Reflections on Rotherham

Our government is more interested in playing politics than doing the right thing. We can change that.

The usual response for any government under pressure on any issue is to set up a public enquiry. This invariably buys time – years not weeks and gives an easy excuse for refusing to answer questions. Even better, the government gets to set the terms of reference (which can neuter an enquiry before it starts) and pick the chair. By the time it actually reports the moment will have passed, indeed the government may well have changed – as it did for the Saville Enquiry (into bloody Sunday), the Chilcott Enquiry (into the invasion of Iraq) and already has for the Hallett enquiry into Covid. While the sworn testimony may generate some challenges for some witnesses, that generally causes more delay – music to the ears of Sir Humphrey and the incompetent state.

So why on earth has the Prime Minister ruled one out on the child rapists of Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham, Oxford and elsewhere – or as he calls it “child grooming”, by which he means the repeated gang rape and trafficking 1,400 of the young girls of Rotherham. That’s 5% of all 1-17 year old females in Rotherham. One in 20. Many of the victims were in the care of the state. That they became gang rape victims is a demonstration of the state’s utter failure of the state.

As the 2014 Jay Report said “the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant….. first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data….. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken”

Kier Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions, that is the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, from 2008 to 2013, when these appalling events were still going on and when the first five convictions were made. This happened on his watch, so he’s known about if for at least 17 years.

It was Blair’s deluded imposition of “multiculturalism” that exacerbated the Police’s problems with racism and it’s senior management focus on addressing it, at the cost of almost all other forms of policing. It’s clearly possible that Starmer, his predecessors, his apparatchiks and his party would be savaged by a public enquiry, along with the relevant parts of the civil service. Might our Prime Minister have conflict of interest?

Or does he just not care?

His labelling of anyone calling for a public enquiry as jumping on “a far right band wagon” could be interpreted to mean he is more interested in fighting Reform than he is on righting the obscene wrings that occurred on his watch. After all, his chief of staff, Morgan MacSwinney spent his formative years (2008 or so)beating the British National Party in Dagenham – which was a political force then with 12 of its 13 candidates elected, a seat in the London Assembly and, in 2009, two MEPs.

MacSwinney has done nothing in his life outside of Labour politics, and that has a tawdry flavour to it. He set up a group called Labour Together, which ended up paying a hefty fine to the Electoral Commission for £730,000 of undeclared donations. MacSwinney assured senior MPs that donations were properly recorded – which they clearly were not. He lied. While vulnerable children are probably still being gang raped Downing Street is playing politics.

Which explains all the media kerfuffle about the interventions of Elon Musk and, by implication, Tommy Robinson. The former is not a UK voter and about to be very busy draining the fetid swamp of the Washington government machine. The latter is an imprisoned criminal (you can’t be imprisoned for civil offences). Neither has any relevance to the prime questions of why the state has been such a complete failure and what is to be done about it.

The addition of a public enquiry as a reasoned amendment to another bit of deeply flawed legislation was unlikely to succeed; Starmtroopers know how to obey (if little else). Reform’s idea of holding their own enquiry is very, very interesting. Absent the procedural constraints of a government enquiry it might well get quite quickly to who knew what, when. That in turn might or might not lead to prosecutions of the incompetents, but it would give us all some form of partial closure.

It will only be partial because understanding how this happened is likely to be complicated by details of ethnicity, nationality and residential status. Although that is relatively straightforward data, although getting it has taken a FOI request by the excellent Matt Godwin. Anticipate series of howls from the anti-racist crew of Black Lives Matter, Hope not Hate and the rest of them. It’s noteworthy that the Prime Minister will take the knee in support of one dead American but won’t lift a finger to act against the living hell of thousands or tens of thousands of sexually abused children. That’s the man who has power in the UK.

Behind all the white noise from the progressive left the reality is that multiculturalism isn’t working. Why? Because the police, courts and government are failing to implement the law evenly (or effectively). It’s not rocket science. If you’re in the UK you’re subject to English (or Scottish) law regardless of who you are, what your ethnicity, what passport you hold, what sexuality you prefer or how wealthy you are. Ironically this is very much the case in Muslim states, try drinking a beer in Jeddah, Riyadh or Rabat.

They may be monocultural, with varying accommodations for drink obsessed Westerners, but their laws are, simple, clear and work. Bizarrely in the UK, which can trace its common law back to before Mohammed was born, the law is compromised and doesn’t work. How the heck our vainglorious law making body, which styles itself the mother of all Parliaments, has delivered us into this mess will not doubt occupy historians for centuries.

Right now the more pertinent question is how we fix this broken, benighted state. The state is almost evil; beyond the child rape gang debacle, 52% of children in the care of the state have a criminal conviction by the age of 24. 25% of the entire prison population have been in care.

I don’t have any answers for that. Yet.

A first step would be to stop electing career politicians, for whom a week is a long time and who consider winning a vote more important than protecting the most vulnerable in our society. This self-serving, incompetent, Stalinist state machine is rotten from the top down, so let’s change it from the top down. Now, at last, there is an alternative.

It’s called Reform. I’m proud to be a part of it. You could be too.