American Thought Leaders - Grooming Gangs in Britain Were Deliberately Ignored for 2 Decades: MP Suella Braverman

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Suella Braverman is the former home secretary of the United Kingdom, and a conservative member of the British parliament. While she was in Washington for President Donald Trump’s inauguration, we sat down to talk about what’s been happening in the U.K., and what Trump’s election means to her and her constituents.“We need to learn a lot from the MAGA movement, from the success of the Republicans under Donald Trump, and really try and apply some of those lessons to U.K. politics right now, because we are mired in the depression, the recession, and the doom and gloom over socialism,” said Braverman.We discussed the grooming gangs scandal currently making headlines in Britain, in which predominantly migrant gangs of men have been sexually assaulting and abusing young girls for roughly two decades.“The Pakistani men who were involved in this abhorrent behavior were targeting white girls for a specific reason—that they have an outdated, unacceptable view of women. And the authorities failed to act because they were scared of the charge of racism,” said Braverman. “It’s one of the biggest national scandals in our history.”We also discussed issues related to anti-Semitism and free speech.“We’ve got this problem in the U.K. of hate marches, where extremism, antisemitism, and Islamism can be paraded on our streets, and the police won’t take any action. And it’s caused a real increase in antisemitism, and it’s made parts of our streets and our public realm no-go zones for Jewish people,” she said.“We have a crisis of free speech in the United Kingdom, and I use that word deliberately. We have a situation where the police have the powers to record your information and log your details, if you’ve said something that might be offensive to someone. It doesn’t matter about the objective nature of what you’ve said. If someone, somewhere, happens to be offended by what you have said, and it relates to a personal characteristic, race, gender, religion, or sex, then that’s it. The case is closed. You will be considered guilty of what we call a ‘noncrime hate incident.'”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Pakistani men who were involved in this abhorrent behavior were targeting white girls for a specific reason. They have an outdated, unacceptable view of women. And the authorities failed to act because they were scared of the charge of racism. It's one of the biggest national scandals in our history. Suella Braverman is the former Home Secretary of the United Kingdom and a Conservative member of the UK Parliament. We've got this problem in the UK of hate marches where Islamism can be paraded on our streets and it's caused a real increase in anti-Semitism

and it's made parts of our streets and our public realm no-go zones for Jewish people. While she was in DC for Trump's inauguration, we sat down to talk about what's been happening in the U.K. and what the election of Donald Trump means to her and her constituents. We have a crisis of free speech in the United Kingdom. The police have the powers to record your information and log your details. If someone somewhere happens to be offended, the case is closed. You will be considered guilty of what we call a non-crime hate incident. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Janja Kellek.

Right Honourable Suella Braverman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. So I noticed on X that you have been following the movement of the bust of Sir Winston Churchill from in and out of the Oval Office over the years and that he's back. Why is that significant to you? Oh, it's so significant because Winston Churchill is not just a British hero, but a hero for Western civilization. And it's thanks to Winston Churchill's courage, focus, determination and bravery, above all, that fascism and the Nazis were beaten, with thanks to the Americans,

of course, and the Allied forces in World War II. But he symbolises, he personifies in many ways, the beginning of the special relationship. Indeed, it was he who coined the phrase, the special relationship between the US and the UK. And I think it's symbolic and symbols are very, very powerful today. And the symbolism of having his bust back into the White House, I think, speaks volumes about the way in which this administration views the UK-US relationship. Speaking of symbolism, I can't help but notice that you have a heart American flag on your lapel yes exactly listen I'm a I'm a big America fan and I love the story of America the spirit of America and you know I I've had some great experiences in America I I was so inspired by America that I sat for the New York Bar exams 20 years

ago for the fun of it. And I passed the exams. They were very, very hard exams, possibly the hardest law exams I've ever sat in my life. And I was able to do a stint working in a New York law firm for a short time, about 10 years ago. And so I listen. I think there's the potential of America, and the impact that America has on the rest of the world is enormous. And so I'm on the side of being a friend of America's.

