There have been numerous surveys over the years intended to prove that conservatives are more stupid than liberals and vice versa, so many that it is almost impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion. It is of course an important issue and so, in lieu of yet another survey, could I suggest that you watch a single edition of The News Agents podcast and you should be left in no doubt as to the correct answer. Whether it be Jon Sopel asserting the brilliance of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to Washington, or almost anything Emily Maitlis says on any issue, or just to see Lewis Goodall – merely to catch the faintest glimpse – will immediately direct you to the correct conclusion. Stupid is as stupid does, as I believe Forrest Gump’s mother was fond of saying.
It’s the response of the white institutions to the grooming gangs that really needs investigating
I watched Maitlis interviewing the independent (formerly Reform) MP Rupert Lowe on this asinine show. Mr Lowe recently crowdfunded, and has now successfully launched, an independent inquiry into the ‘grooming gangs scandal’ which dominated many of our headlines last year and looks likely to continue so doing. His decision to have an independent inquiry was made because he has one or two doubts about the government’s own inquiry. So does almost everybody who has been asked to take part in it, as it happens. The suspicion is that the government, harried into ‘doing something’ in response to the public and political outrage which the whole business engendered, has chosen to kick the ball as far into the long grass as possible and specifically ignore any racial or cultural link associated with the crimes, thus undermining the whole point of the investigation. It does not wish to annoy the Muslim vote in the many Labour-held constituencies where they are a significant presence, this aversion being partly ideological but also, of course, pragmatic.
Maitlis did not seem to think there was a need for an independent inquiry. She repeatedly accused Lowe of racialising the issue because he had been talking about ‘Pakistani rape gangs’ rather than rape gangs which were of some other provenance. Why concentrate on the Asian gangs, she said, when we know from ‘the figures’ that there are many more incidences of rapes and child grooming among white people than there are among Asians? This is a familiar accusation and qualifies as the first irrefutable evidence that liberals are stupid, because anybody who advances it does not understand the concept of ‘proportions’. Of course more offences are committed by whitey, because whitey accounts for 83 per cent of the population and Asians only about 9 per cent. (Or accounted for, perhaps – those figures I quoted are from the 2021 census and have almost certainly drawn closer together over the intervening five years.) But still, if you look at the latest court figures you will see that Asians are disproportionately convicted of sexual assaults on females (134 in a year, as opposed to 743 for white men) and for rapes of women (55 convictions of Asians, 411 of whites).
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But that is not the main objection to Maitlis’s attack upon Lowe. That would be the simple point that neither his inquiry nor the government’s inquiry is actually into Asian grooming or rape gangs. They are more properly into the complete failure of the overwhelmingly white institutions – the police, social services, councils, local politicians – to take the victims seriously and instead to ignore the matter entirely.
That is why a specific investigation into the victims of Asian men – almost all of them Muslim, by the way – was needed, because the authorities responded in a way which was unique. You would think that Emily and the other lefties making the same points might understand that. But they don’t seem to. Professor Alexis Jay, who led the inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, observed that it was out of ‘their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away’, that the institutions failed to act.
It is the response of the white institutions, then, which needed to be investigated, because their approach to appalling crimes committed by Asian men differed from their response to the same crimes being committed by white men. And yet the dimmer elements of the left cannot grasp this and continue, as Baroness Kennedy did, to assert that ‘rich white men’ run grooming gangs too.
This category error of Maitlis’s, the failure to grasp the point, is very common when it comes to race. It was there, for example, when the former editor of this magazine, Fraser Nelson, was interviewed last year by the Triggernometry presenter Konstantin Kisin about what constitutes being ‘English’. Fraser – more often a conservative, but on this issue a liberal – stuck to his line that anybody born in England was English. Not just British, but English. I find this belief more rooted in faith and ideology than in rationality, because there is no rationality to it at all.
Kisin asked Fraser whether, if his children had been born in Japan, they would be Japanese. Looking uncomfortable, Fraser said yes, they would. He would not for a moment countenance that the term ‘English’ might have a racial aspect to it. Even Wikipedia defines English people as being ‘an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common ancestry’.
Fraser’s position was to most people, I think, an absurdity – and had been adopted simply to accord with his political view, which is that immigration is good and poses no cultural or existential threat to the indigenous majority. That Fraser knows it is an absurdity was evident in his blank avowal that anyone born in England was de facto English – when only seconds earlier he had described himself as ‘Scottish’. Fraser was born in Cornwall.
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