A boy throws a missile at police during Wednesday’s Epsom ‘protest’

Last weekend a woman reported that she had been raped by a gang of men outside a church in Epsom, Surrey (this is a few miles from where I live), between 2am and 4am after leaving the Labyrinth night-club. Over the past few days, the police have not issued any descriptions of the alleged attackers, leading people online to “put two and two together” and assume that this means the attackers must have been asylum seekers living in nearby hotels or houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) or at the very least were not white. Comments like “no description is a description” and “it’s those doctors and engineers again” can be found under any link to a newspaper article about the alleged incident on Facebook. Yesterday, a ‘demonstration’ took place in Epsom town centre, in the middle of rush hour, allegedly by “angry locals” but no doubt supported by organised groups of racists from outside town; their supporters on social media have been taunting the police whose job it was to contain them, calling them ‘traitors’ and the demonstrators “English patriots who have had enough”, cheering as ‘projectiles’ are thrown at them and they took a step back as the ‘demonstrators’ moved forward up Epsom high street. Epsom is fairly posh, with the exception of a council estate (or former council estate) to the north of the town centre; the seat was solidly Tory from its inception in 1974, regularly returning its MPs with more than 50% or even 60%, until 2024 when a Liberal Democrat was elected. It is unlikely that most of the ‘demonstrators’ depicted are anything like local.

Complaints about “two-tier policing”, first heard after the riots following the 2024 Southport triple murder, have been heard in relation to this ‘protest’, both on social media and on the new-right TV channels like Talk TV. The complaint is that the police are nowhere near as heavy-handed with pro-Palestinian protesters in London as they are with “decent honest English” when they protest against “third world vermin raping our women”. The obvious reason is that these mobs, including many with convictions for domestic violence and other criminal behaviour, went on the rampage after the Southport murders in an attempted pogrom against Britain’s ethnic minorities and immigrant communities; they did not distinguish between the two then and still do not. Demonstrations against the Gaza genocide have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and many of the arrests have been for politically manufactured speech crimes such as holding up placards supporting Palestine Action, the banned group that sabotaged military hardware intended for use by the Israeli military. The protests have been subject to restrictions: a demonstration outside BBC Broadcasting House was banned because it was near a synagogue on a Sunday, while an order was issued that pots and pans not be used (to ensure that the noise could be heard in the Israeli embassy) in one demonstration in Kensington. The policing of the ‘demonstration’ in Epsom yesterday was not especially heavy-handed; riot police were deployed with shields because previous protests in similar circumstances based on similar accusations have turned violent.

The conspiracy theory as to why no description of the attackers has been published by the police is that that they are asylum seekers and that the police and politicians are more concerned for asylum seekers’ welfare than for the rights of the ordinary citizen. A variant on it is that the attackers will claim to be under 18 and that the police will not identify them after arrest or charge because of this claim. (A man touting this theory has been putting out videos on Twitter, alleging that the police know who the men are and are lying to the public.) Ex-cops both on Twitter and in the new-right media have been repeating variations on these theories when they should know better. One reason they have not been able to release descriptions of the men is that they are still patiently trying to get information out of a traumatised victim; another is that they do indeed know who they are but need to gather actionable evidence to arrest them, so that they will not have to release them under investigation a few days later. Another reason is that they are trying to find corroborating evidence for the claim and maybe even that they are having trouble doing that. (A few years ago in Oxford, a teenage girl reported being raped by two men who arrived in a van; police could not find any evidence that said van was in the area at all, and closed the case.) The fact that the area of the alleged rape is covered by CCTV has been amply mentioned by the racists on social media, but this possibility never occurs to them.

Yes, no word from the police for several days might look suspicious, but sometimes the police have to watch what information they put in the public domain to avoid endangering the inquiry. Racists, the sort who assume that such an attack must be the doing of a Black or Asian person, an immigrant or an asylum seeker, do not have the right to have their assumptions confirmed or addressed by the police when they are trying to solve a report of a serious crime. 

Tamara Jernigan, American astronaut

Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw the video when I had just arrived from work; when I tried to open the app again to re-watch the video and maybe reply, the app had refreshed and the video had gone, so I have no way of finding it or its author. Tamara is married to a man I’m guessing is from Taiwan: he has a Chinese name spelled the “old way” which I also can’t remember. Their new friends habitually call her ‘T’ and her husband also a pair of letters because their names are supposedly too foreign or unfamiliar for them to try to pronounce. Americans, she said, always favour ‘comfort’ over accuracy and it was nothing personal. I disagree: to not even bother to try to pronounce someone’s name is simply lazy and disrespectful.

