--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- John Bickley: This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for 40% off. Terms apply.
--:-- John Bickley: And I would say very respectfully to the Prime Minister, it's not about you, it is about the victims. Be a leader, not a lawyer. We know that people were scared to tell the truth because they thought they would be called racist. If we want to stop this from ever happening again, we cannot be afraid. The Labour Party has adopted the APPG definition of Islamophobia. That same APPG report said talking about sex groomers was an example of Islamophobia. This is exactly why people are scared to tell the truth.
--:-- John Bickley: That was British Conservative leader Kimmy Badenok calling out British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his handling of the so-called grooming gangs scandal. The scandal has been highlighted in recent days by Elon Musk, who has suggested that various British officials, including the prime minister, are complicit in the cover-up. The extent and severity of the scandal, many say, should result in resignations and criminal charges against those who enabled it.
--:-- John Bickley: In this episode, we sit down with an expert from the London-based Legatum Institute to discuss the UK's grooming gang scandal and what action must be taken now to address it. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, January 11th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Hey, guys, producer Brandon here. My sleep in 2034 was awful. Tossing and turning all night, waking up exhausted. That all changed when I found Beam's Dream Powder, a science-backed, healthy nighttime blend for sleep. Other sleep aids can cause next-day grogginess, but Dream contains a powerful, all-natural blend of reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, apigenin, and melatonin to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. Try Beam's best-selling Dream Powder and get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to shopbeam.com slash wire and use code WIRE at checkout. That's shop B-E-A-M slash WIRE. Use code WIRE for up to 40% off.
--:-- John Bickley: Joining us to discuss the horrific grooming gang scandal in the UK is Guy Dampier, a senior researcher at the London Legatum Institute. Guy, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Guy Dampier: Pleasure as always.
--:-- John Bickley: For some context for our listeners, how did these grooming gangs first come to light?
--:-- Guy Dampier: So the scandal itself dates back to the early years of the 2010s, although the actual cases date back into the 1990s and possibly even beyond. It started with a journalist called Andrew Norfolk at the Times of London. He started doing investigations based on court documents that he'd seen. And he gradually revealed that there were gangs of largely Pakistani origin men in the north of England who had been grooming and then sexually abusing underage white girls, often in deeply sadistic ways.
--:-- Guy Dampier: This really, really burst into the mainstream properly when his stories about a small town called Rotherham resulted in an inquiry. And the inquiry found that in the small town of 250,000 people, 1,500 girls have been abused there between 1997 and 2013, and the police had failed to stop it. The council had failed to stop it. Sometimes it had been because they were incompetent. Sometimes it had been because there was a certain degree of corruption going on. But a lot of the time it was because they were afraid of being called racist. And that's because most of these child abusers were members of the Pakistani community. And that community was only about 5,000 people large.
--:-- Guy Dampier: So although the exact number of perpetrators is very difficult to ascertain, one academic report found that one in 73 Muslim men between the ages of 16 and 60 in Rotherham had been prosecuted for the crime, which is a staggering number. And that was followed by inquiries in some other places like Telford and Rochdale, and they found thousands more victims. So the real number of victims of these gangs may well be over 10,000.
--:-- John Bickley: Why has the public outrage over this sparked anew now?
--:-- Guy Dampier: So when the story originally broke, it was in the British press. And if it appeared overseas, it would have been in the pages of the foreign newspapers. Now it's on Twitter, it's on X. And people have been posting extracts from the sentencing remarks of the trials. And they contain some absolutely shocking, shocking details. So that suddenly has gone viral, and it's brought attention to it.
--:-- John Bickley: Can it really be true that thousands of girls were raped while the police looked the other way because they didn't want to be called racist? That the fathers who tried to rescue their daughters were arrested by the police rather than them arresting the abusers? And that girls as young as 11 were being gang-raped in British towns?
--:-- Guy Dampier: So the fact the information was coming from official reports with very clinical, very bloodless language that made it very hard to deny. And I think it made it very evocative. Right. And I looked at some of these court documents, and they truly are surreal in the depravity they detail.
--:-- John Bickley: Are there still people who are trying to deny the truth of this?
--:-- Guy Dampier: Oh, definitely. And it all comes down to that tricky issue of ethnicity. Not just because some people still fear being called racist, but because it's very hard for some people to accept that many of the criminals involved were abusing these girls because of the color of their skin.
