So Labour Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has now joined the ranks of (…checks notes…) a “Far Right Extremist Racist Conspiracy Theory” as he accepts the conclusions of the report by Baroness Louise Casey on the rape (not grooming) gangs scandal of the last twenty years:

He had previously claimed that anyone who suggested that Pakistani men were raping and grooming white British girls with impunity — while British police and government officials covered it up to maintain good relations with the Pakistani community — was a “far-right” agitator, racist, and conspiracy theorist.

Knowing the explosive conclusions of the report, he reversed his long-standing opposition to a full government investigation into the rape gangs and their government enablers, just before packing his bags for Canada.

After years of denying what was increasingly known, the gutless POS made sure he was out of country as the report was revealed to the public, delaying its release by ten days. But now it’s u-turn time:

I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit. I asked her to do that job to double check on this; she has done that job for me and having read her report…I shall now implement her recommendations.

He really didn’t have a choice as the Casey report, in terms of depth and scope, went far beyond anything officially published earlier, although there were plenty of smaller, more local and private investigations, as this superb UnHerd article details:

Newspaper clippings hint at abuses dating all the way back to the Seventies; when far-Right groups raised the alarm in the early 2000s, they were mocked for their accents, accused of stirring up hatred, and censored. When Left-wingers and moderates noticed, they didn’t fare much better: Julie Bindel broke the first mainstream press account almost 20 years ago, only to be called racist for her efforts. The late Times journalist Andrew Norfolk paid a professional price for investigating; former Labour MPs Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion faced stonewalling and harassment.

Not holding back, Casey identified the scale and extent of the rape gangs, the specific ethnic groups in the gangs, and how much the state failed the victims over decades of horror:

Baroness Louise Casey’s report explicitly says that children were allowed to be raped for decades “one, because of the race of the perpetrators [Pakistani], and two, because of who the victims were [white working class girls.]”

The report calls for the government to track the race and national origin of grooming gang perpetrators. It explicitly flags the fact that migrants from other countries are moving to the UK, claiming asylum, and then preying on British natives. It calls out British government authorities for corruptly pressuring police not to prosecute rapists because doing so could “raise tensions.”

His experience of being called a racist is not unusual. I wonder if Ms Maitlis would like to now take back the following attack on MP Rupert Lowe as he tried to launch his inquiry? And I wonder what Casey made of those police statistics she threw around.

Back to Casey’s report:

It seems plausible that this reluctance to record the race of rape gangs was driven by concerns over ‘raising tensions’. Casey says she ‘heard from police forces that local authorities would discourage them from publicising the successful conviction of perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation due to fears of raising tensions’. The report describes deliberate and willful blindness, with many organisations ‘instead of examining whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity… avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems’. In plain terms, public bodies across the country chose to prioritise multiculturalism over the rape of children.

Reinforced by the rest of the system, including the likes of Ms Maitlis. But perhaps she’ll ignore it, just as the Reverend David Walker, Bishop of Manchester is doing:

This is not a pattern of offending confined to any particular ethnic cultural or religious group. I hope that the forthcoming inquiry will help us find ways to keep young girls safe from the groups of predatory older men whatever their origin but it is a natural human tendency to want to think that such horrendous crimes are only carried out by people who are not like us.

I hope his congregation leaves, although they’re likely just as bigger saps, since he’d said much the same back in 2014, when Professor Alexis Jay’s landmark report into Rotherham found that the majority of the known perps there “were of Pakistani heritage.” Walker quoted Matthew 7:3-5 (motes and beams) to urge listeners not to focus on “more distant others”.

Maitlis and Walker might like to have a flick through the section of the Casey report titled “Denial”:

“Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani ethnic backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young White girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so the issue can be examined effectively.

Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue. This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities.”

The real kicker here is that the system is not just protecting history:

Even more explosive is what Casey says about foreign nationals. It is clear that the immigration and asylum systems, and our non-existent borders, are directly causing the organised rape of children. Casey saw ‘evidence of around a dozen live, complex’ police investigations into rape gangs. She notes that ‘a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum’. Just last week, 1,505 people arrived on small boats.

