Newsletter #17: On Pakistani rape gangs; or, 'the dam bursts'

PLUS: Should there be an inquiry? Do Labour want Ed Miliband to fail? And what's Kemi's latest puff piece?

Good morning.

Simultaneously, this was a week in which nothing has happened, and yet it was also a week in which everything has happened. For no obvious reason, the grooming gangs (or, to use the parlance du jour, the ‘Pakistani rape gangs’) have burst, extremely violently, back onto the political scene. Why?

Oh, and apologies for the delay. Urgent ‘Tommy’ business.

This newsletter’s agenda: On Pakistani rape gangs; or, ‘the dam bursts’ I: why now? (free); On Pakistani rape gangs; or, ‘the dam bursts’ II: what now? (paid); Do Labour want Ed Miliband to fail?, and other revelations in Tim Shipman’s latest for The Times (paid); Mini-updates: Tulip Siddiq, Kemi Badenoch (paid).

The first section of this newsletter is free. Upgrade to a paid subscription — £8/month, or £80/year — to read the rest.

On Pakistani rape gangs; or, ‘the dam bursts’ I: why now?

PICTURED: The effect of the defeat of the centre-right in 2024.

Soon after Starmer’s election victory, we saw unprecedented race riots following the murders in Southport. This — perhaps — could have been dismissed as random; bad luck on Starmer’s part (and yes, this was bad luck, Starmer was hurt by the riots, just look at the polls). After all, while there have been many murders by immigrants in Britain, few have been quite as abhorrent as this one, which deliberately targeted little children. And perhaps it was also just random in the sense that things finally reached their breaking point, for those inclined to rioting, after this attack; and that if Rishi Sunak was returned, exactly the same thing would have happened.

This view seems harder to argue after an entirely unexpected explosion of anger over Pakistani rape gangs — another issue of long-standing. Of course, there was a proximate cause: namely, Elon Musk drawing attention to the issue after seeing a post from Max Tempers which included a screenshot of a particularly grotesque section from the transcript of an old court case.

Elon Musk is, of course, highly influential. But even so: why now? There was, we should note, nothing in particular that happened relating to the Pakistani rape gangs. No new transcripts were released; no new trials are underway. Everyone on the British Right was, frankly, taken aback by the scale of the anger in Britain (as opposed to abroad) over things that we — without trying to sound ‘smug’ — all already knew about. We all already knew that the absolutely, completely irrefutable answer to any dispute with the Left over immigration was ‘Rotherham, Oldham, Telford, Rochdale…’.

Because it quickly became clear that actually, most people didn’t know about this — or at the very least, they didn’t know about the scale, and they didn’t quite grasp just how abhorrent the crimes really were (as if child rape needed to be any more abhorrent, but I digress). A genuinely politically well-informed friend, working in the Civil Service, somewhat on the Right (he doesn’t like taxes) but not really party-political, told me that while he had of course heard of the scandal, he wasn’t really aware of the scale of it, nor the scale of the failings of the British state. One regular Pimlico Journal and J’accuse contributor told me that he spoke to two of his schoolfriends, well-educated, politically engaged, and friendly to not only the Right, but also Reform, but who apparently had little clue at all about the rape gangs. If you’re a respectable middle class person, you may have had the truth actively hidden from you by the establishment media.

Because while it is an exaggeration to say that there has been a media blackout on this issue (The Times has done some good work on this), as some claim, they certainly weren’t that keen to cover it nearly as extensively as most of the other scandals they write about. All of these people would know about Grenfell, for instance. Let alone, well… George Floyd. Their attempts to deny that they are still to this day uncomfortable with the topic are unconvincing to say the least.

So, back to my original question: how can we explain this sudden outpouring of anger? Is it just Elon Musk? Or is it all just random? I don’t think so. I think that the reason that all of this pent-up rage has suddenly exploded now is directly because of the defeat of the Conservative Party in July 2024.

This may seem like a strange claim. Pimlico Journal have hardly been complimentary about the performance of the Conservative Party in Government, especially since 2019. Why would their defeat change much? Isn’t Starmer most likely going to reduce immigration from its catastrophic peak under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak? But in fact, in my view, it actually changed everything because there is no longer a Government in place that at least pretends to care about people’s so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ about such things as immigration, crime, and yes, Pakistani rape gangs too.

Public anger was kept in check with the Conservatives. They could at the very least make the right noises on these topics, even if they never achieved anything much, whether because they didn’t care enough, because they were incompetent, or because they weren’t radical enough to tackle the root causes. Many people, rightly or wrongly, believed them when they said that they were listening. No-one, by contrast, thinks that Starmer is willing to do this. They think he is a left-wing ideologue who hates them.

I suspect this will keep happening over the next few years. Paradoxically, Starmer was elected at the precise moment when what remains of political moderation on these issues died. It’s telling that no-one is speaking of him internationally as some kind of revival of ‘social democracy’ — everyone seemingly knows that what he represents was an anachronism even before he was elected.

On Pakistani rape gangs; or, ‘the dam bursts’ II: what now?