--:-- John Bickley: In the transcripts, they often call the victims white slags or white whores. And over the last few decades, it's been a strong pressure from the media, from politicians in Britain to support anti-racism and multiculturalism. And those aren't necessarily bad things, but it's generally meant telling white people that they're racist and they are the ones that need to learn to live with the cultures of other people.
--:-- Guy Dampier: And the grooming gang scandal is a stake through the heart of that. Because what it shows is that the greatest race hate crime in Britain was against whites. And it shows that some parts of these foreign cultures are in fact bad.
--:-- John Bickley: You know, a lot of the abusers felt that white girls were loose or they were easy, and that because they were outside of their own community, they were fair game.
--:-- Guy Dampier: So over the years, various left-wing activists and academics have worked quite hard trying to deny the reality. They've tried to muddle the statistics. They've pointed to white child abusers who, of course, do exist. But nobody's ever been able to point to this kind of massive reuse of one group by another. It really is unique.
--:-- John Bickley: So what can be done and what is being done about these grooming gangs?
--:-- Guy Dampier: So the current battle in Parliament is about whether there should be a national inquiry. So there's been a big child abuse inquiry over the last few years called the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse. But it wasn't about the grooming gangs, and the phrase grooming gangs doesn't even appear in the final report. So even though it's the biggest recent child abuse scandal, there's still this desire to look away.
--:-- John Bickley: One father that GB News recently spoke to, called Jack, has spoken out about how he was arrested by police officers when he tried to rescue his daughter from her abusers.
--:-- Jack: I was arrested outside, put in a police car, told me that I would be arrested to go in the house and don't go back. I was that mad and furious, I went back to the flat. In a few minutes, police were back. But this time in a van, and it were only a few minutes, they must have known how we're going back. So they were watching this flat where your daughter was being abused. They weren't going in to stay with her, but they did go in to arrest you twice.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah. They arrested me a second time, took me down at the police station about an hour, hour and a half later, took me outside and said right go home because if you go back to that flat we going to rest here for stalking the occupants of that house.
--:-- John Bickley: He's one of the many who are backing a call for a national inquiry, pointing out that the last inquiry that they had only looked at six towns. And of those six, only one of those is one of the 50 where we know that a grooming gang has operated. So they've deliberately been looking in the wrong places.
--:-- John Bickley: In Parliament this week, we've had Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, and he's raised this issue of the independent inquiry into child sex abuse. He said that the inquiry was like a shotgun shot. You know, it had covered a wide variety of issues, but there was only a little subsection on grooming gangs. So he said what we needed now is we need a rifle shot, something that's very specific, that's aimed just to this issue, and that really takes the target down.
--:-- John Bickley: But even if we get a national inquiry, we're going to need a lot more. There have been inquiries in various towns, but lots of them have had weak recommendations. They've been ignored or just you know nothing's changed. So we're going to have to look at tougher measures. One of the most obvious one of those is to deport those who are guilty of these crimes. You know, a lot of them are either Pakistani citizens or they're eligible for it. But despite that, not one of them has ever been deported. And that's because of our human rights laws. So those need to change.
--:-- John Bickley: It's absolutely unconscionable that we have victims who can you know walk in the supermarket and see their abuser looking back at them.
--:-- John Bickley: Another thing is punishment. Loads of these abusers have only served about half their time in prison. So you've got gang rapists who've been sentenced for six years, but they've only served 2.5 years. And then they're pretty much free and they go back to the community and they're welcomed with maybe not open arms, but they're certainly not kicked out.
--:-- John Bickley: And finally, we need to look at the police and we need to look at the local government officials who failed. Despite the inquiries finding failures over and over again, none of them have ever gone to jail. In fact, none of them have ever lost their job. They've been allowed to resign at best. So a lot of them had then just moved from one public sector job to another.
--:-- John Bickley: So one thing I've suggested is that we should have a public sector blacklist, where the public servants who are named in inquiries as having failed are barred from working for the public sector or on any private sector projects that involve taxpayer money for a period of years.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question. Is this still going on and to what extent?
--:-- Guy Dampier: Unfortunately, yes. I'd love to say otherwise, especially after all these inquiries. But the truth is, there are still arrests going on every year. In the first year since it was launched, the Grooming Gang Task Force was involved in 550 arrests. So that gives you an idea of the scale of the problem.
--:-- John Bickley: There's a lot of work to do, and we're going to have to be much tougher. I think we all agree this must be stamped out, whatever it takes.
--:-- John Bickley: Guy, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Guy Dampier: Thank you very much for having me on.
--:-- [Theme music starts playing]
--:-- John Bickley: That was the Legatum Institute's Guy Dampier, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
