“Are you non-violent then?” my colleague asked. “Yeah, we are non-violent,” the then leader of the extreme-right English Defence League (EDL), Tommy Robinson, replied. “So, when you just said when the mic was off that if there are Muslim extremists outside the university campus next year, that ‘you’d kick their heads in’, do you stand by that?” I gulped. I tried to hold the microphone steady. It was a freezing day in December 2010, and BBC journalist Phil Kemp and I were sitting inside Robinson’s black SUV in a car park in Luton. “I do personally stand by that,” he said. “I’m not going to stand there and watch extremists recruit my youth in my town. Not any more.”
Phil and I had spent the morning in the Bedfordshire town for a BBC Radio 4 documentary. Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly had recently detonated two bombs in Stockholm; he had studied in Luton and was living there at the time of the bombings. This was the latest in a line of links between the area and terrorist activity dating back to the 1990s.
I’ve been reminded of that day with Robinson – whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – as I’ve watched with horror how the rape of young girls by groups of men, predominantly of Pakistani heritage, has been used as a grotesque political football. As part of a flurry of incendiary posts, Elon Musk called for Robinson’s release from prison, falsely linking his sentence to his discussion of the rape of thousands of girls across England over the past three decades. (Robinson was jailed for contempt of court.) Making that BBC documentary, it was clear that the truth is often murky.
In 2010 we saw the public-facing, non-violent Robinson’s mask slip. His interpretation of Islam is highly questionable despite having claimed to have read the Koran. But he was right that there were some Islamist extremists living in Luton who despised Britain. “I’m working to establish the Islamic state,” one man told us. “I want both Muslims and non-Muslims to live under Sharia [religious Islamic law].”
We saw too how Robinson and his EDL colleagues would latch on to true stories and embroider them to suit their political ends. He told us a well-respected local headteacher had been forced to resign after refusing to allow a Muslim girl to wear a head covering at school. When we tracked the teacher down, we discovered that, yes, one girl had wished to wear a hijab to school. And yes, he had declined the request. But he didn’t resign over the incident. That was, he said, “an absolute load of rubbish”.
I see the same kind of fabrications in the comments that have flooded social media over the grooming gangs scandal. None more so than those from Musk, who is arguably using the plight of vulnerable girls for his own purposes. Noticeably, there has been little, if any, attention paid to the victims of these crimes. Yet, apparently competing narratives can be simultaneously true. Those who were some of the first to raise the alarm on these crimes – such as the Labour MP Ann Cryer as far back as 2002 – were branded “racist”. Robinson highlighted the issue when others denied there was a problem, but he was not the first to expose the scandal, played no part in bringing about (limited) justice and he is not in prison today for speaking out. In fact, Robinson’s actions in 2018 came close to causing a trial regarding one rape gang to collapse.
Claims that the mainstream media has “ignored” the grooming scandal are demonstrably false, too. The Times’s Andrew Norfolk published hundreds of articles on the child rapes perpetrated in Rotherham and elsewhere from 2011. Earlier, in 2007, Julie Bindel wrote about the rape of girls in northern England for the Sunday Times Magazine. In 2017 the BBC broadcast a prime-time drama, Three Girls, based on events in Rochdale. It followed a Radio 4 documentary in 2013, and two editions of Panorama in 2014 and 2015. Grooming – Every Parent’s Nightmare was broadcast on BBC TV in 2011. Further documentaries were aired in 2017 and 2020. (You can find all of these by googling “BBC documentary grooming”.)
Has there been enough publicity of these abhorrent crimes? Maybe not. But have they been ignored? No. Have police officers, social services and local authorities who failed in their duty to protect these children, who were told of the most hideous sexual abuse imaginable but did not act, been adequately held to account? No. Have enough rapists been imprisoned for their crimes? Absolutely not.
Keir Starmer was right to call out Musk and others’ “lies and disinformation”. But it is shameful that we still do not know the true scale of the depravity that has taken place. In 2022, after seven years, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) – which included a strand on the operation of rape gangs (but excluded the towns already known about) – could not determine its extent. It is for survivors to judge whether there should be a new national inquiry. It is not “jumping on the far-right bandwagon”, as Starmer has said, to believe there should be. But any work at scale will take years, and action must happen now. It is a disgrace that having accepted the IICSA’s recommendations in May 2023, the Conservative government enacted none by the time it left office. The Home Secretary announced on 6 January that failing to report child sexual abuse will become a new offence this spring. More is needed. These girls – now women – should not have to wait any longer to see change.
[See also: England in pieces]
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap