Rape, enslavement, child prostitution go unpunished for years. The victims’ complaints are dismissed by social services. The accusations are not seriously investigated by the police. With a few honourable exceptions the politicians and the media won’t even discuss the issue.
No one disputes that the crimes themselves are the responsibility of the criminals, but who is to blame for the conspiracy of silence?
Why, the first man to break it, of course!
In the comments to my earlier post, Jaded Voluntaryist pointed out an article by Sean Thomas in the Telegraph “…which blamed Nick Griffin for the events in Oxford, since by talking about this issue no-one wants to talk about way back in 2004, he made it impossible for anyone else to talk about it seriously. Yes, I’m sure if he had kept schtum it would have all been sorted out years ago…”
Here is said article: Oxford gang rape: did people ignore this sort of scandal because racist Nick Griffin was the first to mention them?
Mr Thomas has wisely opted not to allow comments. They would be radioactive.
He wrote,
As long ago as 2001, Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was making claims about Asian grooming gangs. In 2004 he repeated these allegations in a speech clandestinely recorded by the BBC for a TV documentary, Secret Agent. He was arrested and charged with inciting racial hatred.
Which is exactly what he was doing, of course. He was making his allegations to stir up ethnic strife. Right-thinking people, aware of the BNP’s record as liars, presumed that these stories were just racist demagoguery. No doubt Griffin feels vindicated today: for telling the truth before anyone else. And yet it was thanks in part to his thuggish intervention that society felt able to ignore the scandal. And thus the abuse continued.
[UPDATE 17 MAY 09.45: As those viewing Samizdata on the morning of 17 May will have seen, I tried to edit a minor error in the post and somehow deleted the text from this point onwards. A kind person has emailed me the lost text, which now follows. I will gradually reinsert the links. Apologies for this interruption – NS]
Some background on “the events in Oxford” here.
…a jury at the Old Bailey convicted seven men responsible for running an underworld child sex abuse ring in the Cowley area of Oxford of 43 charges of rape, child prostitution, trafficking and procuring a backstreet abortion. Six victims gave harrowing evidence during the three-and-a-half month trial, but police believe the number of girls recruited by the gang and abused numbers more than 50.
The gang – who were of Asian and north African descent – targeted extremely vulnerable white girls as young as 11 on the streets of Cowley and sold them for £600 a time to be raped and violently abused over an eight-year period. Two other men were cleared by the jury.
A litany of failings by police and social services had allowed the men between 2004 and 2012 to groom young, vulnerable girls they met on the streets, outside schools and in cafes, entice them with the promise of alcohol and trinkets, and subject them over years to sexual atrocities and torture.
“Asian” generally means Pakistani background, although two of the perpetrators here were Eritrean. All the abusers were Muslim. None of their victims were. This was not coincidence. The men generally targeted girls from children’s homes and disrupted family backgrounds. The abusers saw their victims as promiscuous white trash, in an utterly different category from their own wives and daughters. This is the latest of a string of such cases, all following the same pattern, such that a report produced by the police-staffed Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre “found that more than a quarter (26 per cent) of suspects reported to Ceop were of Asian origin, and the majority of groups identified were Asian”. There have been other trials of similar “Asian” (specifically British Pakistani) grooming gangs in Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby, Telford and Keighley.
Keighley, as it happened, was where Nick Griffin made one of the speeches that got him prosecuted. In that speech, Griffin said,
“These 18, 19, and 25-year-old Asian Muslims who are seducing and raping white girls in this town right now are not particularly good Muslims, they drink and all the rest of it, but still part of what they are doing comes from what they are taught is acceptable.”
It will be a cold day in hell before I vote for the Holocaust denier Nick Griffin’s literally fascist party, but I rather think that if Griffin feels vindicated that is because he has been vindicated.
Thug he may be, but his “thuggish intervention” in this case consisted of stating the truth when almost nobody else would – and being prosecuted for it. The charges covered many things said by Griffin, but the opening speech by the prosecuting counsel specifically featured his claims of “paedophile drug rape” in Keighley. (The prosecution was unsuccessful. Two juries acquitted Griffin and another defendant in two separate trials.)
