The ‘community leaders’ doing nothing to solve the grooming scandal

There are some foreign words so expressive that you long to absorb them into your own language, to add breadth, colour and depth. ‘Asshat’ (or ‘ass-hat’) for instance. This fine north-Americanism denotes a person who has their head so far up their own ass [Eng: arse] that they are literally wearing their ass as a hat. It is a term for which there is no precise equivalent in our English demotic. But it is useful, and I recommend its adoption.

The specific cause of this recommendation is that I can think of almost nobody who claims to be any type of ‘community representative’ or ‘leader’ who is not a complete and utter asshat.

On Monday, after the prosecution of another group of rapists in Newcastle, the Sun published a column by Trevor Kavanagh. It followed a column on a similar theme by Labour MP Sarah Champion. Kavanagh’s column dared to mention that the grooming gang in Newcastle (see also Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxfordshire etc) did not consist of ‘Asian’ men but specifically men of Muslim origin. He was right. Most newspapers don’t like to mention this, preferring to hide behind ‘Asian’ and thereby showing a willingness to mislead their readers into thinking that organised gangs of Koreans and Japanese have been gang-raping young white girls across Britain over recent years.

If this is undeniably perilous territory to write in, it is also ground-hog day.  After the prosecutions in Newcastle last week, the BBC’s Newsnight ran a lamentable discussion with four young Muslims chaired by Evan Davis; the panel decided within minutes that the case had nothing to do with religion.

Perhaps readers will forgive me if I sigh about all this. I just checked the first Newsnight discussion I did on this issue and somewhere on the internet found my younger self discussing whether we could talk about Muslim grooming gangs, the whole question of political correctness and the shutting down of debate.