Morning Wire - Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal: Cover-ups & Calls for Action | 1.11.25

Episode Date: January 11, 2025

We examine the failures and ongoing fallout from Britain’s largest child abuse scandal. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Beam: Try Beam's best-selling Dream Powder and get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to https://shopbeam.com/WIRE and use code WIRE at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And I would say very respectfully to the Prime Minister, it's not about you. It is about the victims. Be a leader, not a lawyer. We know that people were scared to tell the truth because they thought they would be called racist. If we want to stop this from ever happening again, we cannot be afraid. The Labour Party has adopted the APPG definition of Islamophobia. That same APPG report, said talking about sex groomers was an example of Islamophobia.

This is exactly why people are scared to tell the truth. That was British conservative leader Kimi Badenak, calling out British Prime Minister Kier Starmor over his handling of the so-called grooming gangs scandal. The scandal has been highlighted in recent days by Elon Musk, who has suggested that various British officials, including the Prime Minister, are complicit in the cover-up. The extent and severity of the scandal,

many say should result in resignations and criminal charges against those who enabled it. In this episode, we sit down with an expert from the London-based Legatum Institute to discuss the UK's grooming gang scandal and what action must be taken now to address it. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley, with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, January 11th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Hey, producer Brandon here. My sleep in 23-4 was awful. Tossing and turning all night, waking up, exhausted. That all changed when I found Beam's Dream Powder, a science-backed healthy nighttime blend for sleep. Other sleep aids can cause next day groginess, but Dream

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Shop B-E-A-M-S-Wire use code wire for up to 40% off. Joining us to discuss the horrific grooming gang scandal in the UK as Guy Dampeer, a senior researcher at London's Lagatum Institute, Guy. Thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure as always. For some context for our listeners, how did these grooming gangs first come to light? So the scandal itself dates back to the early years of 2010s, although the actual cases date back into the 1990s and possibly even beyond. It started with a journalist called Andrew Norfolk

at the Times of London. He started doing investigations based. on court documents that he'd seen, and he gradually revealed that there were gangs of largely Pakistani origin men in the north of England who had been grooming and then sexually abusing underage white girls, often in deeply sadistic ways. This really, really burst into the mainstream properly when his stories about a small town called Rotherham resulted in inquiry. And the inquiry found that in the small town of 250,000 people, that 1,000, 5,000, hundred girls have been abused there between 1997 and 2013. And the police had failed to stop it.

The council had failed to stop it. Sometimes that had been because they're incompetent. Sometimes it had been because there was a certain degree of corruption going on. But a lot of the time it was because they were afraid of being called racist. And that's because most of these child abusers were members of the Pakistani community. And that community was only about 5,000 people large. So although the exact number of perpetrators is very difficult to ascertain. one academic report found that one in 73 Muslim men between the ages of 16 and 60 in Rotherham

had been prosecuted for the crime, which is a staggering number. And that was followed by inquiries in some other places like Telford and Rochdale. And they found thousands more victims. So the real number of victims of these gangs may well be over 10,000. Just devastating and frankly so extreme that I think it's hard for many people to accept that this is real. Why has the public outrage over this sparked anew now. So when the story originally broke, it was in the British press. And if it appeared overseas, it would have been in the pages of the foreign newspapers. Now it's on Twitter.

It's on X. And people have been posting extracts from the sentencing remarks of the trials. And they contain some absolutely shocking, shocking details. So that suddenly has gone viral and it's brought attention to it. And I think it's very important that these sources are official sources. Because as you suggest, it can be really hard. when you're discussing the grooming gangs, not to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Can it really be true that thousands of girls were raped whilst the police looked the other way

because they didn't want to be called racist? That the fathers who tried to rescue their daughters were arrested by the police rather than them arresting the abusers. And that girls as young as 11 were being gang raped in British towns. So the fact the information was coming from official reports with, you know, very clinical, very bloodless language, that made it very hard to deny. And I think it made it very evocative. Right, and I've looked at some of these court documents, and they're truly surreal in the depravity they detail. Are there still people who are trying to deny the truth of this?

