We can deport them -so why don't we? Britain needs to take much tougher action on the grooming gangs MAY 22
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Members of a grooming gang convicted of abusing girls in Huddersfield Upgrade to paid
I’ve consistently argued it’s time for Britain and other Western nations to start drawing some lines in the sand. As I say in a viral clip on X this week, the era of Western nations tolerating people who do not tolerate us —who do not tolerate our rule of law, our traditions, our values, our ways of life— needs to end. From radical Islamists who want to overthrow our entire civilisation, to illegal migrants who commit hideous crimes, we must now make it clear who is welcome and who is not.
And I can think of no better place to start than Britain’s grooming scandal.
Regular readers will remember my debate at the University of Oxford, last year, where I shocked the room by daring to even mention the scandal of thousands of underage and mainly white, working-class girls being abused and raped by Pakistani men.
For our international readers, what did the scandal involve, exactly?
Well, this is not easy reading but here are the details.
It involved gangs of Pakistani men, usually in the taxi and fast-food trade, plying children and young women with vodka and drugs before raping them.
Some the children were kept in cages. Often, the children and young women were raped by multiple men on the same night. Some were passed around friends and family to be raped or trafficked to other areas —only to be raped again.
When I mentioned the scandal in Oxford, people went berserk. They told me flat-out I was wrong. And no doubt they said many other things about me after I left (though, as I said, while Oxford is home to our elite class it too had a major grooming gang).
But the pile of evidence on the sheer scale of this scandal is not only overwhelming but has only grown bigger in the months since I joined that debate in Oxford.
Inquiry after inquiry in towns such as Rotherham, Telford and Rochdale have found what are often called ‘Asian men’, usually of Pakistani background, perpetrated organised abuse against young, invariably white, vulnerable girls.
And we’re not talking about little gangs that committed a handful of crimes. This is about the systematic, organised, industrial-scale rape of children and girls.
In Rotherham, for example, the National Crime Agency has so far identified 1,510 victims so far while a new government Task Force only this week revealed it has already found some 4,000 victims across the country and more than 500 perpetrators.
The scandal is particularly controversial because it strikes at the very heart of the so-called culture war. So much of what we call ‘wokeness’ is predicated on the idea that Western societies are pervaded with racism and prejudice against minority groups, with these minority groups considered virtuous, sacred, and beyond reproach.
But the grooming gangs scandal strikes at the heart of this because it shows, clearly, that racism by whites against non-whites is not the only form of racism. That, in fact, racism by non-whites against whites not only exists but might be even worse than the reverse. That immigrant communities can be perpetrators as well as victims.
All this is anathema to the woke left, with their hierarchies of victimhood, which put morally superior minorities at the top and morally inferior whites at the bottom.
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There can be no doubt race played a role.
One judge said one reason why they abused white girls "was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion". In court Shabir Ahmed, leader of the grooming gang, claimed the girls were prostitutes and called the judge a “racist bastard”. He also abused an Asian girl.
One of the places where this happened was the town of Rochdale in northern England where, according to a recent report, the Greater Manchester Police and the council knew that the grooming gangs were operating from as early as 2007.
But partly because of their fears of being considered ‘racist’, alongside incompetence, the police only began investigating in 2010, and only in 2012 did they finally convict eight men of Pakistani background and one Afghan asylum seeker.
And these weren’t men from the fringes of their community.
Most of them were married. One, Abdul Rauf, taught at the local mosque. He had asked a 15 year old girl if she had any younger friends.
Another, Abdul Qayyum, had character references from two Rochdale councillors who said he’d “fully adopted the British way of life”. The Afghan asylum seeker, Hamid Safi, was an illegal immigrant who had arrived in the country on a lorry.
Some, who exposed girls to a campaign of violence and rape that lasted for six years, were released from prison after serving only two years in prison.
And these men were just the tip of the iceberg.
Police were told about many other abusers but, citing a lack of resources, refused to record the crimes or investigate. Victims who bravely spoke up found their abusers were free to walk the same streets as them.
One girl, abused when she was only 13, walked into an ASDA supermarket to find her abuser, who she thought had been sent to prison, staring back at her.
Only sustained media and political pressure brought further investigations (which is one reason why I keep talking and writing about it).
One subsequent inquiry found another 260 victims. Another found 480 victims. One report identified around 96 abusers but only 30 of them have ever been convicted.
Most of the victims have never had their day in court and their abusers haven’t faced any punishment for what they did. Unlike British Muslim soldiers, no memorial is currently planned for the thousands of victims of Britain’s grooming scandal.
So, what can we do about it?
Well, apart from talking about it because so few in the chattering class are willing to talk about it, we can and should start drawing some lines in the sand.
Four of the convicted groomers, all of whom are dual British-Pakistani nationals, had their citizenship revoked in 2017. Our lax human rights system allowed them appeal after appeal until they finally ran out. But none of them have been deported.
Supposedly, that’s because Pakistan refuses to take them back.
But as my colleague Fred de Fossard at the Legatum Institute has written, we can do something about it by using the visa penalty powers from the recent Nationality and Borders Act. In fact, only yesterday a Tory minister, Laura Farris, said it “sounded sensible” to use these new powers.
Effectively, if a foreign government refuses to accept the return of their citizens who we want to deport, we could impose penalties on that government to make them—like refusing to issue new visas to people from that country who want to come here.
And among those we want to deport are leading members of these vile grooming gangs.
Pakistani nationals received 55,000 visas in the year ending June 2023, making them the third largest national group after Indians and Chinese. Those nationals also send billions back to Pakistan in remittances.
What’s more, Britain is one of the largest donors to Pakistan. This year we’ll spend over £40 million on them and next year it’s planned to increase to £133 million.
Which means that without needing to pass a single new law the government could go ahead and make it clear that Pakistan should accept back the abusers. If they don’t then we could cease issuing any visas or interrupt the flow of remittances.
We need to end this absurd situation whereby we send millions and millions of pounds to a country which won’t take back its criminals and, along the way, send a loud and powerful signal to other would-be abusers in these close-knit communities.
And what is that message?
If you come to Britain, if you abuse our laws, if you abuse our culture, if you abuse our ways of life, if you abuse our children there will be consequences.
Will it be enough, on its own, to stop the abuse? To stop the grooming? Probably not. It’s probably still going on today, in northern towns where, to be blunt, people are still afraid to talk about it.
But I agree with Laura Farris MP that adopting a much tougher approach is not only sensible but, now, essential.
A good first step to dealing with the grooming gangs will be deporting those who we are able to deport. A good first step would be drawing a big, clear line in the sand.