Labour rejects calls for Oldham grooming gang inquiry

[Signalbox]

Are Labour right to push the responsibility for carrying out a public inquiry back onto Oldham Council?

I don't understand how it is considered acceptable for local authorities to carry out their own inquiries when they are often part of the institutional failure that allowed these crimes to be carried out on such a large scale over decades. Councils, police and social services were/are all implicated in the failure to act (or to actively obstruct) in some way or another.

"Phillips’ letter to Oldham Council, seen by GB News, claims it is for the the local authority ‘alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.’ Reports have previously been commissioned and produced in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford; Oldham now plans to launch its own Telford-style inquiry. Given the strength of feeling – which Phillips acknowledges in her letter – it seems inevitable that there will be questions or debate in the Commons when parliament returns next week."

"Yet for the hundreds of victims and those invested in bringing perpetrators to justice, this will seem pitifully inadequate. In each town where grooming gangs operated, similar patterns emerged: victims were ignored, law enforcement complicit and political officials more concerned about reputational damage than lives affected. Local authorities can hold their own inquiries, of course. But given the scale of these crimes, the fact they took place over decades, in many towns, suggests a level of institutional complicity requiring the attention of central government."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-rejects-calls-for-oldham-grooming-gang-inquiry/

Archive...

https://archive.ph/3greC#selection-1667.0-1759.570

@Signalbox I completely agree

don’t think the decision to commission or not to commission an inquiry should be left to councils. There should be a mandatory inquiry in every town / city where grooming gangs have operated for decades under the eyes of councils and police. Each town will have issues specific to their own area and some of those who might have intervened will still be working never having been held to account.

Labour said before the election that they wanted to half violence against women and girls. How will they ever manage to come close to achieving this whilst still burying their heads in the sand in relation to this ongoing scandal.

Here is another interesting article. (Apologies if this has already been posted).

https://unherd.com/2025/01/why-the-police-ignored-the-rape-gangs/

I strongly agree with PPs that Kirkup has an excellent record in standing up for children in care which has long had a substantial overlap with matters such as the subject of this thread (sadly).

The Unherd article Barbados posted seems to give some partial insights into the reality that it would seem to have been helpful to promotion prospects not to address safeguarding young people and to downplay the likely scale of the problem.

I've just read the following Times piece about activities in Scotland: Revealed: how police caught rape gang in ‘Scotland’s Rochdale’
Romanians targeted vulnerable women and girls in Dundee and groomed them with drugs and ‘cruel’ lies of love and friendship

https://archive.ph/dxsat

Overall, and as previously, I'm left angry and despairing that this happens in plain sight and that (allegedly) so many resources have been expended to so little benefit. So many people have had stellar careers on the back of being on the Side of History As Usual Despite the Performative Rhetoric and Expenditure of Resources to Seemingly Scant Benefit.

This is good. Adler writes well, and holds the mirror up to policing in his articles.

the reality that it would seem to have been helpful to promotion prospects not to address safeguarding young people and to downplay the likely scale of the problem.

This is so true, there really needs to be a complete 'clean house' policy where these abuses have happened. I.e. a complete change of staff. For those who have done no wrong, redundancy and appropriate support to find other jobs / retrain. There should be a complete restructure or it will just happen again and again.

But it beggars belief people who were in senior positions when this happened have been promoted.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93qplwpll2o

They've also had a look at the promotion of a senior police officer who dismissed the extent of the abuse of girls as "sensationalised" and challenged the figure of 1,000 girls. He's been rewarded with promotion to "director of operational standards at the College of Policing". The comments under the article are scathing:

Yes, Douglas Murray also mentioned him in his excoriating article, I think posted upthread.

The Douglas Murray article is excellent. It's a shame Douglas Murray isn't prime minister, he'd do more than Starmer. It sickens me that some of these men were out in 2 years after being convicted. Barely punishment and allowed to stay in the same locality as those they abused. The state is forcing more torture on these women. Just appalling. Why on earth can they not have some kind of restraining order to ensure they have to be far from their victims?

How much money has been paid for these rapists and torturers (convicted, remember) to avoid deportation. How much has been given to the victims for support to try and rebuild their lives? I bet nowhere near as much.

Frankly, I hate all this country stands for right now and am ashamed to be British after reading about this.

www.threads.net/@lena_whitaker1/post/C2N1vZ9IMDu?xmt=AQGzjx3WdTAlmtrUesaV4fy57mA_fzryPkpN3ATrSF4Zbw

KJK is doing a LWS in Oldham later today. Does anyone know where it will be livestreamed? The live streams (and the recent LWS videos) are no longer on you tube.
I am apprehensive, but curious, about this one.