The name Tamara is not even difficult to pronounce in the least. It’s not even a name that is unknown in the US. Wikipedia has a list of famous people with that name and there are a number in the US: Tamara Braun (actress), Tamara Brooks (choral conductor), Tamara Feldman (actress), Tamara Hope (Canadian actress and musician), Tamara Johnson-George (volleyball player), Tamara Stocks (basketball player), Tamara Jernigan (astronaut), though maybe that’s over these people’s heads, figuratively if not literally. In Judy Blume’s ‘Fudge’ book series, the title character has a younger sister born during the series called Tamara Roxanne, though they end up calling her Tootsie. Americans tend to pronounce it with the stress on the middle syllable rather than the first as the Croatian Tamara pronounces her name, but still, it’s not at all unfamiliar. When I mentioned this in a social media post earlier, someone pointed out that the name Tamara has the same consonants as the word ‘tomorrow’, so there’s no real excuse to just shorten it to ‘T’ (not even Tammy or for that matter Tootsie).

I was reminded of the chapter in Maya Angelou’s childhood autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where she works as a servant to a wealthy local white woman, Viola Cullinan. She was named Marguerite Johnson at birth; the employer first calls her Margaret and then, at her friends’ suggestion, Mary. A colleague had been similarly renamed from Hallelujah to Glory, simply because she couldn’t be bothered to call her by her real name. (Angelou’s family called her Ritie; the name Maya originated with her brother who always called her “my sister” and this became My and then Maya.) The young Maya was not going to “let a white woman change her name for her own convenience” and explained that most Black people she knew were horrified by being “called out of their name”, in large part from being referred to by derogatory racial terms for generations. She dropped some precious crockery which Cullinan’s mother had brought from Virginia, and Cullinan was distraught. Her friend demanded, “was it Mary?” to which Cullinan responded, “her name’s Margaret, God damn it!”. As she fled the scene and never went back to the house, we don’t know if Viola Cullinan continued treating her employees in that way.

Chinese names are a bit more tricky, as they are tonal and getting the tone wrong can make a name mean something completely different (the word ‘Ma’ in Mandarin has five meanings including mother and horse, all differing by tone), but refusing to pronounce a mildly foreign name just sounds like racism. The attitude is that they are the dominant race in the world’s biggest superpower and they have no need to learn anything about any language or culture besides their own. Whether the people concerned say it’s “nothing personal” is immaterial; it’s plain rude and insulting to refuse to call someone by their name.

Image source: NASA.

In the last couple of weeks, two articles by white feminists have been published in the British right-wing media attacking the niqab, and peddling some very familiar generalisations about women who wear it. The first article, “No feminist should defend the niqab”, published on the website Unherd on 23rd February, was written by Joan Smith; the second, There’s nothing progressive about the niqab, was published by the Daily Telegraph on the 24th and was written by Julie Bindel. What the two articles have in common is that they rehash the same old arguments that we thought had been rebutted decades ago, and that neither show any sign of the author having spoken to any Muslim women who wear hijab or niqab at all.

Joan Smith kicks off by recounting an exchange between Zoe Gardner, a campaigner for immigrants’ welfare, and Colin Brazier, a GB News presenter whose Twitter feed consists of the familiar whinges about ‘illegals’, ‘woke’ and other bogeymen and women of the new far right. Brazier moaned about walking down Oxford Street and seeing evidence that Arabs or Muslims used the street:

Every time I walk down Oxford Street feels like an exercise in forgetting what – until recently – London was. The Arabic caterwauling. The waft of dope. The pimped cars. The Gulf vibe. The women in niqabs. The tat shops. A place of foregone grandeur and an irrecoverable England.

Zoe Gardner denounced the tweet as “total bollocks, but more importantly racist as fuck”. I’ve been to Oxford Street many a time and the western end of it is close to Edgware Road, which is one of London’s main Arab centres and has a number of Arab-run businesses including some cultural businesses such as restaurants. Oxford Street does have an Arabian Oud (perfume) shop at number 435 but apart from that, the businesses along Oxford Street are the standard British department and chain stores. The decline of Oxford Street has much to do with the decline of so many other British high streets and town centre malls, with the added disadvantage of being further away from most people’s homes than their actual town centre and being choked with traffic; yes, private cars and trucks cannot use it but buses and taxis are still traffic and there are still a few diesels (especially the cabs) even if many London buses are now electric. It’s not a pleasant place to shop and never has been; who wouldn’t rather go to a covered or at least pedestrianised mall than squeeze along the pavement of a road like Oxford Street?