Which made the next day’s announcement from No. 10 even worse than usual, as Starmer admitted for the first time that the small boat situation in the Channel is “deteriorating.

Will this result in any real justice for the victims and realm changes to laws – and more importantly attitudes and processes in local police and other authorities that enabled this shit? It’s not as if this is new information.

But there is some hope, in that Starmer and company (who I suspect had some Blue Ribbon bullshit inquiry lined up) have not only accepted all the conclusions, they’ve also accepted all the recommendations, which include some biggies that will be hard for Labour (and the Tories) to swallow. There’s a mix of big and little ones:

  • A national criminal investigation, reviewing accusations of rape which didn’t proceed. That’s already started, with none other than The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, saying in Parliament that over 800 cases have been identified as being worthy of a full review, and that she expects this number to exceed a thousand soon.
  • A time-limited national inquiry – not just ones focused on Rotherham or Oldham or being organised by local authorities who have every reason to lie and coverup.
  • Collection of new “ethnicity data and research so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse.“ That will really sicken the Left.
  • New laws to “protect children and support victims so they stop being blamed for the appalling crimes committed against them.”, including changes to child prostitution laws.
  • “Change the law to ensure that adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 face the most serious charge of rape.“. I’m amazed that this isn’t already illegal!

This Unherd article is a must read, The public sector needs to be purged:

[T]he extent of institutional complicity, already clear, is reiterated in Casey’s report: they all knew.

The police, especially, knew. Victims were blamed, or even arrested: in one notorious incident, a father arrived outside the house in which his own daughter was being raped, called the police, and was then himself arrested. In other incidents, girls would press charges only to be immediately contacted by their rapists with threats: events strongly suggestive of police corruption. One officer in Rotherham told a desperate father that the town “would erupt” if the crimes were exposed; another, according to the 2014 Jay report, admitted these atrocities have been ongoing for 30 years but “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”.

Care homes also knew. One Bradford girl reported all the way back in 2014 that the home where she ought to have found safety and respite didn’t just look the other way — when the men who raped and sold her arrived outside the home, the staff would tell her to “go out and see them”. Councils knew, too: Birmingham was suppressing reports into looked-after children being raped and trafficked 30 years ago. In Oldham, the notorious leader of one rape gang was appointed “Welfare Officer” after a girl had already come forward with allegations against him. How many teachers knew? If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, the Department of Education knew.

The truth is that these gangs are a Frankenstein’s monster hatched in the public sector, and shielded by its operant dogmas.
…
Will it be enough? Perhaps 10 years ago it might have been. But though Cooper did her best to sound angry as she noted that we have “lost more than a decade” in addressing the crimes, in fact, we lost far more than that. The omerta was, and still is, stifling. …And all that time, our institutions went on grimly pretending everything was basically fine. Why?

I agree with the Unherd author in that last piece: in many respects this is all too late, not just for the victims, but for the institutions of Britain to recover their standing in the eyes of British voters:

Some 68 per cent of Brits say the country is “in decline” while 65 per cent say it is “already broken”. And 76 per cent are worried about the potential for political violence, according to the survey by pollsters Merlin Strategy for the political movement Looking for Growth (LFG).

Dr Lawrence Newport, co-founder of LFG, said: “Voters are not just feeling crushed economically, they are now fearful that political violence could ensue if the Government does not reverse the country’s decline.

“When a system stops delivering and people stop believing, things break. That’s where we are now.”

The UnHerd article is not confident about fixing that:

Still more unthinkably, for all the mainstream parties, the extent of institutional corruption suggests that actually tackling these systemic failures would require more than some new procedures, or throwing a few mid-ranking officials under the bus. That it would, in fact, require razing every one of the institutions, ideologies, proscriptions, and ruling-class shibboleths, that treated the victimisation of tens of thousands of white working-class girls as acceptable collateral damage in the construction of “modern Britain”.

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I realise it’s Britain and not us, but here’s the link to the full, downloadable report (PDF, 197 pages), if you’re interesting in reading it.
National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse