A Conspiracy of Murmuring

It has been quite surreal, as someone who has been writing about the grooming gangs scandal for years, to see it burst so violently into the international consciousness over the past few days.

Indeed, I accidentally played a very small part in its doing so, by commissioning Sam Bidwell to respond to Fraser Nelson on multiculturalism. In the back-and-forth that followed his excellent piece, Sam listed “British towns scarred by migrant sex abuse gangs”. On the same evening, and for unrelated reasons, the pseudonymous account “Max Tempers” posted an appalling excerpt from the transcripts of the trial of the Oxford grooming gang. The scale of the evil was emphasised on both a “macro” and “micro” level to such an extent that it caught the attention of Elon Musk, who strapped a rocket ship to the discourse.

Suddenly, it was everywhere. It sucks to say this as someone who writes opinion commentary, but a couple of tweets can be of far more consequence than the most chin-stroking of “long reads”. Even old news can be viral news if it is presented punchily enough.

Still, I could see someone asking, Hey, why should we pay attention now? This was years ago, right? Criminals have been convicted. Investigations have been carried out. What’s with all the fuss?

Yes, it’s true — people have gone to jail, people have lost their jobs and recommendations for change have been published and to some extent even implemented.

There has not been a conspiracy of silence. There has instead been a conspiracy of murmuring.

The establishment — that is, the organs of the state, the traditional media, and the web of charities and NGOs that some of us have called “the Blob” — have addressed the scandal in the most minimal terms. This is not always the case on an individual basis. There have been real heroes, like the journalists Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters, or whistleblowers like Jayne Senior and Maggie Oliver. But overall the issue has been obscured — not swept under the rug, no, but placed neatly in a drawer.

What do I mean? Here’s what I mean. We have witnessed:

1. No proper consequences for the criminals.

Yes, criminals have been convicted. But the criminals have not received the consequences they deserved. For example, one of them pled guilty to ten charges of rape, indecent assault and actual bodily harm, with some of his victims being as young as eleven, and was released on license after serving nine years in prison. That’s not even one year per charge. Such vicious child predators should have been excluded from civilised society for good.

2. No serious consequences for officialdom.

There has been a chronic lack of accountability when it comes to the officials who have failed the thousands of victims (in Rotherham alone it was perhaps more than 1500 victims). Almost no one has faced serious repercussions. In Rotherham, a councillor resigned amid criticism of his role in handling the issue and later secured a comfy post as a diversity and inclusion manager in the NHS. Another councillor who resigned was later nominated (and then removed) as a parliamentary candidate.

Police officers who might have failed victims, meanwhile, refused to cooperate with investigations. In what sane world could they have a choice? We’re not talking about shoplifters who went unarrested. We’re talking about the systematic rape of underage girls.

All this, needless to say, makes it harder to believe that grooming gangs and state enablement are a thing of the past.

3. Denial of the communal element.

It is certainly the case that white people — like people of all ethnic backgrounds — can form grooming gangs. Here’s a sickening case, with bizarre Satanic elements, from 2022. But the overrepresentation of Pakistani men among the perpetrators, which various reports have found was an element behind official institutions failing to expose them, and which helps to explain the anti-white attitudes which some of them expressed towards their victims, has been repeatedly obscured. A Home Office report was welcomed as disproving the link between ethnicity and grooming gangs — yet, as Guy Dampier writes, “even [the report] admits there are huge gaps in the data it uses”.

4. Cultural amnesia.

More broadly, and insidiously, the scandal just does not come up when and where it should. Take Rotherham alone. Gangs raping hundreds upon hundreds of vulnerable British girls while political correctness, classism and incompetence averts the eyes of local officials should be one of the most infamous events in British history. But as Charlie Peters notes, when the Prime Minister lists scandals where “truth and justice” was denied to victims by public authorities, Rotherham isn’t mentioned. Unlike Hillsborough and Windrush, it doesn’t fit with his idea of a united multicultural Britain.

The cultural establishment has, if anything, been worse. Where are the films and novels about the grooming gangs? (Roger Scruton wrote a novel about the scandal, actually, though even I can’t claim to have read it.)

At the Royal Court Theatre, in late 2024, these was a play about grooming gangs. Specifically, according to reviews, it was a play about a Muslim family that was being harassed after family members had been outed as suspected rapists. I haven’t seen the play. I can’t really judge it. But if we’re going to hear about the perspective of these hypothetical “victims”, where are the perspectives of the actual victims? It would be dishonest not to say that there have been honourable exceptions here, like the BBC’s Three Girls. But the scandal has not made nearly the cultural impact that it should have done. Again, it defies establishment narratives.

So, because of all this, even though the public has some awareness of the phenomenon, it does not have a clear sense of its scale and of its severity. Thus, countless people — and British people as well as Americans — have been shocked in the last few days to hear about what could — and should — have been known for many, many years.

An institutional reckoning is long overdue. As I wrote about a year ago, “The British State Should Be More Than Sorry”:

This is the deeply rooted state failure to address systematic child abuse on a massive scale. Apologies are nice, but there should be no quick forgiveness and absolutely no forgetting.