LONDON — The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.
British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.
Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.
The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.
Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.
They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.
All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.
What we do know is that the epicenter was the postindustrial mill towns of England’s north and Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh settled in the 1960s. White locals say the grooming and rapes began soon after. In Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city where the scandal first broke, local police and councilors were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse by 2001. The first convictions did not occur until 2010, when five men of Pakistani background were jailed for multiple offenses against girls as young as 12 years of age.
These men targeted the most vulnerable girls—the poor and the fatherless, children in care homes—with candy, food, taxi rides, and drugs. They raped the girls, passed them around family and friendship networks, pimped them into similar networks in other cities, then discarded them as they reached the age of consent.
This pattern was repeated in as many as 50 cities across the country, including in leafy Oxford and liberal Bristol. A 2014 inquiry estimated that 1,400 girls had been serially raped in Rotherham alone.
The details are established beyond doubt in the small number of prosecutions that eventually made it to court. The suffering described in the court papers is sickening to read: The girls were drugged, beaten, sodomized, gang-raped, trafficked, and tortured.
One night in Oldham in 2006, for example, a 12-year-old girl named “Sophie” entered a police station and reported that she had just been molested in a graveyard by a man named “Ali.” A desk officer told her to come back with an adult when she was sober. Two men accosted her in the police station. Joined by a third, they raped her in their car. When they dumped her on the street, she asked a man named Sarwar Ali for directions. He took her to his home, raped her, and gave her money for bus fare home. A man named Shakil Chowdhury pulled up in his car and offered to take her home. He abducted her and took her to a house where he and four other men repeatedly raped her.
Several girls were murdered. In Manchester in 2003, Victoria Agoglia was repeatedly drugged and raped before being given a fatal dose of heroin at the age of 15. In Blackpool that same year, 14-year-old Charlene Downes disappeared—her body was never found.
In Telford, Azhar Ali Mehmood groomed Lucy Lowe from the age of 12 and impregnated her at 14. He burned her alive in her own home with her mother, her disabled sister, and her unborn second child, also fathered by Mehmood. Mehmood was jailed for life in 2001 for murder—not sex crimes.
In the age of “Say Her Name,” no one important thought it worth saying the names of these girls. The girls, their rapists told them, were “white slags,” worthless and expendable. Apart from a few whistleblowers, most of them women, and courageous journalists such as Julie Bindel, Andrew Norfolk, Douglas Murray, and Charlie Peters, the media showed no interest.
Why? Because this was the wrong kind of racially motivated crime, committed by the wrong kind of criminal.
The majority of the victims were white, plus some Sikhs. The majority of their abusers were of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim extraction. The majority of their crimes were committed in cities with a Labour Party–controlled council and a Labour Party MP who needed Muslim votes. This led to institutional racism of the inverted kind, and that enabled the perpetrators to do as they liked.
The system itself became corrupted. Welfare workers admit that they failed to report crimes because the police told them they would be accused as racist. The leader of one rape gang in Oldham, Shabir Ahmed, worked for the local council as a “welfare rights officer” and ran his gang from the council welfare office. Another member was on the Oldham Youth Council.
In multiple cases, local Labour politicians of Pakistani background interfered with police inquiries. In Telford in 2016, 10 members of the Labour council wrote to the Home Secretary, the Conservatives’ Amber Rudd, claiming that allegations of abuse were “sensationalized” and that there was no need for action. Two years later, an investigation by the Sunday Mirror newspaper counted some 1,000 victims. The superintendent of the West Mercia regional police “significantly disputed” the figures and said the Mirror had “sensationalized” the issue.
The police were in no hurry to inquire. Senior police repeatedly denied there was a problem, then denied its obvious racial and religious elements. Government and police agree that, regardless of which party is in power, the peace in multicultural, mass-migration Britain depends on “community relations.” The law-abiding public’s alarm about the consequences of mass immigration is suppressed, stigmatized by the political class and the press as the racism of a chimerical “far right.”
For the Labour Party specifically, “community relations” means cultivating urban Muslim voters. Nazir Afzal, who was Chief Crown Prosecutor for northwestern England between 2011 and 2015, claims that in 2008 the Home Office advised police not to prosecute grooming gang cases, because the girls had “made an informed choice about their sexual behavior.”
In late December 2024, Jess Phillips, the Home Office’s Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, refused requests from the Oldham city council for a government-led inquiry into the institutional failure and corruption that had made the Oldham cases possible. The only thing Phillips is safeguarding is her seat.
The Conservatives were not much better. In 2019, shortly before he became Conservative leader and prime minister, Boris Johnson complained that money spent on investigating historic child abuse crimes was money “spaffed up a wall.” (Spaffing is English slang for ejaculation.) In 2020, Johnson’s Home Office suppressed the Conservatives’ own research on grooming gangs. Releasing it, they said, was not in “the national interest.”
Elon Musk has changed the Conservatives’ political interest, so their new leader, Kemi Badenoch, is now calling for an inquiry. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is caught between his party, his voters, and—should he find them—his principles. As director of the Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, between 2008 and 2013, Starmer secured some successful convictions against the rape gangs. But Starmer and his lawyers also failed to bring other major cases to court.
In 2009, the Starmer-led CPS dropped its prosecution of a grooming and rape gang in Rochdale, despite having DNA evidence and hours of testimony on video. When Nazir Afzal started working as a Crown prosecutor in 2011, one of his first actions was to reopen the case and reverse the CPS’s decision. In 2012, Afzal secured the convictions of nine men, eight of them of Pakistani background and one of Afghan background.
Afterward, Afzal said that “white professionals’ oversensitivity to political correctness and fear of appearing racist may well have contributed to justice being stalled.”
Starmer admitted that “particularly in cases involving groups, there’s clearly an issue of ethnicity that has to be understood and addressed.” But he insisted that the failure to prosecute had been caused by “a lack of understanding” about the victims: a “credibility issue.”
It is now Starmer who has a credibility issue. Maggie Oliver, the Manchester-based detective who helped to expose the abuse in Rochdale, says that Starmer is “as guilty as anyone I know” for the institutional failure to protect some of Britain’s most vulnerable children.
Starmer has yet to address the Labour Party’s historic role in this mess, or his own record of triangulating complicity. He has yet to say whether he agrees with his minister Jess Phillips that there should be no national inquiry. But now that Musk has said the unsayable about the unspeakable, there is no going back.
Starmer’s lawyerly equivocations look like what they are: covering the party’s backside at the expense of justice for the victims. Announcing another inquiry will not be enough to pacify the British public. Nor will it reduce the popularity of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party. Their main appeal is that they say what no one else dares to: The entire British system has become morally bankrupt. Ironically enough, Musk’s call for Farage to step down—Farage, Musk says, “doesn’t have what it takes”—is likely to take the pressure off Starmer.
“No justice, no peace” is a common slogan among the activist class that chose not to act against the rape gangs. There will be no peace in Britain until the full truth is known, the law is restored, the bureaucracies are held to account, and rule by “community relations” is reversed. The Labour government will do its utmost to do its least.
Pressure from Musk has already done what the outrage of the beaten-down British people cannot do. Musk has shamed the British government into explaining itself. Next, it must be forced to act.
For more on the threat of radical Islam, read our editorial, “‘Globalize the Intifada’ Comes to New Orleans.”
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist, and the author of five books. Follow him on X @DrDominicGreen.