The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as I can ascertain, it moved so fast – through posts on X that quoted horrific extracts from trial proceedings. Within hours the full horror of what happened (and may well still be happening) in towns and cities around Britain blasted into public consciousness and global headlines.
This is obviously one of the very worst things, maybe the very worst thing, to have occurred in Britain since the war
It’s been a strange few days – not least because none of this information is new. What feels different this time is that its importance has broken out and been acknowledged, by the public if not yet entirely by some politicians.
‘Shouldn’t that be a bigger story?’ has always been a fairly common thought when reading, listening to or watching the news. But there is usually some rhyme or reason to it. This time though it made no sense at all. How was this story ‘missed’ over the last 20 years? Why didn’t we realise how big it is, and what it signifies?
I think it is because of the sheer scale of its importance and significance. The bandwidth of our collective consciousness is too narrow, our vocabulary lacking, there is no ‘form’ for talking about it. The ethnicity of the perpetrators hit a nerve that was too exposed for most people to consider talking about it, at least in public.
We’d do anything to look away. And we have. The focus is shifting again already, moving to political gossip and point scoring. It’s hard to think of a more inappropriate reaction to the last few days than to squawk about the largely mythical ‘far right’ – but Starmer, of course, did exactly that.
The contrast with the manias that we reacted to with acres of print is telling. The BLM frenzy of 2020, the Downing Street wallpaper and sandwiches, #MeToo, the obviously barmy lies spread by Carl Beech. And there were plenty of other shocking things, from hate marches to genderism, that were also simply absorbed by the background noise.
But the grooming gangs are at another level. This is obviously one of the very worst things, maybe the very worst thing, to have occurred in Britain since the war. Hundreds of little girls have been raped. This moment of clarity needs to become more than a moment; we need to get over our lingering cultural cringe about anti-white racism, a major factor in these crimes. We need to face up to what’s happening, because these aren’t distant crimes we’re happy to pontificate about, they are not historical sins like slavery or empire. They are occurring in Britain right now. The British state’s attempts to avoid stoking ‘community tensions’ has been a perfect recipe for inflaming them. Mass immigration and multiculturalism have been a disaster. It is horrible to face this, but we must.
What’s stopping us? I think in many cases we are still using a mental map formed in the mid-1990s, with a compass that has been pointing increasingly out of true ever since, and which has now become useless. In the last few days some politicians and celebrities, from Starmer to Armando Iannucci and Chris Mullin have made crass interventions, working on that model from the 90s. Iannucci has accused Musk of being a ‘toxic gonad’, poisoning the discourse of the country, while Mullin has said GB News and the Telegraph are ‘climbing on the Musk bandwagon’ for their recent coverage of the grooming gang scandal.
That level of cognitive dissonance is very bad for you. Because yes the story has recently broken out, but we knew, we all knew. For years. We all saw Jess Phillips breezily dismissing the Cologne sex attacks on Question Time. We all heard about the disappearance of the abused girl Charlene Downes. We read about the parents who went to try and rescue their daughters and were arrested. But none of it went in.
Forty years ago, in my sixth form college, a classmate told me about what we would now call a Pakistani grooming gang in nearby Aylesbury. I dismissed her. I thought ‘well that can’t be true’. It sounded like a nasty racist lie. I think many public figures are still running that mental routine.
A challenge to your worldview – or ’values’ as they are so often pompously labelled today – is an enormous jolt. The professional term is ‘ontological shock’. I had my ontological shock, about all manner of things, in about 1999, which meant I had the advantage and luxury of doing it privately. The people around me knew about it, but strangers didn’t, and I had no history of public statements or reputation to consider. Politicians have never had that option, and social media ‘receipts’ now make it harder for anybody with even a minor profile to change their mind.
But the time has come for a lot of people to catch up, to update their ‘values’. The liberalism that we loved cannot begin to resolve this situation. It will be painful, but at a level that hardly compares to the pain of the victims of the gangs.
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