I have looked at the conclusions of Jay's report and though mandatory reporting is welcome there needs to be an explicit statement about the recording of race and religion of the perpetrators so it is clear who was and is performing this abuse. The scale of data shortage for these crimes is shocking and any policy to address crimes such as this are reliant on data. The data shortage seems a flimsy excuse for anyone stating Pakistini Muslim men are the main perpetrators of these crimes to be called 'far right extremist ' if they have the temerity to state an evident fact.

Time after time we see the names and faces of the convicted after convictions in the press and time free time we have the left wing press trying to say grooming gangs is a general problem and obfuscating the issue by trying to bring in other areas of CSA e.g. the family and then calling people extremist for pointing out the background of the perpetrators and suggesting its possibly sensible to concentrate on that demogrpahic.

We need another report and this time with a clear focus with no fear of accusations of racism when a realistic conclusion is reached.

KJK is doing a LWS in Oldham later today. Does anyone know where it will be livestreamed? The live streams (and the recent LWS videos) are no longer on you tube.
I am apprehensive, but curious, about this one.

She generally streams them on Twitter/X.

Another article in Unherd on grooming gang ground zero, Keighley, gives some of the back story of Ann Cryer MP and the mothers who alerted her and the subsequent opportunitism of the BNP

https://unherd.com/2025/01/how-britain-forgot-keighleys-grooming-gangs/

But it beggars belief people who were in senior positions when this happened have been promoted.

You'll have real difficulty getting any of this to happen because the promotion of actual sex offenders – never mind of people who failed to deal with them – is so normal for Britain.

Boris Johnson tries to obfuscate it with chatter about cake in lockdown, but the real reason he had to resign as Prime Minister in July 2022 was because he had promoted a serial sex offender, Chris Pincher. And not just promoted him, but made him Deputy Chief Whip – the position responsible for enforcing party discipline and upholding standards.

Johnson then tried to hide the fact that he'd known Pincher had multiple allegations against him. (By 2022 police had already investigated at least two allegations against Pincher; neither was taken further, the only reason being given as "complainant said they did not wish to take it further." The Parliamentary Standards Committee subsequently found some allegations be true. )

Johnson's ministers had more integrity than him, and about 50 resigned en masse in July 2022, including Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid and Michelle Donelan.

That's why Johnson resigned. Though you'd have to be paying attention to know it, given the behaviour of much of the media and certain posters on MN who try to minimise and distract from Johnson's behaviour by banging on about cake.

Any legislation we make about sacking and blocking people who fail to deal with sex offenders will prevent Boris Johnson (and doubtless many, many others) from holding office.

Chris Pincher: How No 10 changed its story on what Boris Johnson knew
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/62048687

One scandal too many: British PM Boris Johnson resigns
https://apnews.com/article/boris-johnson-resignation-60da3c4b29a4e9c93c7db9f53034ad0e

Police probed Chris Pincher assault allegations
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-62064605

Committee on Standards publishes report on the conduct of Christopher Pincher
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/290/committee-on-standards/news/196293/committee-on-standards-publishes-report-on-the-conduct-of-christopher-pincher/

I'm absolutely delighted that we have finally decided that sexual assault is not part of Britain's culture, and that people who do it are beyond the pale.

It's a nice change from my younger days, when it was all the woman/child's fault, men were allowed to have a bit of fun, and it was Political Correctness Gorn Mad to suggest there was anything wrong with men grabbing younger female colleagues by the pussy in the lift.

The first 10 minutes of The Week in Westminster (currently being broadcast on Radio 4) discussed this issue:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0026tv3

To discuss whether there should be a national inquiry into grooming gangs, Caroline is joined by Labour MP Paul Waugh who represents Rochdale, and former Conservative MP Laura Farris, who served as Safeguarding Minister in Rishi Sunak's government.

It was a grown-up discussion. The impression I got from it is confirmation that there is a gap and Labour are shifting bit by bit to recognising that they'll have to deal with this.

Agree, we need good quality data and then I do think it's fine to discuss whether we want to limit immigration from demographics who don't believe women should have rights and see girls as less than human.

Wanting to protect our country's values and the rights of people already living here isn't far right. In some cases, for immigrants already here, they're here precisely because they don't want to be treated as less than human / would like their female children to be treated equally with boys. Would we accept lots of men from the Taliban over here as refugees or economic migrants if they decided that their lives in Afghanistan (using women and girls as slaves) wasn't good enough? Would we say it was 'islamophobic' to question their attitudes and actions to keep women and girls as slaves, as they currently are in Afghanistan, breaking the law in this country? Would this be 'racist'?