So what are the implications, aside from some sort of symbolism around the strengthening of the UK-American relationship? What is the significance of this election, this inauguration of Donald Trump? I think it's enormous. Donald Trump has not just shifted the Overton window, he's shattered it. And that's very influential upon us in the United Kingdom when it comes to right-wing politics and what we can do to save our country

and make Britain great again. We need to learn a lot from the MAGA movement, from the success of the Republicans under Donald Trump, and really try and apply some of those lessons to UK politics right now, because we are mired in the depression, the recession, the doom and gloom of socialism, I'm afraid. Newly elected, not a year old. And we've got about four years, at least, of a socialist, woke, high immigration, high taxation, low growth, net zero militant government. And, you know, it's the British people who will suffer. So there is, you know, a lot that we can learn from the success here in the United States.

Well, what would you say the big lessons are then? I think Donald Trump has prosecuted the case for raw, unfiltered, common sense conservatism successfully. It's based on a program of strong and secure borders. An unapologetic, robust approach to your southern border is exactly what we need on our southern border. We have a crisis when it comes to illegal migration in the United Kingdom, where we have small boats and thousands of people, not millions, the scale is very different to the US, but thousands of people, tens of thousands, now it's topped 100,000 in total over the last four or five years, of people coming into the country illegally. We don't know who's coming into the country.

Some of these people are causing harm to the British people. And that is a basic failing of the government. Secondly, we need a government that is focused on economic growth, tax cuts, deregulation, cutting public spending, reducing government waste. The Department of Government Efficiency is a model that we can emulate in the United Kingdom because we have soaring debt, a deficit which is increasing. The Conservatives managed to cut that when we were in office. Inflation, I believe, will rise under this Labour government eventually. And we are going to have, as I said, we are teetering on the brink of a recession in the United Kingdom because of the extortionate level of taxation

that this government is imposing on the British people, on workers, on business, on entrepreneurs, on wealth creators. And Trump has put forward the case to scale back on the net zero extremism. And unfortunately, we've got a net zero extremist who is responsible for our energy policy in this Labour government. I call him Militant Miliband because he is wide-eyed and pretty crazed when it comes to pursuing the net zero carbon-free agenda. He's the kind of guy who doesn't care about the costs of renewable energy and energy transition. And so he's shutting our gas stations. He's not issuing licences for gas exploration or drilling in our North Sea where we have rich supplies.

He's come perilously close to running out of power, actually. The lights have almost gone off in the United Kingdom because he's not pursuing a sustainable energy policy. It's driven by idiotic ideology. So on the net zero agenda, Donald Trump is absolutely right with his drill, baby drill mantra. And then lastly, you know, Donald Trump represents the fight against DEI and woke nonsense. You know, when he talked about in his inaugural speech, a merit-based society, making it government policy that there are only two genders, male and female. You know, that was music to my ears. And it's something that we desperately need in the United Kingdom. We've got a situation where,

you know, there are conservative MPs in the past who have taken the knee. There are calls for reparations to be made to atone for the sins of the British Empire, a phrase I would strongly refute. We have ministers who have in the past said that a trans woman is a woman, you know, defying biology and defying truth. So we have a real battle when it comes to restoring fairness and meritocracy into our workplaces and our public institutions. And I think those are some of the lessons that we can learn as Conservatives, but also more broadly as a country from the US. We started talking a little bit about gender ideology. In some ways the UK is ahead in

banning purity blockers, for example. Yes. So we have been able to mitigate some of the excesses and begin to turn the tide. You are right. And that I think is thanks to the UK Conservative administration. So when we were in power, whilst the problem did get to a very serious level of young people, children undergoing irreversible gender reassignment surgery, child abuse as I would call it in many ways, sanctioned by the state, take part or biological males take part in female sports or use female only spaces like prisons or refuges or all those kind of things. Where we have had some of that problem what we did do was we commissioned a review and we got an independent medical expert to review the situation Dr Hilary Cass. She wrote a seminal report which concluded that there were problems with this approach. There should be much more caution

