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BY DR NIALL McCRAE
How a provincial solicitor forced Starmer’s U-turn on rape gangs inquiry
At last, the Prime Minister has ordered a statutory inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’. Critics believe that Sir Keir Starmer had turned a blind eye to the systematic sexual abuse of white girls by gangs of Pakistani men, when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. That’s quite a charge, when you consider the number of victims and perpetrators.
Despite calls for a statutory inquiry into the euphemistic ‘grooming gangs’, which have plagued a multitude of towns and cities, the political establishment persistently failed to act. Labour politicians were certainly not interested, having large Muslim voting blocs to appease. Starmer and his Home Office ministers deemed a national statutory inquiry unnecessary. Instead, any investigation should be done locally, on a non-statutory basis, applying local knowledge and sensitivities (we know what that means).
So what changed?
The answer will not be stated by ministers or by mainstream media. In fact, this is almost certainly the result of painstaking work by Robin Tilbrook, a solicitor in rural Essex.
Tilbrook, leader of the English Democrats and working on behalf of the Workers of England Union, also recently brought a case for a ‘grooming gang’ victim and got a judgment of £426,000 damages against a gang member for two rapes when the girl was 14. His application for judicial review is what pushed the government into a U-turn.
The established political parties do not want their neglect exposed. In a notorious interview, Dennis MacShane, MP for Rotherham, admitted that when he raised concern about the gangs with senior people in the Labour Party, he was told to keep quiet for ‘community relations’. In some Conservative constituencies the gangs operated with no less impunity. A hotspot for rape gangs was Oxford, a city controlled by the Lib Dems.
Labour activists have long argues that any focus on men of Pakistani origin or Muslims is ‘racist’- an effective silencing tactic. They assert that most paedophiles are white. However, Pakistani Muslim child rape gangs are not only abusing girls sexually, but abusing them racially too (using phrases such as ‘white trash’). Furthermore, they profited by pimping to other mostly Pakistani Muslim men (each girl was worth an estimated quarter of a million pounds to a gang).
The British state has failed partly out of cowardice and careerism, but also due to its multiculturalist hang-ups. This radical (and generally unpopular) undermining of indigenous identity and culture has been advanced to greater or lesser extent by the mainstream media, causing reluctance to discuss any happenings that show white people as the victims rather than perpetrators of racism.
Some critical journalists and commentators have spoken out, however. As featured in Tilbrook’s application, Charlie Peters of GB News decried the institutional neglect:
‘The grooming gangs scandal is the gravest atrocity in modern British history, possibly the worst since the Second World War. In cities, towns and communities across Britain, thousands of children – predominantly white, working-class girls – were systematically groomed, abused, raped, trafficked, tortured and defiled by thousands.
First reports of this abuse by predominantly Pakistani men were made in the 1960s in Bradford. Newspaper reports resurfaced again in the 1970s, this time in Rotherham. Then the trail went cold, only for reporting on this form of child abuse to return to media coverage in the late 1990s. Ann Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley, raised concerns about Asian men targeting girls outside school gates in 2002. She was derided as a racist. But the horrendous pattern she detected in her once-gentle corner of West Yorkshire soon spread across the country.
In every major town and city across Britain, children were being groomed by gangs of Pakistani men to be used in the most horrendous forms of child abuse. Their desecration went beyond the horror of rape and sexual assault: they were often tortured, trafficked, violently beaten, branded with the initials of their rapists, treated like meat, subjugated in the most reprehensible conditions, plied with alcohol and drugs, and generally subjected to a level of treatment beyond the imagination of even the most disturbed mind.
Only a handful of reports have ever been launched into this terrifying pattern of abuse. They have focussed on Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oldham. In each of these areas, the same accusations of racism that Ann Cryer was subjected to has prevented people from being confident and free to raise concerns. In all of these areas, police officers, council officials, social services and elected politicians were terrified of confronting the rapists because they prioritised protecting community cohesion over securing the safety of thousands of children.’
