BRITAIN’S LONG-OVERDUE RECKONING WITH ‘GROOMING GANGS:’
It is important to be clear that in an ocean of indifference, there were people who did a lot to make this happen, like the whistleblowers Maggie Oliver and Jayne Senior, the journalists Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters, and the victims who had the astonishing courage to speak of what they had experienced.
But the scale of the response simply did not match up to the scale of the atrocities. Some of the rapists are already being released. Disgraced officials found cozy jobs elsewhere. No police officers faced serious consequences. Chillingly, files and laptops containing important evidence were stolen. The state avoided accountability while a cultural establishment that emphasized egalitarian and minoritarian narratives avoided the subject. When posts about the grooming gangs scandal went viral on X this week, there was widespread shock. People outside the UK hadn’t even heard about it—and many people within the UK hadn’t grasped its implications.
It is about time that there was a cultural and institutional reckoning. Of course, it is important to be clear that such crimes could still be happening today. It is important to be clear that such crimes can be, and have been, carried out by white people as well (and not for the sake of political correctness but to stop it happening).
Yet if Britain’s state and cultural institutions are allowed to forget what happened in Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and Oxford, and Bristol, and so many other places, there will not be meaningful attempts to tear off the ideological and institutional blinkers that have blinded them to atrocities in the past and could blind them to atrocities in the future.
The British media are furious about having to cover this story, and are in full shooting-the-messenger mode. Even the London Times, which is seen as many as a nominally center-right paper is in full “a pox on all their houses” mode: Excusing the child rape gangs only gives Musk’s ideologues more fuel. On one side, the proto-fascists. On the other, the hyperliberals. It’s hard to know which pose a bigger threat.
Norm Macdonald could not be reached for comment:
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