Society did not just “feel able to ignore the scandal”, society – in the form of police chiefs, social workers, and the media – actively, cravenly dodged saying anything about it. Why? Because they were all afraid of being branded racist. As one of the few exceptions to the media silence, the documentary-maker Anna Hall, wrote, “…a senior children’s services manager said: “The men are Asian, Anna, but you’ll never get anyone on the record to say that.”” Or as Tim Loughton, the former Children’s Minister admitted, “There are clear cultural sensitivities around these cases that too often meant the relevant agencies were reluctant to intervene properly”. Or as retired police Superintendent Mick Gradwell said, “There is a problem with some members of the Pakistani community targeting young women in this way […] In the past there have been major fears of being seen as racist, especially after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry at the Met police said the force was institutionally racist.” (H/T: Laban Tall at UK Commentators, who has followed this story for years.) Note how Gradwell described the former Home Secretary Jack Straw as “brave” for speaking out as late as 2011. He was, too, even though his fellow Labour MP Ann Cryer had been much braver in speaking out back in 2004 when she was MP for Keighley. Bravery was required to speak out because bad things were likely to happen to the careers of those who did, particularly if they did not have Cryer’s or Straw’s Parliamentary privilege.
And thus the abuse continued, Mr Thomas.
Incidentally, the police “requested” that Anna Hall’s documentary “Edge of the City” be postponed until the 2004 local elections were over, for fear it would send votes to the BNP. I thought the police were meant to be politically impartial.
There is a grain of truth in what Sean Thomas has written. When I first saw reports that the BNP claimed that Asian gangs were grooming white girls, my eyes skated over them because claims that “their” men are seducing, corrupting and raping “our” girls have been a staple of racist propaganda through the ages. Thus far, Mr Thomas was right. But to attempt to shift the blame for even a fraction of years of sustained, repeated evasion of their duties on the part of every organ of the establishment onto Nick Griffin is… inventive. Were the social services departments of multiple British towns really listening that hard to Nick Griffin? Did the chief constables of several different police authorities check that the chairman of the British National Party hadn’t spoilt the atmosphere before giving the go-ahead to investigate? Should we assume that the fact that in the last couple of years the Crown Prosecution Service has finally started to actively prosecute these gangs (following the initiative taken by Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England Nazir Afzal, himself of Pakistani heritage, please note) is because the CPS lawyers have finally got over their sulk at Griffin making them look bad?
A question for the mainstream media: aren’t you ashamed that the British National Party reported what you dared not?
A question for the politicians, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service: do you now regret the prosecution of Nick Griffin and Mark Collett on charges of using words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred, specifically including his claims about Keighley? Do you acknowledge that your action in attempting to curtail and punish his free speech, in part for saying this type of crime was happening at a time and a place when it was, will certainly have deterred others from speaking out?
The phrase is, I believe “crickets chirping”.
The C21 has produced many awful things already but one of the most insidious is the consolidation of the political class in the UK into a virtually seamless entity.
It is not the smoking ban which has rendered it impossible to insert a cigarette paper between the various groups, claques, guilds and placemen but rather a recognition of a commonality of interest the like of which has not been seen since the late days of the Ottoman Empire.
Mere accusations of grotesque inaction will not stir this necrotic slug into movement and the idea of reform or apology is, with the greatest respect, much misplaced.
Bloated with self-importance, puffed-up with misplaced pride, lubricated by public money and swimming in a sea of self-congratulation, the only way to deal with them is with contempt and constant striving to undermine and displace them all and their corrupt institutions.
Please note that in the Netherlands, girls are told in school to be wary of Moroccan boys. (Not just Moroccan, but especially Moroccan.)
The Dutch, unlike the English speaking people, are willing to face reality.
Sam Harris once mentioned the dangerous situation we are in, where the only people brave enough to speak the truth about Islamism are right wing groups. For that, he was called a racist by Glen Greenwold, among others.
Is it not conceivable that Mr Griffin will appeal against his conviction on the grounds that he was telling the truth? And win?
Why does UK allow uneducated (or unemployable) “Asian youth” to immigrate? Or, are these guys ‘growing up’ in the UK with these values and doing their thing?
While the identity of the speaker in and of itself should not reflect on the veracity of individual statements made by that person, one cannot deny that in day to day life ad homs work.
On some of the more conspiracy minded blogs I occasionally trawl they actually believe that MI5 infiltrators deliberately implant views the government considers a threat (for example opposition to the EU) into the BNP to discredit those views by association in the public’s eye. They also believe that the BNP has been essentially run by MI5 for a number of years, and that they keep it functioning as a useful catchment pond for all the people they want to keep an eye on.
I’ve seen no evidence at all to back up these claims, but you’ve got to admit the logic is sound. In the public consciousness the BNP is a compass that always points south.