But here’s the real issue with this exchange: a white man made a false, racist claim and a woman countered it, and here is Joan Smith, siding with a white man who whinged on Twitter about seeing signs of another culture and took a pot-shot against ‘foreign’ looking women rather than with the woman who defended other women — and yes, countering bigotry targeted at the niqab is defending women, not the men Smith and Bindel imagine force them to wear it. If anyone is mystified about why feminists who used to write for the Guardian are now showing up on right-wing websites, this is it: white feminism has become a reactionary ideology. It lines up with racists, even to the detriment of women’s rights. White feminists presume they know best; they do not listen to women, other than those that tell them what they want to hear. (To be clear: not all feminism by white women is white feminism. White feminism is a particular tendency.)

I’ve been Muslim for 27 years. I’ve known a number of women who wear hijab or niqab. They do so for different reasons but “men’s will”, as Bindel calls it, is usually not among them. Many simply wear it because it is a way of following Islam and following the way of the first generation of Muslims “to the max” and the women Companions (those who knew the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) did indeed cover their faces. Sometimes these are women who have converted or have got more religious at some point in their lives, sometimes not; sometimes their mothers, aunts etc. wore it, sometimes not. Some wear black or dull colours; some do not. Some wear it specifically to cut men out of their lives, to keep the male gaze off their bodies. I know one lady who lives in Morocco with her daughters and ex mother-in-law, and a few cats, and wears niqab when outside for that very reason; her former marriage was abusive, and she wants nothing to do with men. The behaviour and attitudes of many men in this day and age means that there are more women seeking ways to do that, and Islam offers a very obvious one. Back in 2006, I interviewed a sister who had been wearing it in Canada since her high-school days; that interview is here.

Smith compares it to the debate over “cultural relativism” in regard to FGM in the 1980s: feminists she argued with defended immigrant families’ right to practise FGM because “it’s their culture”. Well, if niqab meant injuring a woman’s face, that comparison might hold some value but it does not. FGM is irreversible, and girls die from it; niqab can just be taken off. “Feminists who criticise the niqab or the burqa are not attacking the women who wear it, but the ideology which promotes it,” she claims. But this exchange began when a bigot moaned about foreigners in the street, a woman hit back at him, and the ‘feminist’ took the white bigot’s side. Those people absolutely are attacking the women, and if feminists claim to care for women, they should consider the consequences for them of lining up with racists when they attack women for wearing something they disapprove of or practising some aspect of their culture they don’t understand. 

Image source: Pixabay.

Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth elected on a Reform UK slate in 2024 who subsequently went independent because his views on immigration were too extreme even for Nigel Farage, has now formed his own party, Restore Britain. Its policies include abolishing the BBC licence fee, abolishing inheritance tax, abolishing hosepipe bans (cutting immigration is meant to help with that), restricting postal voting, “restoring” the British pub and the High Street (by clamping down on immigrant associated businesses such as barber shops), abolishing foreign aid and the mass deportation of not only illegal migrants but also legal immigrants who they regard as unproductive or burdensome, and the removal of “COVID relics” and the annulment of convictions for breaking lockdown rules incurred during “the darkest time in recent British history, a time where our freedoms were trampled over all in the name of bent ‘science’”. They have not, so far, scored any defections by MPs but a few councillors have defected and some local activists previously associated with Reform, such as the leader of the “Pink Ladies” Orla Minihane (who a few weeks ago told us she wasn’t going to run for a council seat for Reform but dedicate herself to her new Rhiannon Whyte Foundation, named after a worker in a migrant hotel who was murdered by one of its residents; now we know why).

The party and its sole MP have been putting out lots of videos, mostly of Lowe giving speeches and attacking Nigel Farage more than any other single politician. There’s a video of Nigel Farage apparently backtracking on one policy statement and then another, with The Who’s song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as a backing track (not sure if Pete Townshend’s lawyers are onto it). Another is titled “National Restoration” and consists of a flickering array of old images of 20th-century England: steam trains, ladies in floral prints walking in pretty streets of small towns and sitting down to tea, red squirrels, the cliffs of Dover, RT buses, military band performances. “In 1997, Britain was in good shape,” the voice-over informs us. “We knew who we were, we were still one country; most importantly, the population was stable and immigration was under control.” 1997? Oh yes, the year Tony Blair was elected and eighteen years of Tory government ended. If Rupert Lowe likes Tory government so much, why doesn’t he just become a Tory? But the mention of 1997 makes all the images absurd. AEC Regent or RT buses were a London Transport mainstay from World War II through to the 60s which was finally withdrawn from service in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher first came to power; the route shown, number 152, had last used that type of bus in 1970. Red squirrels were as rare in most of England in 1997 as they are now. Steam trains only ran on preserved lines, as now. You don’t see too many women dressed quite like those in RB’s clips in 2024, but fashions change.