Oh, definitely. And it all comes down to that tricky issue of ethnicity, not just because some people still fear being called racist, but because it's very hard for some people to accept that many of the criminals involved were abusing these girls because of the color of their skin. In the transcripts, they often call the victims white slags or white whores. And over the last few decades, it's been a strong pressure from the media, from politicians, in Britain to support anti-racism and multiculturalism. And those aren't necessarily bad things, but it's generally meant telling white people that they're racist and they are the ones that need to learn to live with the cultures of other people.

And the grooming gang scandal is a stake through the heart of that. Because what it shows is that the greatest race-hate crime in Britain was against whites. And it shows that some parts of these foreign cultures are in fact bad. A lot of the abusers felt that white girls were loose or they were easy and that because they were outside of their own community, they were fair game. So over the years, various left-wing activists and academics have worked quite hard trying to deny the reality. They've tried to muddle the statistics. They pointed to white child abusers who, of course, do exist. But nobody's ever been able to point to this kind of massive reuse of one group by another.

It really is unique. Yeah, some very harsh realities exposed in this scandal. So what can be done and what is being done about these grooming gangs? So the current battle in Parliament is about whether there should be a national inquiry. So there's been a big child abuse inquiry for the last few years called the independent inquiry into child sex abuse. But it wasn't about the grooming gangs, and the phrase grooming gangs doesn't even appear in the final report. So even though it's the biggest recent child abuse scandal, there's still this desire to look away. One father that GB News recently spoke to called Jack has spoken out about how he was arrested by police officers when he tried to rescue his daughter from his abusers.

What happened when you tried to save for a from an abuse den? I was arrested outside, putting a police car, told me that I were de-arrested to go in house and don't go back. I was that mad and furious. I went back to the flat. In a few minutes, police were back, but this time in a van, and it were only a few minutes. They must have known I were going back. So they were watching this flat where your daughter was being abused. They weren't going in to stay fair, but they did go into arrest you twice?

Yeah. They arrested me second time took me down at police station about an hour and off later took me outside and said, right, go home because if you go back to that flat we're going to rest you for stalking

the occupants of that house. Extraordinary. He's one of the many who was backing a call for a national inquiry pointing out that the last inquiry that they had only looked at six towns and of those six, only one of those is one of the 50 where we know that a grooming gang has operated.

So they've deliberately been looking in the wrong places. So in Parliament this week, we've had Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, and he's raised this issue of the independent inquiry into child sex abuse. He said that the inquiry was like a shotgun shot. You know, it had covered a wide variety of issues, but there was only a little subsection on grooming gangs. So he said what we needed now is we need a rifle shot, something that's very specific that's aimed just to this issue

and that really takes the target down. But even if we get a national inquiry, we're going to need a lot more. There have been inquiries in various towns, but lots of them have had weak recommendations, they've been ignored, or just, you know, nothing's changed. So we're going to have to look at tougher measures. One of the most obvious one of those

is to deport those who are guilty of these crimes. A lot of them are either Pakistani citizens or they're eligible for it, but despite that, not one of them has ever been deported. And that's because of our human rights laws. So those need to change. it's absolutely unconscionable that we have victims who can walk in the supermarket and see their abuser looking back at them.

Another thing is punishment. Loads of these abusers have only served about half their time in prison. So you've got gang rapists who've been sentenced to six years, but they've only served 2.5 years, and then they're pretty much free, and they go back to the community, and they're welcomed with maybe not open arms, but they're certainly not kicked out. And then finally, we need to look at the police, and we need to look at the local government officials who failed. despite the inquiries finding failures over and over again, none of them have ever gone to jail.

In fact, none of them have ever lost their job. They've been allowed to resign at best. So a lot of them had then just moved from one public sector job to another. So one thing I've suggested is that we should have a public sector blacklist where the public servants who are named in inquiries as having failed are barred from working for the public sector or on any private sector projects that involve taxpayer money for a period of years. Final question. Is this still going on and to what extent? Unfortunately, yes. I'd love to say otherwise, especially after all these inquiries, but the truth is, there are still arrests going on every year. In the first years since it was launched, the Grooming Gang Task Force was involved in 550 arrests. So that gives you an idea of the scale of the problem. There's a lot of work to do, and we're going to have to be much tougher. I think we all agree this must be stamped out whatever it takes. Guy, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me on. is the Legatum Institute's Guy Dampeer, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.