This is a problem of punishing things like “inciting racial hatred”. If people group themselves together by characteristics, be in common interests, common politics, or common heritage, than those same people are going to share activities. Sometimes those activities will be monstrous. If saying bad things about ethnic groups is beyond the pale, only people beyond the pale will say anything. If saying things like that is only a little rude (like in the US), then you’ll get (some, not all) mainstream people taking the hit to talk about white racist anti-immigrant groups or black inner city gangs from time to time.
Isn’t multiculturalism great? A blind man could have seen this coming from a mile away. Ask the women of Sweden how they feel about muslim immigration.
A question about Sweden- what are their gun laws like? If they have tough gun laws, then being a woman in Sweden would be riskier than other countries!
Does anyone know?
Well Valerie, I know a Swedish woman married to a nominally muslim man who lives in Goteborg (I also used to live there), so I suppose I could ask her, but I don’t have an e-mail address for The Women of Sweden. I have noticed from an earlier comment you are rather keen on sweeping generalisations.
Saxon: My understanding is that this is mostly a second-generation problem. The actual adult immigrants tend to like European culture, but their kids can’t get jobs(because of idiotic socialist governance), get looked down on by the locals(whether out of racism, habit, or because others of their ethnic group who’ve gone down this slope before have ruined their reputation preemptively), and turn to radical stupidity as a method of psychological coping. People don’t like feeling like trash, and most will happily cling to damn near any justification for why they’re secretly superior.
The BNP makes me think of Pamyat, a Russian ‘Nationalist’ organisation that came to media prominence and then vanished in the Yeltsin era. If it didin’t exist, you might have got the feeling that the political class would have invented it as a ‘bogeyman’ or scary alternative to what is on offer.
In dealing with such issues as those raised, one should always use methodological individualism. Scumbags will be scumbags, decent people will be decent people. What makes a scumbag depends on that Scumbag’s own choices to act as a sentient being.
AndrewWS, Griffin was acquitted of all charges relating to the 2004 undercover filming, so he doesn’t need to appeal.
He has at least one earlier race-hate conviction, possibly more. I have little doubt that he does speak in terms intended to stir up racial or religious hatred, more or less constantly – for which I think he should be censured, not censored.
Why would one not want to see the BNP vindicated in this matter when they are right? Would you rather have them convicted for expressing objectively correct opinions?
Maximo Macaroni, did you actually read the entire article? Clearly she does not think expressing an objectively correct opinion should be grounds for prosecution. The reasons Natalie does not want to see an odious bunch of collectivist right-socialists vindicated is that she is not a fascist, so why would she want to see a bunch of fascists gain any political advantage?
Alsadius, thank you.
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) was writing about this a decade and more ago. So it wasn’t just that people shied away from it because it was the non-PLU Nick Griffin who was talking about it. So that claim is a load of bunk.
I will wager good cash money that the street coppers in Bolton and Keighley and wherever-else knew good and G-d-damned well about a large part of what was going on – you can’t run organized rings like this without it getting onto the street ‘net – but that their concerns were diluted as they went up the chain of command. Read Copperfield or Gadget to see exactly how this works. I’ve only ever heard of one organized vice activity that came as a complete and total surpise to the street coppers on the beat.
By the same token, a lot of UK coppers don’t have a very – charitable -attitude to large parts of the underclass, so we also have to allow for the possibility that the street coppers knew all about it, but just didn’t care that much. The attitude being ‘they’re all toms anyway, so why would we bother too much about the precise ethnicity of their clients?’. I’m not saying this was the case, merely that the possibility should be considered.
Episodes like the Climbie case have already proven that the social ‘services’ (‘service’ having more than one meaning, and one especially quite apt in this case) are far-more concerned about promoting the ‘right’ multi-cultural attitudes than they are about the welfare of poor, at-risk children.
llater,
llamas
Perry, there are none so blind as those who will not see.
http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/8231
I can’t really see what SeanT said that is necessarily wrong or controversial. He did not blame Griffin for the inaction of the Police/CPS/media he merely pointed out that said agencies did not want to be seen to be associated with the inflammatory accusations of the BNP. I strongly suspect a policeman seen doing the BNP’s donkey work would be committing career suicide.
So… Did Griffin’s involvement cause the authorities not to investigate properly? quite possibly. Is Griffin to blame for this willful incompetence? No, of course not.
It is however hilarious to see SeanT being accused of being as a respectable liberal progressive journalist.
Few things are more unforgivable than speaking the truth. One of them is being proven right.