Scarily, given the media silence on Afghanistan, I think that likely would be the case. It's so depressing.

By all means have whatever kind of inquiry can best reveal the full extent of the sexual abuse of children, and if it is helpful to gather statistics into who exactly the perpetrators are, by sex, race, class, age, location, profession, educational attainment - whatever, go for it. The column headed 'Sex of Perpetrator' can be filled in very quickly.

But be prepared for the results, because the perpetrators live in your house, or next door, or down your street, and they are so numerous - perhaps as many as 840,000 according to the National Crime Agency - that one of the participants in the Channel 4 programme Undercover Police: Hunting Paedophiles remarked that if the police succeeded in catching all the sexual abusers of children in the UK, there wouldn't be enough prison cells in the whole country to hold them.

In Ireland, the focus on the scandal of sexual abuse of boys by priests and other categories of religious men led to the words 'sexual abuse' being almost inevitably preceded in public discourse by 'clerical', and the tragically 'everyday' sexual abuse, mostly of girls, mostly by fathers and uncles and stepfathers and brothers or, as in my case, by trusted, well-respected neighbours, fades into the background.

Sexual abuse by gangs and clerical sexual abuse are subsets of male violence against women and children; they deserve to be specifically and fully investigated for what they are, and how badly they were dealt with by the authorities. But they should not come to represent, and thereby obscure, the totality of what is a massive problem in every community in every country.

I think CSA can be (and must) be differentiated. We cannot use the fact SA occurs in families to act as a diversion to a problem where action can be taken. To try and take the focus off grooming gangs by just placing it under the umbrella of CSA is misguided and snacks of deliberate avoidance of a specific problem.

We cannot just be a report whose conclusion is 'SA is bad and must be reporter's as this is self evident and would be a waste of time and money. What we need is a report into a specific problem and unashamedly state we are investigating the extent of a crime committed by a certain demographic and look seriously at the cultural attitudes that allowed men to collectivise in such a manner to commit heinous crimes.

Yes CSA occurs in families

It was a grown-up discussion. The impression I got from it is confirmation that there is a gap and Labour are shifting bit by bit to recognising that they'll have to deal with this.

That's good.

I think CSA can be (and must) be differentiated. We cannot use the fact SA occurs in families to act as a diversion to a problem where action can be taken. To try and take the focus off grooming gangs by just placing it under the umbrella of CSA is misguided and snacks of deliberate avoidance of a specific problem.

It reminds me of when people say things like "most sexual violence is by people you know, so why are you worried about "trans women"! Yes, it is, but that doesn't mean we abandon all safeguarding in public.

Part of maggie olivers job was to compile information sbout the crimes and perpetrators. When she returned to work after having to take leave, the information had been destroyed, and the cases sidelined.

That indicates that the police did take abuse against girls seriously, and had the opportunity to see there was a particular group of man involved and patterns to this abuse.

Data being destroyed, cases sidelined and officers redeployed isnt something that happens by accident, or by someone junior - its a decision thats taken at the very top. The high level police who could see the need for this investigation and create a team to investigate it suddenly decided it wasnt need to the extent information had to be destroyed.

So, no. This isnt just society and police not taking sexual abuse seriously, its not police refusing to investigate. Its the shutting down of sexual abuse investigation once it created other problems for who, i dont know.

I'm just so glad we can have these discussions, whether we agree or not without certain former posters disrupting them. Mentioning no names but they made it impossible.

Part of maggie olivers job was to compile information sbout the crimes and perpetrators. When she returned to work after having to take leave, the information had been destroyed, and the cases sidelined.

That indicates that the police did take abuse against girls seriously, and had the opportunity to see there was a particular group of man involved and patterns to this abuse.

Data being destroyed, cases sidelined and officers redeployed isnt something that happens by accident, or by someone junior - it's a decision thats taken at the very top.

The high level police who could see the need for this investigation and create a team to investigate it suddenly decided it wasnt need to the extent information had to be destroyed.

So, no. This isnt just society and police not taking sexual abuse seriously, it's not police refusing to investigate. It's the shutting down of sexual abuse investigation once it created other problems for who, i dont know.

Yes. All on Maggie Oliver's site.

An inquiry is needed because this is a startling obvious case of wilful blindness. It is a classic case and should be taught in all training of public officials instead of CRT etc. It is necessary because the denial is still going on. Wes Streeting's intervention has really shocked me.
This short video by Margaret Hefferman is based on her book 'Wilful Blindness' which was initiated by Enron and the crash but the principles apply here.