The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben gets to the bottom of the Grooming Gang scandal out of the U.K.

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Ben gets to the bottom of the Grooming Gang scandal out of the U.K. With Guest: Charlie Peters, National Reporter and investigations for GB News If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Maybe, but definitely 100% closer to getting 1% cash back with TD Direct Investing. Conditions apply, offer ends January 31st, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. A scandal embroiling all of the United Kingdom today. A lot of us are only now recently learning about the grooming gang scandal. And a lot of it due to an attention that was brought to it by Elon Musk on X.

We're joined now by Charlie Peters, national reporter and investigations for GB News. Charlie, thank you. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you very much for having me. So Charlie, if you can, I'm sure that you've been speaking about this for quite some time, but a lot of Canadians still are very ignorant of this story. Can you tell us, take us back to the beginning? Well you join me in Rotherham. I'm standing on the high street in this town in South Yorkshire in the north of England, where in 2014 a report exposed that from 1997 to 2013, at least 1400

children, most of them young white girls, were abused by gangs of predominantly Pakistani men. Now, Rotherham is the centrepiece of this story because so much of the investigation has happened here that this story goes back decades behind 2014. Reports of these gangs operating in England first appeared in the 1970s, but when they were investigated by a Labour MP Anne Cryer in 2003, she was called a racist and investigations were shut down. There were similar reports later on also in the north of England.

Similar concerns were shut down and it wasn't until the Rotherham scandal was exposed by a journalist at the Times Newpaper called Andrew Norfolk that we got a sense of just how broad this scandal is. Since 2014 there have been a handful of other reports in Telford, which is in West Mercia, which for your listeners that's on the border between England and Wales and the west of England, and also a local review in Rochdale and Oldham, both in Greater Manchester, England's sort of second city in the north west. So we've had a handful of inquiries and investigations but there's never been a national effort to investigate this sort of appalling abuse.

And it really is horrendous. Some of the, what are these children endured? I don't know what time it is where your listeners are hearing you or the sort of nature of your program. So I won't go into great detail, but I can assure your listeners that it's nothing short of torture. Yeah. Some of these children injured. These gangs of marauding rapists would traffic them between different towns as well, and they were used essentially as meat, as commodities. Accountability seems, is at the top of my mind, from the local police to the local governments all the way to the highest levels of the national government. Why has there been no accountability? Well, one of the reasons why there's been such a demand at the moment for this national inquiry is because in the local reports that I've just been referring to, a handful of towns in the north and the West Midlands, there has never been the requirement to compel people to give evidence. Local inquiries

don't have that same degree of power and they can't bring charges for those to be held accountable. When the Independent Office of Police Conduct, which is the watchdog that looks into the police officers in England, launched an investigation into Rotherham, where I am right now. It found that dozens of officers had failed. To give your listeners just a sense of what, just how bad those failures were, we're aware of instances of essentially corruption, where children were being ferried between rapists

and other abusers by police officers, who were essentially involved in the abuse. In other cases, police officers saw Asian men, Pakistani men with girls in their car and just moved them along. So they did nothing to actually prosecute and investigate these issues. When the IOPC, that watchdog, concluded their report in 2022, it fired zero people. Nobody was held to account for those crimes. Only five were punished in any way.

What happened in Rotherham in terms of the lack of accountability is the story across the country. There's never been an effort to hold people to account. And that's why I've seen those demands for that national inquiry. So, Charlie, explain to make this make sense for me that British lawmakers voted against launching that national inquiry into these grooming gangs after objections to the way the vote was being put forward. To me, make that make sense. Well, that's the defense of the

Labour Party, the party that's currently in power in government in Westminster. They have said that's why they didn't agree with that vote. They've also said that they think there's already been an investigation, the Independent Inquiry to Child Sexual Abuse, that published in 2022. But at GB News, we have found compelling evidence of these gangs operating in at least 50 different towns and cities across the United Kingdom, all the way from Bristol in the southwest and Banbury near Oxford in the south up to Glasgow, Scotland's second city, that big belt of the west of Scotland. So major issues here and demonstrating the problem that

we've got. But also one of the reasons that political opposition to the Labour government think there hasn't been that investigation is because many of those local authorities that you're referring to are Labour-run areas and the Labour Party has often Resisted powers to investigate this issue at least in part due to the fact that their own Politicians have been implicated in the abuse in the past. In a 2015 report into Rotterdam, just to give you one example, it found that Labour councillors were covering up the abuse in Rotterdam, where I am now. They found that they chilled

conversations on the issue, particularly with regards to ethnicity in this abuse. So people don't want to look into this and there has been a sense of national nervousness over the ethnicity element. People have been called racist for pointing out the disparity between the abusers and the victims and that has been a major issue. Yeah, in the short time we have left, put on, if you can look into a crystal ball, how do you see this unfolding in the days and weeks to come? Well, just as you reached me in the last half hour or so, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has called for a limited national inquiry. He's the first major Labour figure to call for this national inquiry after Sir Keir Starmer,

the Prime Minister, led a three-line whip in his party to not vote for one last night. So the government's defence is crumbling literally as we speak. We could see further labor pressure being put on the prime minister to reverse that stance to finally get to the truth of this crisis because at GB News we have found so much appalling evidence not only of further abuse, thousands of victims across the country, many victims we've spoken to over the last four years, but also evidence of cover-up, evidence of investigators being blocked. We revealed so many instances of this occurring and it was last

Wednesday our story that we revealed that the government had rejected a request from Oldham, that town in Greater Manchester. Charlie, we're gonna have to leave it there, but thank you so much for bringing us up to speed on this terrible story. Thank you.