be legal in Britain, 39 per cent agreed “wives should always obey their husbands”, and 31 per cent said it was acceptable for a man to have more than one wife.

iramramzan.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/what-do-british-muslims-really-think/

I believe we do ourselves and our sisters of Muslim origin a great disservice when we pretend there is not a serious clash between progressive British values and the attitudes in a large section of the Muslim community. Liberal Muslim women get it in the neck both ways - as much victims of genuine Islamophobia as any other Muslim, but often marginalised and isolated within their own communities for going against the grain too. We don’t stand with them by denying there’s an issue there.

Ann Cryer was vilified for trying to highlight this issue when she was Labour MP. Labour are staring down the barrel of electoral oblivion because they are dominated by people who think Twitter represents mainstream public opinion. As for the laughable post about the 'right wing media?' Sorry. Those cliched bait and smear tactics aren't working. Anymore.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4780326/Branded-racist-trying-save-girls-vile-abusers.html

Good post talking

In the survey below, Labour got 85% of the Muslim vote.

www.brin.ac.uk/religious-affiliation-and-party-choice-at-the-2017-general-election/

Only 26% of the Jewish vote.

When was it ever not?

Fantastic post Talking

Thank you

the reluctance of the police to call out muslim men in northern towns was as much if not more to do with a fear of a white backlash than of being PC PC's.

But is that really what the police feared? So where was the white backlash when the police did finally take action, and the first convictions hit the headlines in 2010? Or during the following years as the ever-increasing number of grooming rings were revealed?

We're always being warned, by middle-class media commentators, about the dreaded "white backlash". They're not talking about themselves, so it's pretty clear they mean a white working-class backlash. And yet it never actually happens.

I'd say it's really about middle-class fear of the working class. And contempt -- just read anything on the subject in The Guardian. In fact, the same attitude that actually stopped professionals investigating child abuse.

Wikipedia gives what looks to me like a pretty accurate account: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal

Quoting from the Jay and Casey reports published in 2014 and 2015:
"The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class and gender—contemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations; the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority; lack of a child-centred focus; a desire to protect the town's reputation; and lack of training and resources."

@alloutoffucks the phenomenon you describe was one factor - as was a sort of class-awfulness where social workers were happy for children to do things (like stay out all night and have a 31 year old “boyfriend”) that they wouldn’t have countenanced for their own kids. But a fear of being racist among the police for calling it a Pakistani Muslim gang was referenced too.

Jay Report, p.91

In the broader organisational context, however, there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.

@longtalljosie Yes that is accurate.

Labour Party is fucked

Thank you, Talking, for talking sense. I do not understand why people refuse to be honest about religious differences. Every day I work with a majority Muslim (first and second-generation) cohort, and I can tell you there is sometimes very little in the way of "common sense".

These "phobia" and "ist" words have the power to make people disingenuous, fearful and self-righteous. It is disheartening.

We need a new left wing party. I'm no longer convinced that Labour can come back from this.
Yes, or we need the current mob running the Labour Party to bugger off and form their own hard left Socislist party and allow the Labour Party to recover. We cannot expect to run a democracy with no credible opposition for much longer and we cant wait for another party to emerge.

I lived in a largely muslim area of Glasgow for three years.

The police would not attend incidents in the area. I witnessed women being attacked, called the police, nobody came. It was generally known as an area that the police wouldn't touch.

I agree talking, with all you say. And ppl need to remember that "Muslim" doesn't just mean one thing, just like "Christian" doesn't. There is, of course, dissent between Muslims and also class divisions in Muslim communities. It's not like all Northern Muslims are taxi drivers, just like all white residents of northern towns aren't in the BNP!

I'd say it's really about middle-class fear of the working class. And contempt -- just read anything on the subject in The Guardian. In fact, the same attitude that actually stopped professionals investigating child abuse.
Completely agree. It's a mixture of contempt and paternalistic 'othering' that caused the Labour vote to collapse.

I also didn't realise how important the Muslim vote was to the Labour Party until this thread.

Go into any secondary school in certain parts of West Yorkshire and witness the abuse that female teachers have to put up with from teenage boys from the local Pakistani community.

Schools are failing in their duties here too then. Abuse of staff should not be tolerated in schools, and by allowing it to go unpunished they are implicitly teaching young people that such attitudes are acceptable. So appalling for the staff, but also the schools are failing in their duty to help teach young people acceptable behaviour.

It's a very strong sub-culture among British males of Pakistani-muslim origin (Kashmiri & Punjabi, but not Indians and Bangladeshis.) 'White women are all drunks and whores.' etc.

The figures for consumption of the most extreme pornography also tell a tale. But none of this is Beacuse they are Muslim but in spite of it.

The critique of relisgion is, as ever, that it fails to make anyone any better than they would otherwise have been without it.

They tried forming a new Labour party - ie Change - but look how well that went.

I agree that what is needed is a purge of the real Labour Party, which has been taken over by nutcases, and unimpressive nutcases at that. I watched the leadership contender interviews - they were all awful . And as for Rebecca Long Bailey - you can't have her potentially running the country! Quite how a purge is carried out when the lunatics are running the asylum is a difficult one, however,

Among some British males whose families origin is in Kashmiri and Punjabi, not all. I have met men with this origin at One Law for All events who are politically aware and who campaign against this misogyny.
Yes I agree that the level of misogyny is higher, but it is racist to say that one group of people of the same ethnic orogin all think the same, they don't.
Read Maryam Namazei if you want to know more about this. She also talks openly about the left wing's complicity in this.