Nigel Farage has vowed that his Reform UK party will fund an inquiry into the child rape grooming gang scandal if the left-wing Labour government continues to refuse to launch a full public inquiry.
The Reform leader, who for over a decade has been a leading voice criticising the failures of authorities and successive governments to safeguard young girls from mostly Muslim Pakistani rape gangs, has said that his party is willing to raise the money to appoint “independent ex-judges and experts” to conduct an inquiry into the scandal.
“If the Labour government won’t hold a full public inquiry into the widespread mass rape scandal, then we at Reform UK will. Raising the money won’t be a problem,” Farage said on Monday evening.
The Reform boss said there is an “overwhelming demand” for a fresh investigation. Yet, the government has resisted calls for a full inquiry, claiming that previous reports have been sufficient and that the focus should be on implementing recommendations rather than re-litigating the past.
Going further, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who has faced questions about his role in the scandal during his time as the country’s top prosecutor, said on Monday that those demanding a public inquiry were jumping on the “bandwagon of the far-right“.
Starmer’s attempts to disregard the growing public anger over the issue as a function of the so-called “far-right” were undercut just hours later, however, with the influential Blue Labour campaign group breaking with the PM to call for an inquiry to “give voice to the many thousands of forgotten victims,” who suffered some of “the worst series of atrocities that have taken place in Britain since the war”.
The group wrote: “For many of us in Blue Labour, the left’s inability to face up to the awful reality of the organised grooming and rape of young girls by men of mostly Pakistani origin across English towns severed our faith in progressive politics for good.”
The Labour peer Lord Glasman-founded group added that “progressives denied, obfuscated, equivocated, averted their eyes, changed the subject. Anything but look the dark side of multiculturalism squarely in the eye”. The group lamented that “many are still doing that today when they immediately pivot to talking about the far-right or Elon Musk.”
Both Blue Labour and Mr Farage have argued that previous reports, including the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) from Professor Alexis Jay, were insufficient, with the Reform boss branding the report as a “whitewash”.
While those who have raised the alarm about the scale of the abuse and the politically correct failures of authorities were long branded by the left and legacy media as racists, Mr Farage said Tuesday that the real racism was against the young white British girls who were victimised by mostly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men and who were ignored by police and other local officials for fear of appearing racist.
Indeed, a previous report found that officers at the Greater Manchester Police were told to focus on “other ethnicities” in the early 2000s as a group of around 100 South Asian men were left free to sexually abuse 57 young girls in the area. A separate report found that police in Rotherham had told the father of a missing girl that the town would “erupt” if it were made known that young white girls were being preyed upon by Muslim grooming gangs.
Victims were often ignored by police and social services officials, often under the pretence that the young girls were wilfully engaging in sexual activities with their abusers.
“They knew all along what was going on. They knew crimes were being committed, but they just told my mum and dad I was making lifestyle choices,” one victim remarked. “How is being raped by dozens of men a lifestyle choice? Why would any girl of 15 want to do that?”
In addition to being ignored by authorities, many victims faced intimidation from members of grooming gangs to keep quiet, with the Jay report finding that child victims “had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.”
Due to the prevalence of violent threats and the blind eye turned by authorities, many believe that the true scale of the Muslim child rape gangs has yet to be exposed.
Writing in The Express, Mr Farage said he had been told that young white girls in as many as 50 towns and cities in England may have been preyed on, saying: “It is a stain on the nation that justice has still not been done.”