Politics: no longer boring

By Richard North - January 8, 2025

With the Muslim rape gangs burning through the internet, driving the legacy media into discussing the issue and dominating the political agenda, the BBC ran as its lead item for most of yesterday a weak, own-initiative story on sexual harassment in McDonalds, fronted by Indian heritage “culture” reporter, Noor Nanji.

Only latterly did the corporation decide to switch from this displacement activity to cover Jess Phillip’s bid for victimhood, courtesy of a lengthy interview in its flagging Newsnight programme, where the embattled under secretary complained that the “disinformation” spread by Elon Musk was “endangering” her.

Also courtesy of the BBC, the poor darling received some support for her refusal to commission an inquiry into the Oldham Muslim rape gangs. This came, rather conveniently from professor Alexis Jay, chair of the 2022 inquiry.

Jay told the BBC’s Today programme: “We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions… we have set out what action is required, and people should just get on with it locally and nationally”.

Perhaps she had forgotten that her own report which stated: “Poor or non-existent data collection makes it impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation by networks”, and the BBC certainly wasn’t going to remind her.

Here, though, we get a sense of the establishment closing ranks as The Times also runs a piece on Jay, lifting from the BBC report to have the professor tell us that it would be wrong to launch a new inquiry as this would “certainly cause delays” in implementing the reforms set out in her report.

She condemned the Conservative government as “weak” for failing to put her reforms into action – a reasonable enough comment – and made a fresh call for “action”. But to suggest that a new inquiry, most probably with different terms of reference, would necessarily impact on the implementation of her report sounds too much like special pleading.

Nevertheless, The Times beefs up Jay’s point with an article featuring the now-retired Andrew Norfolk, their journalist who wrote about the abuse in 2011, under the heading: “We still don’t know cause of grooming gangs, says scandal reporter”.

The sub-head tells us that Norfolk says there needs to be proper research into the issues that let criminals flourish, confirming that Jay’s inquiry failed to get to grips with the root causes of grooming gangs “which have still not been properly examined”. Norfolk thinks that the “proper research” must extend into and understanding of the issues of religion, culture and social cohesion that had allowed criminals to flourish.

“They shied away from it”, says Norfolk, although he stops short of calling for a national public inquiry as he questions how it would help victims of the “scandal”. He also speaks up for Starmer who, he asserts, “changed the rules” to make more prosecutions possible, following which “there was a huge increase in convictions”.

In what might seem a contradiction, Norfolk nevertheless “strongly believes” that independent research of a range of issues is essential to understanding the phenomenon, even though such research might be best directed through the medium of a specific inquiry into these issues.

Such issues, Norfolk believes, include Islamic jurisprudence and how it can impact on the treatment of girls and women, and ingrained factors in some communities such as arranged and cousin marriages and how they impact on relationships.

However, he seems to prejudge those very issues when he says: “Why one very small sub-section of one minority ethnic community was so overwhelmingly, disproportionately responsible for these crimes – that this work that would be vital in bringing about understanding that could enable changes to take place”.

What increasingly becomes apparent, from the sheer scale of the rape gang activities – located in as many as 50 town and cities throughout the UK – is that this behaviour is a feature of the Muslim ghetto culture, and if not endorsed by the communities, certainly tolerated with no attempt to prevent the activity or ostracise perpetrators.

Norfolk asks of the rape gang activity, “How do you address it and stamp it out if you don’t understand why it it is happening in the first place?”, and warns that “everybody is still too scared”, arguing that this was “a vacuum that allowed the far right to continue exploiting grooming victims”, adding: “It’s the void into which Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson can shout, spread lies and poison”.

If one was to be generous, this is a somewhat disingenuous view, as the scope of concern extends far beyond the behaviour of the rapists into their ghetto communities and extends to asking how this country managed to degenerate to such an extent that this behaviour was tolerated by all manner of officials and official bodies, which was even facilitated by the officials charged with protecting the victims.

But if ever there was a need for an inquiry, it is highlighted by an article in the Mail (a version of which also appears in The Times) headed: “Revealed: Rochdale grooming gang ringleader’s VERY comfortable life in Britain a decade after he was released and told he’d be deported”.

This concerns Qari Abdul Rauf, who – after serving two-and-a-half years of a six-year sentence for his role as ringleader of a Muslim rape gang in Rochdale, was stripped of his UK citizenship, was told he would be sent back to Pakistan following his release in November 2014.

Immigration tribunal judges have twice rejected his appeal against deportation in 2020 and 2022 yet, after Rauf cynically renounced his Pakistani citizenship as a ploy to avoid deportation, he had his lawyers argue that he was “stateless” and could not be returned to his home country.

Needless to say, with such scum, Rauf also had his lawyers claim that deportation would breach his right to private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights, which leaves him still in Rochdale, walking around the town “like he owns the place”.

What an inquiry could be usefully directed to explore is why it is that governments are so weak that they cannot even summon the determination to get rid of a single Pakistani rapist. And as long as we have governments that cannot perform even this simple function, they are not worthy of the name, cannot command our obedience and deserve nothing but our contempt.

Almost certainly, it is the likes of Rauf which Robert Jenrick had in mind when yesterday, he declared that migrants from cultures with “medieval attitudes to women” should be blocked from coming to Britain.

This, from a senior Tory, is evidence of how far and how quickly the Overton window is shifting, more so when this stance quickly gained the support of his leader who, we are reminded, has said that all cultures are not “equally valid”.

Once again, though, Jenrick has outflanked Farage who, at the moment, seems bogged down over his spat with Tommy Robinson, making some questionable statements about Robinson’s “criminal convictions”.

Having also launched an attack on Ben Habib, accusing him of being “too big for his boots”, Farage seems rather to be losing the plot on the issue of the moment.

Meanwhile, Jenrick got some flak from his own side, with Pakistani heritage Lord Ahmad urging him to “reflect” on some of his comments. Talking to the BBC (where else?), he asked: “Is he putting victims of these abhorrent crimes at the heart of the solutions that do exist… or is he trying to play to a particular audience to incite particular thinking and particular views against a particular community?”

Jenrick even had “wet” Tory Iain Dale crawling out of his hole to attack him, the very same Iain Dale, who in 2013 assaulted a pensioner and received a police caution after admitting common assault.

Dale asserts that Jenrick “is speaking like Tommy Robinson” and “needs to simmer down”, this from a man who on multiple occasions failed to win nomination for a Tory seat, as prospective MP. “Responsible free speech is a wonderful thing, which our democracy should cherish”, Dale wibbles, adding: “but most people know when they breach the undoubted limits of free speech. Jenrick has come very close to doing that”.

But this is nothing compared to the savaging that Ed Davey got from Musk after the Lib-Dem leader railed on Twitter, “People have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country’s democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain”, asserting: “It’s time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official is suggesting the UK government should be overthrown”.

Short and to the point, Musk retorted: “What exactly do I fail to understand about your failure to stop the mass rape of little girls in Britain, you snivelling cretin?”.

What ever else one might say of current developments, for once no-one could accuse politics of being boring at this juncture – except the BBC, which is doing its best to make it so.