applied when it comes to the treatment. And if I may, which led to the shutting of the major gender clinic in the country. Yes, nominally. So the Tavistock Clinic, which has been responsible for the thousands of children who have undergone this damaging surgery, has been ordered to shut. And so, there is a reversal of the policy. The ban on puberty blockers was implemented by the Conservative government. It's been maintained by this Labour administration, which is good news. And so, you're right, there are measures which have been put in place to try and turn the tide. And I think that's thanks to conservative political resolve

and also thanks to high profile campaigners. I think JK Rowling has been pivotal in shifting the kind of the consensus. And that's been very, very effective. I want to get you to tell me a little bit about yourself. Of course, you were the Attorney General at some point. You played many actually quite significant roles. And then you took the New York bars. I did notice something about that as I was reading up. I thought, that's fascinating. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got to today. And oh, and by the way, in talking about empire, I can't tell that I can't help but notice that you're Indian.

Yeah. Well, how far back do you want me to go? Because I could actually go back to the 19th century in terms of where my background. We've done some research on my ancestry, but my mother is from Mauritius and my father is from Kenya and so they were born under the British Empire in the 1940s and they grew up really with admiration and gratitude for the British Empire they saw the good that Britain did for the world in the Victorian era in the 1800s in the 1700s and the 1800s and into the 20th century. You know, take India, the British built the railways and the ports and the infrastructure and the irrigation. And in Mauritius, the legal system and the parliamentary system. And in Kenya, again,

the railways and infrastructure and the civil service were all fruits of the British Empire. And they laid the foundations for subsequent prosperity for these countries when they gained independence. My parents came to the UK in the 1960s after independence was gained by their countries. And they met in the United Kingdom. And then they made their life in the UK. My dad actually came because he was kicked out of Kenya. When Kenya got independence there was a real expulsion of the Asians from Africa. The policy of Africanization was in place and it meant that people of Indian heritage had a very perilous situation.

And so my father was a young man and he faced very few prospects in Kenya and the British granted him citizenship. And he often tells me about the day in 1968 on a cold February morning when he stepped off the plane at Heathrow Airport in London and he had no one, no friends, no family, no money and it was only his British passport that was his symbol of hope and it was Britain that offered him security and opportunity. My mother came to the UK for different reasons. She was a girl, a teenager and she was recruited by the NHS, our national health service, after

the war. And she took up an offer to train as a nurse when she was 18. And so she came over for work reasons, and she worked as a nurse for 45 years in the UK with the NHS. And my mother in particular really got interested. This was in the UK with the NHS and my mother in particular really got interested, this was in the Thatcher years, she got interested in her community and indeed in her country and she joined the Conservative Party and she was an activist and a local politician so she became a councillor

which means that she sat and represented a small community on her local board and a local council and she served as a counselor for 16 years so she was always getting involved in campaigns and elections and politics and I grew up around that and I grew up around election campaigns you know every few years our front room would be transformed into a campaign headquarters with maps and leaflets and rosettes. And so it became a very strong part of my childhood. And then when I was an adult, I got involved in student politics at Cambridge University, and I chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association. I was studying law. I qualified as a lawyer, a barrister, and I worked for a decade as a barrister in London and around the country, specialising in public law, administrative law

and judicial review and immigration. A lot of that area of law takes you into the field of immigration. And I defended the Home Office in a lot of immigration and asylum cases as a lawyer. I then got elected to Parliament to represent an area in Hampshire, a beautiful area called Fairham on the south coast. And I've been the MP in Fairham for coming up to 10 years, it will be 10 years this May and in that time during my parliamentary career I've served as a minister in the Brexit department so we had the referendum in 2016 the British people voted to leave the European Union we set up a new department called the department for exiting the EU, DEXU, and I was a minister in that department, tasked with delivering this massive constitutional change. And so I served as a Brexit minister under Prime

Minister Theresa May. I was then Attorney General under Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And then I was Home Secretary under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. And did you leave the May government? I think you did, right? I did. I'm one of these politicians who has a few principles and they sometimes get in the way of, they get in the way, basically. So I was very much a Brexit enthusiast. I campaigned to leave the European Union in 2016, and I was very cheered on by the chutzpah of the British people when they decided to leave the European Union. I didn't think we were going to win the referendum, but we did.