There seems to be subtle lines of demarcation between racial hate and disliking a group of differently-skinned people, as well as stating the ‘bleeding obvious’ and telling the truth though it is the positioning of first line of demarcation that most worries our lords and masters. The awful events in Oxford and other places tends to push a number of people towards dislike of a group or culture, though the biggest ‘wedge’ between groups is caused by attitude; often one group doesn’t really like the attitude of other people and consequently base a level of dislike on that rather than pigmentation.
But attitude is relative, I suppose and what one group sees as a manifestation of their ‘manliness’ and cultural habits strikes others as offensive. Attitude is however not something many of the great and good really encounter. I imagine, for example, the waiter at their favourite restaurant is sufficiently bowing-and-scraping to warrant a tip irrespective of skin colour. Likewise someone you employ as a gesture of positive discrimination doesn’t appear to have any different outlook or attitude to those happily insulated by power and money.
There is something to be said for politicians, civil servants of high rank and even media hacks accustomed to air-conditioned offices in pleasant areas getting out and finding out how that attitude works on the street and why some people feel a degree of mistrust or discomfort. But I’m not holding my breath.
The problem had existed for years when Griffin spoke out. If the British “establishment” had been responsible, the problem would have been addressed and there would have been nothing for him to rant on.
But the “establishment” (especially the intellectual establishment) is in a long-running moral panic over “racism”.
Eric S. Raymond recently blogged an essay on the current hysteria over sexual assault/harassment at colleges. The real problem is something entirely different, he thinks.
There is a longer moral panic going on over “racism”.
Item: the YWCA (“Young Women’s Christian Association”, originally a parallel to the YMCA, and still around as a distant competitor) has as its motto “Empowering Women, Eliminating Racism”. Why racism, and not ignorance, crime, poverty, or illness?
Item: Northwestern University’s “8th Annual 5K
Race for Diversity” tomorrow.
I’m sure British readers could find many examples there.
Why all this fuss? South Africa and Rhodesia fell long ago. The U.S. has re-elected a black President. The previous chairman of the British Conservative Party was a Pakistani Moslem woman, and Guido Fawkes reports that a black man (Adam Afriyie) has seriously plotted to become party leader.
Following ESR’s analysis – there’s something else going on. My opinion is that liberals are terrified of acknowledging the social and cultural failures of some non-“white” communities. Or it may be that they recognize the imminent fiscal collapse of the welfare state, and are desperate for a distraction.
The first possibility though goes back further, before the disaster became inevitable, and Griffin’s quasi-lynching was 9 years ago. Another data point: the 2003 “racism” attack on Australian prosecutor Margaret Cunneen for winning convictions against a Lebanese rape gang. And of course the fanatical persistence of American elite universities in racially discriminatory admissions with ever more convoluted excuses.
There are two great dangers:
1) The “establishment” will deny the problems and prevent any action to fix them even as they inflict fatal damage on civilization.
2) The “establishment” will deny the problems and prevent any action to fix them until catastrophe is in progress, and the people then turn to the fascists.
I don’t know which is more likely.
This is not exactly a new problem. During the heyday of Islam there was a huge market for Christian women. Muslim women had to be treated with respect and marriage to Christians was frowned on, but Christian slave concubines were quite okay. As late as 1859 Victorian explorer Samuel Baker rescued his future wife (a Christian) from a Balkan slave market.
Had these gangs been prostituting Muslim girls there would have been an outcry and something would have been done, but everyone seemed quite okay with it if they weren’t.
The last thing the current crowd in power wants is the truth — Aussie journalist Andrew Bolt was recently muzzled (yes, for inciting racial hatred) for daring to observe that a lot of the high-profile Aboriginals looked pretty white. Can’t have that.
“Maximo Macaroni, did you actually read the entire article? Clearly she does not think expressing an objectively correct opinion should be grounds for prosecution. The reasons Natalie does not want to see an odious bunch of collectivist right-socialists vindicated is that she is not a fascist, so why would she want to see a bunch of fascists gain any political advantage?”
Dear Perry H,
Yes, I had read everything. It did not seem to me that Natalie S. gave any good reason why anyone should not want to see the BNP vindicated in this matter. The only alternatives to wanting to see them vindicated are not caring or wanting them to be persecuted for telling the truth. As to whether one should hesitate to support the BNP’s true statements because they have made some other false or otherwise odious statements, that is moral cowardice. Actually, I think the authoress knows this.
Valerie, the numbers at the link to which you posted simply don’t matter: all the Swedish political parties minus one are on-board with the present immigration policies in Sweden. These parties have been and are voted in, in no small part, by Swedish women.