I remember 1997. I was 20 that year. Labour won the election with a landslide and pro-European, progressive parties won a very comfortable majority of the popular vote, with the Tories reduced to 30.6% and wiped out in Wales and Scotland. There was much demand for self-rule from both Wales and Scotland and for peace in Northern Ireland, which everyone knew would not be achieved with permanent direct rule. Immigration had been reduced since the late 1960s, but it was still possible to bring spouses very easily from the “New Commonwealth” countries such as India and Pakistan and many did; the 2001 Oldham riots and the terrorist attacks that year led to spousal migration being restricted so that anyone not making a good salary was excluded (Lowe’s policies include an end to this for countries not included on his “red list”). The Tories were widely derided, were hopelessly divided over Europe with the prime minister calling some of his own cabinet ‘bastards’ and reported as threatening to “f**king crucify” others; they had a reputation for meanness, imposing VAT on domestic fuel in breach of their manifesto, and attacking single mothers from the conference podium (at the time, the electronic dance band The Prodigy released a single called “Smack My Bitch Up”, which caused much controversy as you might guess; a BBC radio comedy show quoted a politician as saying the title was acceptable as it referred to a single mother).

The Blair dream went sour in his second term, but in 1997 there was a lot of optimism and joy at the result. There’s nothing to be optimistic about from Lowe’s pronouncements. Like Farage before him, he blames immigration for everything. Just today, he posted a rant about litter by the side of Britain’s motorways, moaning that “our country is increasingly becoming a third world dump”, and then proclaiming that his government will put “healthy Brits who consistently refuse work” out to work cleaning it up (this is actually a job we currently pay people for) and that there would be “no foreigners on benefits” under his rule either. Elsewhere on his Twitter feed, he has a side-swipe at “the healthy British shirking class”. In another one-minute video posted on Twitter, he tells people who “don’t want to work” not to vote for him and rails against doctors signing people off work on “sick notes” because of headaches and other trivialities, against a backdrop of what looks like 50s London. All just recycled prejudices culled from Sun editorials and Tory party conference speeches.

Restore Britain is a backward- and inward-looking party that appeals to the same people who produce nostalgia videos about the once-great British high street, back when everyone was white and men were men and women were women. Lowe has gained much publicity from his unofficial “rape gang inquiry” over the past few weeks, but in truth he does not care much for the British working class: he proclaims in the 1997 video that “the individual is good, the state is bad” (except when it’s rounding up and deporting people, of course). Restore might not be a neo-Nazi party as it doesn’t have that heritage (although it has attracted a few supporters from that quarter), but he is still a politician that appeals to bigotry while romanticising a past that was never real, offering policies that will leave most people worse off.

There’s a certain type of politician and political activist who is quick to take credit when his party wins, but will blame everyone but himself and his allies when they lose, and can be very inventive in doing so. In the aftermath of the 2015 election, when the Liberal Democrats lost many of their seats both in the affluent suburbs and the rural south-west where they were the major exception to the Labour/Tory two-party politics of the rest of England, the theory was put about that they lost so many seats because the public had been warned by the Tories of the danger of a Labour/SNP coalition in the event of a hung parliament (i.e. one with no party majority), anything but admit that their conduct during the coalition government had angered many of their former supporters and that many of the others actually wanted the promised referendum on EU membership. The other day, I came across an article on the previous election, in 2010, in which Labour lost power and were replaced by that Tory/Liberal coalition which implemented austerity measures so as to quickly pay back the debts the previous government had incurred while bailing out banks to ensure that people did not lose their savings, while also sneaking through some tax cuts so that a future Labour government could not reverse them. The blog article blamed the Guardian for endorsing the Lib Dems and the intellectual Left for voting for them instead of Labour.

A brief look at election maps of the 2010 and 2005 elections will show that Labour lost considerably more seats to the Tories than they did to the Lib Dems (though they did lose a few, such as Norwich South). In 2005 there was a swathe of red on the map running eastwards from north Wales to the Humber estuary, taking in all of the urban areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire; in 2010, there were two, smaller, separate red sections. The “Red Wall” had already started to fragment. Labour also lost a swathe of seats running southwards from the Pennines down to the Midlands, which we might call the “Red Column”, to the Tories as well as a number of seats in the Thames estuary and the large towns (as opposed to cities) of the south, the Midlands and East Anglia. The Lib Dems, although they increased their voter share by around 1%, actually lost five seats (this is an estimate, as electoral boundaries had changed). Labour’s vote in the north Midlands was reduced to just the urban areas, while the urban islands further south disappeared.  This could not have been down to a Guardian editorial; the decision of the Sun newspaper to switch its support to the Tories would have been more significant, but there is no reflection on why Labour lost so much support in this part of the country.