I wanted us to take back control over our borders, because previously it was the European Union who controlled our migration policy. Take back control over our laws, because previously it was the European Union who controlled our migration policy, take back control of our laws, because previously it was the European Parliament that set the dictates on what laws we, the limits of what our laws could be. And I wanted us to take back control of our trade policy, you know, because again, previously it was the European Union that dictated with whom we could have trade deals. So on laws, borders and trade I thought there was a very strong case and ultimately sovereignty. The UK Parliament is the mother of all parliaments and I really felt that self-government was the right thing

for us to do. So that's why I voted for Brexit. Those were my objectives. Unfortunately, what happened under Theresa May is that the negotiations failed and she was unable to present a Brexit deal that honoured those objectives that I set out, control of our borders, control of our laws, coming out of the single market and the customs union and full extrication from the EU orbit. And so her deal was a failure. It was called BRINO, Brexit in Name Only, or Brexit Betrayal Deal. And it was very controversial. And so I had to resign from her government because I couldn't support the deal that she had negotiated.

I couldn't defend it because it didn't satisfy the criteria that Brexit represented. There were 28 MPs on the Conservative benches who voted against the deal when it was put to our parliament. It was put to our parliament on the first occasion. It didn't get through, so the Prime Minister tried again on another occasion. It still didn't get through, albeit with a reduced majority and a reduced rebellion. And so she tried again a third time. And we are called the Spartans because we held strong and we didn't give in despite the very immense pressure on us to reverse our position. And so her deal ultimately collapsed. And it meant that Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. He then ran on a mandate to get Brexit done properly. And he was able to renegotiate the deal with the EU. He had a stronger hand. And then he was able, at the end of 2019,

beginning of 2020, to actually take us out of the European Union. So one of the things that we've been hearing a lot about in the US, and I think in good part because of Elon Musk getting interested in the issue, is this, you know, what's dubbed the grooming gangs scandal. Explain to me what this whole scenario is. Yeah, I think you're right. This is the first time that it's exploded into the public consciousness, even though, tragically, the problem has been going on for over a decade. And so what the problem is of the grooming gangs, or more accurately, the rape gangs, is that in some of our towns and cities around the United Kingdom there have been organized gangs, gangs of men, who've targeted girls. These gangs have been

made up of predominantly Muslim Pakistani men and they have targeted white girls, poor white girls, and this has been an open secret in these towns. The authorities have been aware, the teachers have been aware. Sometimes the girls themselves have reported the suspects, the perpetrators, to the police. And what's happened is the authorities turned a blind eye. And they didn't't take sufficient or in some cases any action to arrest these perpetrators or to investigate the crimes they were scared of backlash from community leaders ultimately they didn't want to be called racist and they they were fearful and there was an institutional cowardice on the part of the police, on the part of social workers, on the part of teachers, on the part of elected officials who knew about this, should have known better, owed a duty of care to these girls and did nothing.

So there are two elements to this scandal. There's the actual wrongdoing itself, which is going on today. And then there was a failure of the authorities to take any action and over the years there have been reports commissioned into it which have concluded some of the things that I've just set out independently verified. There have been investigations, there have been some convictions and there has been recommendations to try and reform the whole of the system to try and fix this. And I think the problem is there's been a squeamishness in British society to really tackle it head on. When I was Home Secretary, I was very keen to tackle it.

I went to Rotherham, I went to Rochdale, I met with some of the women, now women, girls previously who had survived some of this horrendous abuse and they told me about their experiences just as I've told you. There have been whistleblowers, Maggie Oliver is a former police officer who worked for Greater Manchester Police and she writes, she's written a book about it actually called Survivors detailing what she came across. And so I set up a task force. I set up a dedicated unit involving the National Crime Agency,

which is a very kind of elite set of crime investigators in the United Kingdom and in England and Wales, and the police to expedite and improve the criminal investigations, to get these investigations to court so justice could be secured. And in its first year, it did secure over 550 arrests, and it identified 4,000 victims. But there was much more that could have been done. And if I'm honest, I did struggle to get the support to do more and to do more faster. When I talked about it publicly, there was a real shutdown by the kind of mainstream media and people on the left accusing me of racism

