After months of turmoil, the chair and the terms of reference of the government’s national grooming gangs inquiry have at last been announced. The inquiry will be led by Baroness Anne Longfield, a Labour peer and former children’s commissioner. She will investigate the ‘systemic, institutional and individual’ failures to deal with these gangs and to protect their victims. It is unclear still what shape the inquiry will take, and whether or not it will be a whitewash. Some survivors have already criticised the decision to make the inquiry chair a Labour peer.
The failure to treat these offences as racially aggravated points to a systemic problem in our institutions
But perhaps the key question will be how seriously it will take the central political controversy of these crimes and how the state has failed to deal with them: race and religion. We are told it will ‘examine how ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in responses at a local and national level, as well as other issues of denial.’ In particular, it will ‘consider the background (including ethnicity, religion and culture)’ of the perpetrators. This is referring to gangs of predominantly Pakistani-Muslim men and their victims, largely vulnerable white girls.
This is quite right. But if the inquiry is aiming to look at systemic and institutional failures around these issues, there is one problem its terms of reference do not mention that has long been staring the justice system in the face. Given these offences are widely understood to be the worst set of race-hate crimes Britain has ever seen, why have they never been treated by the justice system as racially or religiously aggravated? The British state today has a bewildering array of offences aimed at punishing ‘racism’ and ‘hate’. So why has there been no official reckoning with these decades of violent, heinous largely anti-white hate crimes? Indeed, it is difficult to find a single example of the British courts treating these appalling crimes in this way.
When I asked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for an example of a case where this had happened, the state prosecutor was unable to provide any. A spokesperson said:
‘We prosecute the right person for the right offence, regardless of nationality, and bring offenders of these heinous crimes to justice – this year our specialist unit which prosecutes organised child sexual abuse has seen 41 defendants jailed for a total of over 600 years.
The lawprovides that certain offences can be charged as racially-aggravated crimes – this does not include rape – however our prosecutors can still seek tougher sentences if there is evidence a crime is motivated by hostility based on race.’
So the CPS ‘can’ seek these tougher sentences – but has it?
On the question of sentences being uplifted by the courts for being hate crimes, the spokesperson added:
‘Any case where there is verbal abuse of the victim(s) or similar demonstration of hostility based on their race, colour, nationality or ethnicity at the time of the offence or immediately before or after would make the offence a racial hate crime and trigger the statutory uplift which allows the judge to increase the length of sentence given to the perpetrator.’
So racial abuse during the offending ‘would’ make an offence a hate crime and automatically ‘trigger the statutory uplift’ of a sentence by the court.
Anyone familiar with the details of these crimes can see that practically all of the CPS criteria for demonstrating an offence is racially or religiously aggravated apply to most of the rape gang cases. There wasn’t just ‘derogatory language towards ethnicity, race, nationality or religion’. Many of these offences were ‘sustained’, with ordeals often lasting hours, and some victims suffering abuse that went on for years. There was often the involvement of ‘excessive violence’, like the cigarettes stubbed out on victims’ naked bodies, and undoubtedly there was ‘cruelty, humiliation or degradation’. In statements from perpetrators like, ‘We’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government’ we can plainly see ‘hostility based on the victim’s race or religion’. There was often repeat offending; in the majority of cases, crimes indeed ‘escalated in severity and frequency’. It is undeniable that in many cases, ‘opportunistic offending’ against vulnerable girls soon became ‘systematic and regular targeting’ of the victims. And there were often many bystanders and accomplices, with most cases indeed having ‘multiple perpetrators condoning and encouraging’ the offence.
So when the CPS says that prosecutors ‘can… seek tougher sentences if there is evidence a crime is motivated by hostility based on race’, there has often been more than enough evidence.
But in practice, has this happened? It ought to be very obvious if it had, given that a key element of hate crime laws, first introduced by New Labour in 1998, is that the court ‘must state in open court that the offence is so aggravated’. At sentencing, there are statutory obligations to make sure relevant aggravating factors are taken into account. Generally after the conviction of a complex case like a grooming gang trial, a written sentencing note will be prepared for the judge by the CPS where it can put forward alleged aggravating factors (the defence will then have an opportunity to challenge them). In the sentencing remarks, the judge is expected to state whether they agree or disagree. While there is no such offence as ‘racially aggravated rape’ in and of itself, since 2000, it has been possible for a sentencing uplift to be applied to any crime found to be motivated by ‘hostility or prejudice’ towards someone on the basis of race or religion.
What this means is that wherever we have the sentencing remarks of grooming gang trials – and we now have several more, thanks to the tireless efforts of Adam Wren and Melisa Tourt at Open Justice UK – we can see very plainly whether the court has considered racial aggravation in these crimes, even to deny it.