Labour’s strategy in the late 90s was to target the same voters who had defected to Thatcher’s Tories in 1979 and after: lower-middle class or ‘C2’ voters, as well as voters in the Midlands and those from working-class backgrounds in places like Essex who had moved beyond the cities as their circumstances improved. The theory of the time was that for Labour, the classes above C2 (meaning the wealthy and salaried professionals, classes A to C1) will never vote Labour in large numbers while those below (D and E) always will, so need not be targeted. To target the working class was seen as electoral suicide; people who talked of it were perceived as Scargillites or dinosaurs. Blair’s government was influenced by the now disgraced (and always regarded with much suspicion) Peter Mandelson, who early on in the Blair government told Peter Hain, a minister of state in early Blair cabinets and a cabinet minister later, that the working class had nowhere else to go. A little over twenty years later, that same working class sent Boris Johnson back into Downing Street with a substantial majority. A major contributory factor may have been Blair’s decision to allow migration of workers from eastern Europe into the UK in 2004, when other EU countries did not, as was the norm when weaker economies joined the union. I have written about the effect this had on the labour market in the UK at the time and it was not as simple as “they’re taking our jobs”: a ready supply of migrant workers frees employers from having to invest in or take risks on local talent, and when many of them are not setting up homes here but living in rooms and sending money home, they will not demand wages appropriate for living and raising a family in the UK. Academics like to stick their fingers in their ears and talk of the “lump of labour fallacy”, but in a country with a labour market as loosely regulated as ours is, a buyer’s market does not favour the working class.

Blair won a landslide in 1997 and a respectable majority in 2001 on a pro-European and pro-Maastricht platform. Leaving the EU was lunatic fringe politics at that time; Labour had lost elections it fought on the pledge of leaving the EEC in the 1980s. By 2010, the Tories could gain the largest share of the vote and by 2015 a majority on the basis of a pledge for an EU referendum in their manifesto. As they were in coalition with the Lib Dems in the 2010 parliament, they could not deliver it as the Lib Dems were opposed; they finally did in 2016. The 2015 election and Labour’s performance is often judged as Miliband’s failure — either by running on an “old left” platform or being too indistinguishable from the Tories — but the 2016 referendum result shows otherwise: that was a Brexit election, and Tony Blair had lost it in 2004 before Ed Miliband ever ran for leadership. It is possible that, had the Tories won a majority in 2010 and held the referendum a few years earlier, maybe in the afterglow of the 2012 Olympics, the result would have gone the other way, but we can only speculate. The Lib Dems in coalition only postponed the inevitable as regards the EU referendum and did little to mitigate the Tories’ austerity drive.

The Blairite faction has a tendency to take the credit for Labour’s wins when they are in charge, but blame everyone else (and especially the Left) for the losses (if one of theirs loses, as with Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, he will be accused of tacking too far left). They assume Blair won because he was Tony Blair, and because he alone knew what had to be done, and ignore the factors in his favour, particularly the constant scandals that afflict late-term Tory governments and the Tory vote being split with a hardline anti-Europe faction such as the Referendum Party, Brexit Party or Reform UK; they also ignore the fact that his actions led to a dramatic loss in the party’s fortunes in their third term which the new leadership failed to put right after Blair got out before his mess hit the fan. The 2005 result, where Labour won a majority off 35.2% of the popular vote, should have been a wake-up call, but it was not heeded and the party let Gordon Brown run unopposed for the leadership as if he had a right to it (when you point out that Blair won this election by the skin of his teeth, his fans simply counter “he won”). They are also as messianic and blind to their leaders’ faults as the Corbyn cult were to their leader’s: they mistake cowardice and meanness for wisdom and they trivialise major mistakes, even crimes: our involvement with the Iraq war in Blair’s case, the collusion in the Gaza genocide in Starmer’s. They expect lifelong Labour supporters to just accept this as the cost of winning. They expect whole sections of society to just accept getting shafted for the same reason, because they’re not as important as another group of people whose votes they need, whether it’s the old working class under Blair or Muslims under Starmer, and are shocked and angry when there is no acceptance.