and accusing me of Islamophobia. You know. Just a few statistics from the Daily Mail. I think there are 76 gangs in total in 41 towns. I think just about 400 were convicted. Something like 150 have been released back, they say quietly. How can this happen, I guess, is the question, or why does this happen? So again, the criminal justice system has let a lot of these victims down. So you're right, some of these perpetrators have been convicted and sentenced, and then they've received short sentences, and then they've been released quite early. In other instances these people have been foreigners, they've not been British citizens and our immigration system and because our border control is not perfect and in fact is dysfunctional to a large degree we've not been able to deport them to Pakistan and these people have been let out of prison and they're still in the UK. So there is a real

failure when it comes to border control, but also our justice system. And it's still happening, as you said. Yeah, it's still happening because the police is still institutionally scared. And there is also a kind of operational challenge here. So, I mean, I think what we've got to focus on is the policing response. How many specialist officers do the relevant police forces have diverted onto this kind of work? These cases are complex to build, to make them ready for trial. You need a lot of evidence. Sometimes it's difficult to get hold of this evidence. So it can take time. But if you apply more resource, you can do it more quickly. I would ask as well, how fast is our criminal justice system working? It can sometimes take

a very long time, like over a year, sometimes two years, from arrest to a charge, and then even longer from charge to trial. so you know your victim has to stay the course for sometimes you know two or three years that's a very long time to try and get justice for something so awful and I would say that we need to think about expediting that justice system so that people are getting charges much more quickly and then reaching a court and a judge much more quickly and so that we can start getting these people sentenced and into jail. So I think there are real structural problems that need to be addressed before we can say confidently we're

anywhere near making progress on it. You mentioned you were accused of Islamophobia. It just strikes me somehow that what could create more Islamophobia than allowing this sort of thing to happen? I don't know, people who should be trusted, people who are professional, failed to act out of their own weakness and out of their own choice. You know, it's indefensible. And so I was moved to try and raise the profile of this issue because I felt very angry about what happened. But you just get shot down. You just get told you're being Islamophobic, you're being divisive, you're being racist. And, you know, there's many people who are reticent about going through that process. So,

you know, I agree with you, I think we've got to fix it, because it's going to cause more tension within our communities, the longer this goes on. It's very interesting what you say because what you describe to me is almost like every piece of society, whether it's the media, whether it's the law enforcement, whether it's the legal system, whether it's the politicians, they all seem to somehow be happy to largely just kind of let this sleeping dog lie, so to speak, mostly, right? Yeah, because they are so caught up with political correctness and virtue signaling and identity politics and they don't want to go anywhere near uncomfortable truths and confront the

very real issues that are destroying our country because they don't want to be seen to be targeting a particular ethnic minority group. And unfortunately, there is a racial element to this scandal. It's one of the biggest national scandals in our history, because the Pakistani men who were involved in this abhorrent behaviour were targeting white girls for a specific reason. They have an outdated, unacceptable view of women. And the authorities failed to act because they were scared of the charge of racism. And, you know, it's very difficult to find support on this issue from even my own colleagues. I'm thinking back to what you said earlier about Donald Trump opening the Overton window.

Yeah, he didn't shift the Overton window, he shattered it. I think because he has been so unapologetic, so fearless, so determined, so bold, he has caused others to see the good sense of what he's talking about. And he's made it safe to talk about some of the things that he said. You know, he calls it an invasion on the southern border. I call it an invasion on our south coast. He is now, at last, providing that necessary shift back to sanity. One of the executive orders that I really remarked on

was the executive order on free speech. I understand in the UK, I understand there's thousands of people that are actually in jail for publicly on social media saying things that were apparently untoward, apparently illegal? We have a crisis of free speech in the United Kingdom. And I use that word deliberately. We have a situation where the police have the powers to record your information and log your details if you've said something that might be offensive to someone. It doesn't matter about the objective nature of what you've said. If someone somewhere happens to be offended by what you have said, and it relates to a personal characteristic, race, gender, religion, sex, then that's it.