Adam Wren says he has ‘not seen any instance where racial motivation was pursued as an aggravating factor’ in these cases. There was no racial aggravation considered for the five Kirklees and Dewsbury offenders sentenced at Leeds Crown Court in 2022, one of whom said: ‘we’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government’. Nor was it for the Rotherham gang sentenced in 2016, one of whom called his victim a ‘white bitch’ and ‘trash’ as he was raping her. Sentencing a defendant this year, a judge said of the attitude of several abusers toward a ten-year-old girl: ‘They had not been with a white girl; sex before marriage was forbidden, but this innocent corrupted child would do, to satisfy their sexual desires.’ Yet Judge Paul Batty made no reference to racial aggravation in sentencing.
Sickeningly, these are by no means the first grooming gang trials we know of where apparent racial aggravation has been entirely ignored. In 2017, an 18-strong Newcastle grooming gang of mostly Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin were sentenced for a campaign of horrific offences of rape and sexual assault. During one of the many trials, the jury heard how in 2014, one of the gang members had been caught travelling without a tube ticket by a female ticket inspector when he furiously exclaimed: ‘White women are good for only one thing – for people like me to fuck and use as trash.’ The gang showed similar contempt for their white victims, plying vulnerable women and girls with drink and drugs before raping them. ‘These were profoundly racist crimes’, said Lord Macdonald, a former Director of Public Prosecutions. Yet racial aggravation was not reflected in their sentencing. The Attorney General even faced calls to review the sentences for their leniency, led by Conservative MP Mike Penning, a former policing and justice minister, and taken up by the then solicitor general, Robert Buckland. But they fell on deaf ears and the cause was soon dropped.
Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced a Rochdale grooming gang in 2012 stated bluntly: ‘All of you treated [your victims] as though they were worthless and beyond all respect. I believe that one of the factors that led to that was that they were not of your community or religion.’ Yet somehow aggravation didn’t come into his sentencing equation. The following year, professor Mark Walters, a criminologist at the University of Sussex, argued that the case did have the hallmarks of a hate crime and should have been treated as such, warning that ‘police, prosecutors and the courts’ should not ‘deny the racial or religious element of a case’ simply because it might stir ‘cultural tensions’. Walters cogently explains how racial contempt underpins these crimes’ pitiless dehumanisation: ‘many victims who are targeted because of their racial or religious background are selected because they are seen as vulnerable and because they are deemed as less deserving of social respect than those from the offender’s “in-group”.’
Like with the rest of the grooming gangs scandal, the failure to treat these offences as racially aggravated points to a systemic problem in our institutions. It is the combined responsibility of the CPS, the police and the courts to make sure a hate crime is successfully prosecuted. It also depends to no small degree on the prevailing political winds. In 2004 came the invention of Hate Crime Scrutiny Panels, where representatives of various ‘victim groups’ are effectively invited to lobby and monitor police and prosecutors to make sure they are being sufficiently attentive to alleged hate crimes against their group. Needless to say, in our system of asymmetrical multiculturalism, there are no groups expected to speak for white girls on these panels.
It is not as if the British state is averse to considering that sexual crimes might be racially aggravated. In 2015, child abuser Jamal Nasir was convicted of a racially aggravated offence for sexually assaulting two girls under the age of 13 because they were Asian and were said to have therefore suffered cultural shame as a result of the offences. This ruling – that Asians suffer more from being raped than whites – was later upheld at the Court of Appeal. Likewise, in October, the CPS was quick to announce the charging of an alleged rape of a Sikh woman by a white man in Walsall as a ‘religiously aggravated rape’, along with a ‘religiously/racially aggravated assault’. The outcry at the racial element of this offence was loud and immediate – Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood herself immediately weighed in to call it ‘horrific’ – in stark contrast to decades of official denialism and mute silence about the racist rape gangs. Before that recent offence, the only reference to ‘racially aggravated rape’ yielded by a web search are Sentencing Council guidelines from 2005, which describe it as among crimes ‘where the victim has been targeted because of his or her membership of a vulnerable minority’. Which is to say: not if they’ve been targeted as a ‘white slag’, as one victim was called in Rotherham.
Two-tier justice is a phrase that might seem glib, but it really shouldn’t. It is not just the work of a handful of errant woke judges, it’s the product of the entire architecture of Britain’s ‘anti-racist’ state. Tony Blair’s Labour government’s quest for ‘permanent and irrevocable change’ didn’t just mean ‘rubbing the right’s noses in diversity’ via immigration. It entailed creating a special new category of crime that functioned along principles of left-wing identity politics. As the debate that introduced them made clear, this special seriousness was never intended to apply to crimes against white victims; in practice the law has almost always worked that way.
It was the MacPherson report, the lynchpin of the New Labour cultural revolution, that accused that the Metropolitan police and implicitly, wider British society, of being ‘institutionally racist’. In a way, that charge has now come true. The British justice system’s treatment of the rape gangs scandal shows it is institutionally racist when it comes to white victims.
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