There is also a tendency towards superstitious reasoning. This also affects Democrat supporters in the US. The previous two times a Labour party went into an election in government but with a different prime minister to the elected one, Labour lost, they say, so Labour should just get behind Starmer despite such things as the party’s persistent low opinion poll ratings, sometimes well below 20% with Reform UK polling over 30%. Labour have never actually ousted a sitting prime minister; Harold Wilson resigned of his own accord in 1976, and Blair in 2007 having stated in 2004 that he would not seek a fourth term, i.e. contest an election in 2009 or 2010. I heard the same reasoning from the late Victoria Brownworth, a Democrat-supporting journalist in the US, about whether Joe Biden should have stood down as candidate on account of his failing mental state during his presidency: the last time a Democratic president declined to stand for a second term (Lyndon Johnson in 1968), his successor lost, as did Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president who succeeded him as candidate. That’s two occasions each in each country. There just aren’t enough cases to establish a pattern; James Callaghan and Gordon Brown served three years each and failed to be re-elected for different reasons.

Labour are a year and a half into a five year term; they have all that time to give people a reason to vote Labour in 2029. Mid-term blues are not a new thing but Labour or the Tories continually scoring 21% or less definitely is. It could be that the Reform vote will tear itself apart come 2029 as Restore Britain absorbs much of the racist vote that previously went to Farage’s party, but that is not a risk Labour can take. Labour must understand that if they do not cater to people’s needs, Reform or Restore Britain will cater to their prejudices while their “thinking vote” will not show up if there is any alternative and sometimes even where there is none. There is a sense that we expect better of the Labour party: this sentiment was heard often during the antisemitism debate, and should be heard louder in any debate on the Government’s support for Israel during its genocide in Gaza and its repression towards those who oppose it here. We also do not vote Labour expecting swingeing cuts to disability benefits or special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision in schools. The prospect of a far-right government led by Nigel Farage, let alone Rupert Lowe, off 30% of the vote because of the legacy parties’ unpopularity is a dire one; the leaders will get by on law work, public speaking and think tanks, while ordinary people suffer. If Keir Starmer cannot take this on, he should step aside and leave the job to someone who can; if the party continues to perform poorly in local elections and by-elections, it must take the initiative before it is too late; if you go into the next election and poll the predicted 19% to Farage’s 30%, you will not have the Left or the Guardian to blame.

Rupert Lowe

The grooming gangs issue has been all over social media the past few weeks: three weeks ago, a group called Open Justice UK published the transcripts of the 2019 Bradford trial in which nine men, eight Asian and one white, were handed lengthy sentences (all but two received between 16 and 20 years) and promised a three-part podcast in which one of the two victims, Fiona Goddard, gave an interview about her experiences to the feminist campaigner and writer Julie Bindel. That was “next week” three weeks ago and finally appeared on Wednesday (on YouTube and other podcast platforms). In the meantime I went down something of a rabbit hole, looking for podcasts on the issue to listen to as I drove around the south-east delivering flooring products, and stumbled upon a couple of interviews with one Raja Miah, a former adviser to Tony Blair on counter-extremism who was accusing all and sundry in the Labour party especially of complicity with the gangs in a search for votes. This week, in response to some testimony given at the “Rape Gang Inquiry” being chaired by the Reform splinter group MP Rupert Lowe (right), there was an exchange on GB News alleging that British Muslims would rape “working-class white girls” for Eid; a racist Twitter account called “Britain is Broken” shared it with the words “In the UK, evidence is mounting that suggests Muslims spend Eid by inviting their families round to rape little white girls”, subsequently shared by GB News correspondent, Patrick Christys.

I did some digging for information on Raja Miah and it turns out that he has an axe to grind: he ran two free schools which failed and was secretly blacklisted from further involvement in education. He makes wild accusations against local Labour MPs and councillors and when inquiries do not support his claims, he calls them a whitewash. On one of the podcasts, he claimed that Axel Rudukabana, the teenager who carried out the triple stabbing in Southport that sparked the 2024 race riots, was an Islamist and the fact that he had ricin, a poison used in past assassinations and which has become associated with terrorism, proves it; in fact, the precursors for ricin, such as castor oil beans and the plant that produces them, are readily available and Rudukabana had a long history of violent behaviour at school, going back to his early teens, was obsessed with violence and was not Muslim at all. He accuses Labour politicians of collusion in postal vote fraud, and rails against what he calls sectarian candidates for parliament, but fails to consider that much postal vote fraud was intended to prevent young people voting for precisely these candidates, and during the Blair years, for candidates such as George Galloway and Salma Yaqoub. This is not a very rational individual. However, he did make one useful observation, which was that the ‘Pakistani’ grooming gangs nearly all traced back to around three villages in the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir and were basically one big family. This is not a problem endemic in the entire Muslim community; its core is a criminal element in a sub-group of a sub-group. Racists commonly allege that the gang members are of “Pakistani ethnicity”; anyone who knows anything about Pakistan knows that there is no such thing. It is just a category used in British bureaucracy, for statistics, diversity monitoring and so on.