The case is closed. You will be considered guilty of what we call a non-crime hate incident. And that's what you're talking about. And there are thousands of these cases in the UK or in England and Wales where the police spend an inordinate amount of time policing social media. And it is having a chilling effect on our freedom of speech in the United Kingdom. There's many people who have lost their jobs,

who have ended up with criminal sanctions because they have said a man can't be a woman or they are very vocal about defending Israel for example that seems to be a another issue where the police takes a very you know kind of double standards approach. We have a case of a journalist Alison Pearson famous journalist award-winning, who wrote on social media after October the 7th. I'm not quite sure what she wrote, I can't recall the details, but she wrote something which was very pro-Israel and she was criticising the pro-Palestinian extremists. We've got this problem in the UK of hate marches where extremism, anti-semitism and Islamism can be paraded on our streets

and the police won't take any action. And it's caused a real increase in anti-semitism and it's made parts of our streets and our public realm no-go zones for Jewish people. Anyway she wasising this and she was commenting on it and she got a knock on the door from the police and they suggested that she might have committed a non-crime hate incident and there was a public outcry. The police did backtrack because of the public backlash but there are many thousands of people who receive that similar treatment from the police

and they don't have the public profile of an award-winning journalist to stir up a backlash and an outcry. So there is a real problem with free speech on campus. It's very scary to be Jewish on campus these days. It's very difficult to be a conservative on campus these days. It's very scary. We've had cases where Christian followers or believers have prayed silently outside abortion clinics. They're not waving a placard. They're not being aggressive. They're not intimidating anyone. But they've been arrested and prosecuted by the police and the CPS just for doing that. So I think it's incredibly worrying that we are sliding down this Orwellian slope towards a dystopia. Is there a way out of this? Well, I think, first of all, the non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped. As Home

Secretary I tried to get rid of them but unfortunately I didn't have the political support to go as far as I wanted to so I had to settle on issuing some clarificatory guidance. We need better protections for students on campus when it comes to free speech. I was actually cancelled myself a few months ago. I was invited to speak at Cambridge University, my former university. The event was shut down because of the mob, the pro-Palestinian mob mobilised and they got their activists together and said, we're going to protest very heavily and very vociferously outside this event. I wasn't bothered by that. I was happy to go ahead with the event. But the police got involved and they instructed us to cancel the event

because they couldn't guarantee my security. And their advice was this shouldn't go ahead. And so on arguably overcautious police advice, but it's very difficult to disagree with the security agencies, law enforcement agencies. We were cancelled and the event didn't go ahead on that particular night. We rescheduled it for another day and it did go ahead. But that's an example of what's happening on campus that there are extremists, whether they're eco-extremists, pro-Palestinian extremists, left-wing extremists largely, who are militant such that they don't want to allow or entertain a respectful challenge

or other people having a different point of view. If students and academics are feeling silenced out of fear, then that is a very, very, very damaging place for our country to be in. So you're here in the US. You know, you're, as I understand it, you were invited to come. So what are your plans? What are your next plans? Well, it's been brilliant. I'm incredibly honoured and grateful to have been invited to come to the inauguration, to attend the victory rally, the Liberty Ball yesterday. Great atmosphere, great to be part of it all. I'm very keen to build relationships with people in the US administration. I have some colleagues and friends who are going in to work for President Trump and vice president's team. And I think there's huge potential for the UK-US relationship. I think we need to work on a free trade agreement between the

two nations. We need to look at what further security and military collaboration can be secured. And, you know, I will keep flying the flag for common sense conservatism. I very much believe in the virtue of the patriotic law-abiding common sense majority. And I think for too long they've been dismissed and they've been smeared in the United Kingdom. And their voice needs to be heard. And there's a lot of wisdom in the British people,

in the hearts and the minds of the British people, and we just need to listen to them a bit more. And that's what I will keep doing. Well, Suella Braverman, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. My pleasure too. And all the best to the Epoch Times. Thank you all for joining former Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, Suella Braverman MP, on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.