By Dr. Jim Lewthwaite, Party Chairman
The week’s news revealed a significant item of interest—the death of Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist who uncovered the Rotherham Grooming Gang Scandal through a series of articles published between 2011 and 2013.
Norfolk’s articles had a profound impact, compelling the Establishment to commission Alexis Jay, who led the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), and Baroness Louise Casey’s Review into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police.
There was also an investigation by the parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee, which led to the resignation of the leader and key portfolio holders. Eventually, the entire Labour cabinet controlling Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council resigned, culminating in the appointment of Government-appointed Commissioners. The controversial Police and Crime Commissioner, Shaun Wright, was the last to resign after significant pressure. However, there is still much more that has not been remembered or brought to public attention.
The key argument, as highlighted by the author Peter McLoughlin in his important book, Easy Meat: inside Britain’s grooming gang scandal, is that the issue of Pakistani rape gangs had been recognised by the authorities since at least the late 1980s, with a significant opportunity to address it in the first decade of this millennium.
McLoughlin highlights the proactive stance of the Sikh community in Wolverhampton, who were the first to respond when a vigilante group attacked the Mughal Durbar site of a rape incident in 1988. However, similar to the situation with the West and South Yorkshire forces, the West Midlands Police jailed members of the Sikh community while allowing the rapists to go free.
Later, the Sikhs established an Awareness Society to educate Sikh girls about the threats they faced. By the mid-1990s, authorities in Rotherham recognised the issue. They created the Risky Business agency (a service that supported children at risk), led by Jayne Senior. However, the agency’s work with victims and survivors was overlooked, and there was a lack of acknowledgement of the ethnic aspect of the situation, which is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of the issue.
A report was conducted by a respected Yorkshire lawyer, Adele Weir. She faced intense criticism from Christine Burbeary, the Rotherham Divisional Commander of South Yorkshire Police (SYP). The hard copy of the report was stolen during the night of April 17-18, 2002. The digital version was deleted by someone with high-level access to the Risky Business office located within the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council building, indicating that it was likely an insider job. McLoughlin noted that the report was discovered in the Council Offices in 2015. Following these events, Risky Business was shut down, and Labour councillors went into denial about the situation. Meanwhile, MP Denis Macshane, dealing with fraud charges at the time, claimed he had no knowledge of the matter.
McLoughlin makes a groundbreaking suggestion that Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League (EDL) significantly motivated Andrew Norfolk to begin his investigation. However, he does not mention Norfolk by name. However, he fails to acknowledge the role of the British National Party in general or the contributions of Marlene Guest, a former Liberal who switched to the BNP, was elected as a councillor in Rotherham in 2006, and campaigned vigorously against rape gangs for some time before she was elected. Marlene sadly passed away over a decade ago but continued the campaign to expose these horrific crimes against young children until her passing.
We must take action to halt the disturbing trend of rewriting history in a manner reminiscent of Stalinist propaganda. This practice distorts the truth and manipulates our understanding of significant events. It resembles an Orwellian tactic, where accurate events and facts are systematically erased or suppressed, effectively casting the deletion of actual events into the memory hole. As the philosopher Hegel emphasised, those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it, one might add, to relive it. We must maintain historical accuracy to ensure we are well-informed and aware of the events that have shaped our society.
The famous nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke wrote, as a young man, in his first historical work, that the role of history is to show how it really was—“Wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.”
The situation in Rotherham closely resembles that of the Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council, including Keighley. As McLoughlin points out, the government was sufficiently aware of the issue to fund the victim-support project “Streets and Lanes,” which was run by Dr. Barnardo’s alongside the Risky Business initiative in the mid-1990s. The British National Party also successfully elected four councillors on an anti-rape gang platform, notably Angela Clarke in Keighley. The well-regarded MP Ann Cryer only acknowledged the scale and existence of the gangs after learning about Channel 4’s upcoming documentary, Edge of the City, which faced attempts at censorship from Muslim and Leftist pressure groups, as well as from West Yorkshire Police Chief Constable Colin Cramphorn in 2004.
In 2004, I was elected councillor for the Wyke ward on Bradford Council. In 2005, I proposed a motion to address rape gang issues, which was dismissed by all the establishment councillors from the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green parties. A similar motion proposed by my colleague Angela Clarke at Keighley Town Council met the same fate.
The outcome differs in Bradford’s case—the City of Bradford of the Bradford Metropolitan District Council (BMDC) still refuses to hold an inquiry. A recent report, summarised on GB News as I write this, by Keighley Tory MP Robbie Moore and solicitor David Greenwood, suggests that up to 72,000 children could have been at risk.
During an interview over ten years ago, journalist Andrew Norfolk asked me when there would ever be a major trial in Bradford, especially considering that the city has a Pakistani population proportionately ten times larger than Rotherham. We both agreed that it would likely never happen, as local politicians and police are terrified of the potential repercussions, fearing a repetition of the 2001 riots.
In conclusion, we have made significant progress; our predictions have been validated, and our concerns have become mainstream. The Establishment parties are now discredited and will soon fade away. If the Reform party temporarily benefits from our hard work, it will, in turn, disappoint. We must be prepared to remind the electorate that we deserve significant credit for addressing issues others were too cowardly to confront. We trust that future historians will see beyond the mainstream media’s lies and distortions to recognise who saved the day “at the eleventh hour.”
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