There is a widespread assumption that the Muslim community as a whole is responsible because it sheltered the abusers or failed to turn them in to the police. “There isn’t enough said about how SHAMEFUL the Islamic community in the UK is for shielding their men who r*ped and groomed British girls,” proclaimed the Australian “writer/artist” Alexandra Marshall. Everyone knew, she alleges, from their wives to the neighbours to the mosques and community leaders. This is simply not true: the Muslim community is spread across the country, is very diverse, featuring people whose origins are all over the world, not just in Pakistan or even south Asia but also the Middle East, Africa and Europe itself, including the UK. We do not all know what is going on in towns 150 miles or more away, and even if we are aware of something untoward happening, that does not mean we know exactly what, or who is involved. Not every minority group, whether it’s religious, ethnic or (say) disability-based, is so close-knit that everyone knows each other, as people outside them often assume.

There is, however, plenty of evidence that both police and social services, care home staff and other authorities knew already, turning a blind eye because they regarded the victims as ‘difficult’, “their own worst enemies”, “child prostitutes” and various other victim-blaming descriptions. The police “locker-room culture” in which women are assumed to be asking for it or to be unreliable witnesses, and which protects officers who abuse their partners or colleagues, is well-known; let’s not forget that one of the police forces in Yorkshire preferred to believe a tape with a man’s voice on it than women who said their attacker was local and missed many opportunities to catch the Yorkshire Ripper earlier. Fiona Goddard mentioned that the police arrested her and let one of her abusers get away, and that care home staff knew she was missing for days and shut her out when she came back drunk. The system did not, and does not, allow care staff to physically prevent children from going out even if they are known to be at risk of exploitation or abuse unless the home is a registered secure home, of which there are only 14 in the country (only one, in Peterborough, is just for girls), and there have been accounts on Twitter from people who worked in such places that they had to let the girls go because it would have been illegal to prevent them. Of course, some people who run away are fleeing abusive situations, but there needs to be a way to protect girls from this type of abuse and right now there is none.

As for the accusations of “Eid rape” made on GB News, that little cabal are pretending not to understand why that claim is racist, and indeed dangerous. The reason is that it was phrased, both in the TV clip and in the tweet from a third party, shared by one of the participants, in such a way as to imply that this behaviour is normal for Muslims in the UK — that we get together to rape young white working-class girls, rather than going to the mosque or the open-air prayer in the morning then home for a family meal in the afternoon, which is what we actually do. I’m sure they’ve heard of the blood libel, because the phrase is bandied around whenever war crimes by the Israelis are documented in Gaza; the actual blood libel started when a boy was found murdered in a Jewish quarter in England, and a myth was spun that his blood had been used as a food ingredient on Passover. The crime of one, or maybe a small group, or maybe as in this case a criminal family and their scummy friends and clients, was assumed to be the practice of all. If anyone professes not to understand why this claim was racist, they are either racist themselves, or stupid, or both.

I’m not calling Fiona Goddard or any other victim of the grooming gangs a liar (though some of the racist politicians and hack journalists who have latched onto this story undoubtedly are), but the only people with any blame for this apart from the perpetrators themselves are the politicians, councillors, police officers, social workers and others who allowed this to happen for several decades, leaving a trail of broken lives in numerous towns and cities, not because they were scared of being called racist but because they thought the same of the girls being abused that their abusers did. Lastly, anyone tempted to support Rupert Lowe’s new party imagining that they will usher in misogyny-free new age should read the words of his candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, Nick Buckley MBE:

Many British young women are wh*res but don’t realise they are. The days of morality & decorum are over. They make poor wives & poor mothers. They also contribute to the idea that all women are easy & can be abused.

Somali women giving out samosas to anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis (source: Mukhtar, X).

Imagine that there was a boarding school where children were being abused on a daily basis; where bullying was rife, where staff were casually physically violent and verbally abusive, where the food was routinely contaminated with such things as cigarette ash and insects; a school where petty rules stoked conflict and made life miserable, where staff were seemingly recruited by word of mouth at the pub and were neither vetted nor trained. Many people would say that this place should be shut down fairly swiftly, and that saving children from abuse was the important thing, more so than the concern that they may miss a few weeks of school. The benefits they get from going there do not justify the suffering.

