A Labour MP fired from the shadow government by Jeremy Corbyn for calling out Pakistani-heritage rapists targeting white girls will help review a government report into the ethnic background of grooming gangs.
Sarah Champion, MP for the rape gang-blighted town of Rotherham, Yorkshire, will help to review a government report into the “characteristics” of grooming gangs, which have repeatedly been found to be made up overwhelmingly of Muslim men, usually of Pakistani heritage victimising overwhelmingly non-Muslim girls, usually white working class.
Champion was one of the few figures on the political left to call for the racial elements of the grooming gangs phenomenon to be confronted — elements which saw the crimes ignored by police, social workers, and other authority figures for years because they feared being accused of racism if they tackled them.
“Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?” Champion wrote in an article for the right-leaning Sun in 2017.
“For too long we have ignored the race of these abusers and, worse, tried to cover it up. No more. These people are predators and the common denominator is their ethnic heritage. We have to have grown-up conversations,” she pleaded.
Evidently, then-party leader Jeremy Corbyn did not agree, swiftly firing her from her frontbench role in his shadow administration.
Corbyn’s supposedly more moderate successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has not rehired her — indeed, he recently promoted an Asian-heritage MP who once liked and shared a tweet saying “abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity” to be his Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion.
“When you [look] at the convictions of what are identified as grooming gangs in the media by far the majority of perpetrators are of Pakistani heritage,” Champion said of her new role on the report panel, in comments reported by The Times.
“We’ve had two big reports into Rotherham which both identify Pakistani heritage as being a common denominator,” she continued.
“I understand the nervousness people have around race. This is about child protection and crimes against children. You should follow the evidence regardless of who they are.
“We need to put this issue to bed for once and for all. Ethnicity might not be a determining factor but the issue needs to be investigated and the research made public.”
While the courts, the mainstream media, and other establishment institutions have been forced in recent years to begin lifting the lid on the grooming gangs epidemic, at least somewhat, they are still not treated as hate crimes, with judges claiming they are not racially motivated.
This is despite the fact members of the gangs have verbally abused their victims and others in racial terms, with one having told a female official that white women are “good for only one thing – for people like me to f*** and use as trash, that is all women like you are worth.”
Moreover, the government had originally planned that the report Sarah Champion will be helping to review prior to publication would never see the light of day, with the Home Office deciding it would remain “internal” so ministers would have a “safe space” to consider policy after its announcement.
This decision was reversed after their refusal to release it under the Freedom of Information Act saw more than 125,000 people sign an official petition for its release.
This was implicitly rejected in a very late and rambling non-response in April, but the government U-turned at almost the last second when MPs on the Petitions Committee insisted that the Home Office give a proper yes or no answer by May 20th.