It is in this context that the Greater Manchester Independent Assurance Review published its review on child sexual exploitation in 2022. Oldham Council had made numerous calls to the Home Office asking for a wider public inquiry and resolved to do so again at a council meeting on 10th July 2024, when there was a unanimous resolution for the chief executive to ask the new Home Secretary (Yvette Cooper) for a statutory inquiry into the rampant abuse in Oldham. Cooper delegated the duty of responding to the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls (Jess Phillips).
Phillips did not respond until 29th October 2024, and that was to refuse the request. This caused an outcry. How could a minister – particularly a lifelong feminist – obstruct an inquiry into one of the worst crimes against girls ever committed?
In an implicit admission of growing public concern, on 16th January 2025 Cooper announced a national audit of grooming gangs, led by Dame Louise Casey, to explore ‘cultural and societal drivers’ of child sex abuse. Meanwhile, Cooper announced five more local inquiries, claiming that these would ‘deliver more answers and change than a lengthy nationwide inquiry’. This was criticised by her Conservative opponent Chris Philp, who argued that a statutory inquiry was necessary due to the widespread criminality and ‘huge and unforgiveable neglect of duty by large numbers of public servants.’
Empowered by the Inquiries Act, a statutory inquiry is headed by a judge with the full array of statutory powers, including witnesses being compelled to attend and face cross-examination and to provide any documents of interest. Failure to comply could lead to imprisonment. Such powers are essential when dealing with criminal matters.
A major problem had arisen for Starmer because his government, rather than simply ignoring the scandal (like the preceding Tory administration), specifically refused a statutory inquiry. Cooper’s announcement opened the government to challenge.
Meanwhile public pressure was mounting. On 19th January a Sunday Telegraph editorial asserted:
‘With each passing day, Sir Keir Starmer’s obstinate refusal to grant a full national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal becomes harder to explain. The failures that allowed these criminals to operate untouched for years in towns across the country came from a disturbingly wide range of agencies, from the Crown Prosecution Service and local authorities to police forces.’
On the failure of South Yorkshire Police to take the crime seriously, dismissing the victims and thus allowing the brutal abuse to continue, the Sunday Telegraph opined that ‘it is difficult to think of a better summary of the dynamics at play in this scandal: state authorities made aware of atrocities taking place that they were responsible for preventing, failing to take action, and then other bodies responsible for examining their conduct refusing to make that failure public.
Tilbrook, with Stephen Morris (General Secretary of the Workers of England Union), sent a letter before action on 29th January 2025. The government’s lawyers responded by making quibbling technical arguments to play for time. On 17th May, the applicants issued the following judicial review case in the High Court: –
The King (on the application of Morris and another) – v – Secretary of State for the Home Department and another – Case No. AC-2025-LON-001612.
The applicants sought a judicial review to force the government to order a statutory enquiry not only into the Pakistani-origin rape gangs but also into collusion by local and central government politicians, civil servants, council officers, officers, police, social workers and care managers and staff. Starmer’s government, determined to avoid such an inquiry (because some of its senior figures are likely to be implicated), instructed Baroness Casey to write a report so that it would be seen to be doing something. The terms of reference were published on 20th February, three weeks after Tilbrook’s letter before action.
The government legal department confirmed that the claim was served on the defendants by post on 23rd May. The government was required to present their grounds of defence by 4pm on 17th June. Baroness Casey’s report appears to have been circulating in the upper reaches of government by the second week in June. On Saturday 14th June, after the report’s release, Starmer pledged a statutory inquiry after all. On 16th June, the day before the government’s defence to the judicial review application was due, the inquiry was formally announced in the House of Commons.
Starmer attributed the decision to the Casey Report alone. The government pretends to have reconsidered and made the right decision on its own volition, but the likelihood of losing a judicial review would have shown unprecedented gross negligence by the political establishment – with Starmer directly implicated.
Let us hope that the statutory inquiry brings belated justice to the tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of victims of this shameful, state-facilitated savagery.
Dr Niall McCrae is the author of ‘Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm’ (2024).