It is fairly obvious that “the women of Sweden” as a voting bloc don’t care.
A reminder of why I do no longer buy the Daily Telegraph – many thanks Natalie.
Attack the National Socialists of the BNP for they are guilty of – not for what they are innocent of, still less for what others are guilty of.
And the effort to win “liberal” readers for the Telegraph is as foolish as Mr Cameron trying to win “liberal” votes.
Conservative Daily Telegraph readers (or exreaders) do not like the BNP – we despise the BNP. but we do not like LIES either. And blaming the leader of the BNP for the lack of action against the very crimes he warned about……
This is a vile thing for Mr Sean Thomas to do.
It is not political sillyness (such as the idiot letters in the “Spectator” which blame recent byelection losses on Mrs T., not leader of the Conservative party since 1990, and articles that praise the latest print-and-spend stuidity in Japan) – this is not really political at all.
It is just Mr Thomas being a useless human being – and working for an organisation that clearly encourages such conduct (by paying someone to write this stuff).
The economic (and political) ignorance of some of the writing in the Spectator and Daily Telegraph is one thing – but this sort of utter vileness (moral cowardice) goes well beyond that.
And the lefties sniffed that the plot from Taken was sooo far removed from reality.
In a word, bullshit. Firstly you do not know her, so not presume to know what she knows.
Secondly, the BNP have the rare distinction of being an even worse kind of collectivists than the ghastly current dominant political class, so far from being ‘moral cowardice’ to not wish to see them accrue any benefit whatsoever from anything, it is simply rational behaviour on the part of anyone who thinks liberty actually matters.
I fail to see why Maximo should be criticised for his presumption, one cannot know another’s thoughts, however well you may know them, and he did not say that he knew the author’s thoughts, just that he presumed. To disparage his comments because he does not know the author is in effect, ad hominem. His point is that given what he knows of the author’s position, he surmises that the author would conclude, in a discussion, if pressed, in line with his point. That seems to me to be reasonable comment, it may not be borne out, but that is another matter.
As for regarding agreeing with the BNP’s point as giving them benefit, I fail to see why one should not accept that they might have been right to point something out. One does not endorse the use of a stopped clock as a timepiece by pointing out that it is right twice a day, and only a peculiar ideologue would say ‘if the BNP clock says it is noon, it must not be noon, and I refuse to make my own enquiries lest reality and the BNP’s information concur and they be proved right, even if I miss my train’. (Or an opportunity to catch a criminal gang). There is no benefit to the BNP, indeed, it hands them a propaganda gift. ‘they would rather child abuse be perpetrated than act to stop it lest we be proved right’ is what they can say now.
And there are plenty of collectivists just as bad as the BNP in the Labour and Green movements, and some worse.
Mr Ed – but few (if any) collectivists as bad as the BNP under the Blue Flag.
“Ken” Clarke and co are vile – but not as bad as the BNP.
I suggest all of you read this article, especially the comments of the victim.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/14/oxford-sex-abuse-victim-princess
PM I made no mention of Mr Clarke, but plenty of Communists have been in the Labour Party, and the Greens urge to control te populatin might get the better of their patience.
Valerie, stop posting links without making any supporting argument as to *why* it is worth reading.
Quite, which is why I regard him as presumptuous.
So? His remark was clearly ad hominem so should I care?
‘Presumption’ and ‘presumptiousness’ are different. No reason why you should care, but I do not see his comment as ad hominem, so much as a challenge to the author to state her position.
Perry, One should never be too lazy to read.
Valerie, that’s just silly. I very much doubt that anyone here is “too lazy to read”. However, there is so very much to read, and so much of it is of questionable value, that I almost never bother to go to a proffered link without some reason being adduced as to why I should.
Challenge? More like “rising to the bait”. No, it is not ‘moral cowardice’ to not want to see the political agenda of some toxic fascists advanced, which was rather the whole thrust of the article: if the people who needed to act had acted rather than quivering in fear of being called ‘racists’, the BNP would not be in the position of being amongst the few to draw attention to this. Natalie’s position is quite clear from this and other articles.
Mr Ed – yes there are lots of deeply totalitarian people in both the Labour and Green parties.
That does not alter the fact that the BNP are also utterly vile.
Valerie….
I am a lazy man – if I was not my garden would bein a lot better condition and there would be less dust in the house (like many men who live alone I have “motivation issues”).
However, even if I was not a lazy man you would have to present a very good argument to get me to click on a Guardian link.