The United Kingdom’s Labour Party blocked an inquiry into Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s conduct as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, which was charged with investigating a massive child-sex grooming operation in Oldham more than a decade ago.
That’s according to The Telegraph of London and other news outlets.
The story has been in the news as of late in large part because of Elon Musk, who has been posting about the numerous child-sex grooming operations conducted by Pakistani immigrants to the U.K. In many cases, British authorities ignored or refused to investigate the gangs for fear of being labeled “racist.”
The Telegraph reported that Jessica Phillips, a Labour member of Parliament, said that the decision to launch an investigation into the child-sex rings that allegedly operated between 2011 to 2014 should be “for Oldham council alone.”
On X, former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss noted that Phillips also serves as “Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls,” to which Musk replied, “she deserves to be in prison.”
Musk has posted relentlessly about this topic in the last week.
He responded to another Telegraph story in which former Member of Parliament Simon Danczuk accused ex-Labour Chairman Tony Lloyd of wanting to suppress the story and its link to Muslim immigrants because it might “have adverse electoral impact.”
Musk posted that “incentives explain behavior.”
On Friday, Musk doubled down, posting that the “mass rapes in Britain are still happening.”
Starmer responded to Musk’s postings by saying that his criticism of the government’s behavior is “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Oldham wasn’t the only city alleged to have mass Pakistani child sex-grooming gangs.
“Girls as young as 11 were groomed and raped across a number of towns in England—including Oldham, Rochdale, Rotherham, and Telford—over a decade ago in a national scandal that was exposed in 2013,” Sky News reported.
The story is more than a decade old, but has been exploding on X.
Author J.K. Rowling wrote, “The details emerging about what the rape gangs (why call them ‘grooming’ gangs? It’s like calling those who stab people to death ‘knife owners’) did to girls in Rotherham are downright horrific. The allegations of possible police corruption in the case are almost beyond belief.”
Sam Ashworth-Hayes, a Telegraph columnist, has been posting details of the sex-grooming cases and the failure of authorities to do anything about it because they feared it would inflame “racial tensions.”
In some cases, police arrested fathers trying to rescue their daughters from the Pakistani rape gangs.
Journalist Ben Sixsmith wrote that the reason this story is only now blowing up despite being more than a decade old is because of the institutional actors involved downplaying the extent of the crimes and making sure the story got as little traction as possible.
He called it a “conspiracy of murmuring.”
“The establishment—that is, the organs of the state, the traditional media, and the web of charities and [nongovernmental organizations] that some of us have called ‘the Blob’—have addressed the scandal in the most minimal terms,” Sixsmith wrote. “ … Overall the issue has been obscured—not swept under the rug, no, but placed neatly in a drawer.”
Sixsmith further noted that the criminals faced minimal consequences, officials even less, and that there was generally a denial that there was any kind of larger issue in the Pakistani community.