Now consider that there is a police force that deals with a less than vital area of the law: in this case, immigration control and removal of illegal immigrants. Imagine that they act with extreme violence, that they do not distinguish between actual illegal immigrants and legal ones or even citizens but target anyone who “looks foreign”, abducting people to camps thousands of miles away for no valid reason, threaten and attack people who video their behaviour, and shoot people dead when they get in their way. Imagine also that they are deployed by the government against parts of the country which have a history of supporting the opposition, ignoring places that have many times the number of illegal immigrants of the places they terrorise. There would be calls for this entity to be abolished because the lawlessness they perpetrate is considerably worse than what they prevent.

A few weeks ago I saw someone I follow on Twitter, a Democrat who has a clear resentment for “the Left” for causing the loss of the most recent presidential election, poured scorn on the idea that ICE, the American immigration police responsible for an ongoing campaign of terror against immigrant communities in Minnesota, resulting in the deaths of two American citizens and seven others, should be abolished. “We need a sane immigration policy” she proclaims; “it makes no sense to import people into this country that dilute wages for the working class”. The reason working-class people cannot get good jobs anymore is because industry packed up and moved because it did not want to pay decent wages, which is the case both here and in the US, but it’s so much easier to blame immigrants in a country where the creed that you cannot argue with the market is beyond question. In previous tweets she has criticised people calling for ICE to be abolished because she claims they do not appreciate what “real Americans” want and are making it more difficult for Democrats to win elections. She does not actually care whether these things are right or wrong — a gang of thugs, terrorising cities, using extreme violence against non-violent people for nothing more than suspected illegal immigration — only whether it is politically convenient.

She also pours scorn on the notion of ‘defunding’ ICE. She criticises people for saying they are poorly trained, responding that to train them properly would require them to be better resourced. The same arguments are held around defunding police forces that are trigger-happy and have a history of killing innocent people, or at worst people who have committed petty crimes, or people who are in the throes of a mental health crisis; they have resources to buy wholly excessive and inappropriate military hardware to use on civilians, but have no interest in training their officers to use force appropriately. When you remind them of the need to do this, they tell you that they are not “social workers in uniform” (which is exactly what they do need to be when performing welfare checks on people reported to be in mental health crisis) and accuse people who died at the hands of the police of not doing what they were told. In the case of the ICE attack on Minneapolis, the police have become (at least for the time being) heroes, being firmly on the side of the locals under attack and some of their off-duty officers falling victim to ICE’s dragnet as anyone who is not white is assumed to be an illegal immigrant. But when people demand the abolition or defunding of police forces in response to yet another killing of an innocent man or woman by a cop who “didn’t have time for this shit” or whatever, they are called morons or similar by people who have no real solutions themselves.

Policing is actually necessary; the taking off the streets of rapists, murderers, gangsters and so on cannot wait. The removal of illegal immigrants certainly can, until they can find people who can do it without killing them, or innocent members of the public whom they perceive as being in their way, or people who were videoing them to hold them to account, and until they learn to distinguish between an actual illegal immigrant and a mere non-white person. If someone’s sole wrongdoing is being in the country or working illegally, their removal is not worth anyone losing their life over; it should not be up to the immigration service to apprehend and remove illegal immigrants who are violent criminals. They should be escorted to the airport straight from prison. A country that employs an army of undisciplined thugs who terrorise ethnic minorities and cities with a history of opposition to the government on the pretext of controlling immigration is a repressive country that is on the downslide into fascism or banana republic status and when such outfits are abolished when dictatorships are removed, the same people defending ICE would applaud. 

A Maccabi Tel Aviv fan gives a Nazi salute at a match in Stuttgart, Germany

Last week the chief constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guildford, retired after admitting presenting inaccurate information sourced from an artificial intelligence app, Microsoft CoPilot, in a report on the security situation that would ensue if the away fans of the Israeli football team, Maccabi Tel Aviv (MTA), were to be allowed to travel to Birmingham to see their team play Aston Villa. The information included mention of a fixture between MTA and West Ham, an east London side, which had never taken place. The mainstream media has been full of angry debate about who was a threat to whom in the event of the MTA fans coming; pro-Israel outlets and figures claim that the police, whom they claimed are under the sway of local ‘Islamists’, were underplaying the threat of local “Islamist thugs” to the Israeli fans while local MPs and Palestine supporters point to the club’s actual record of racist violence, both inside and outside Israel. In the event, the club withdrew the fans itself after a riot between their fans and another local team’s fans in Tel Aviv, but the latest revelations have prompted an orchestrated outrage from Zionists, securocrats and racists who claim that the MTA fans were blameless and that the opposition to them attending was motivated by antisemitism, or was antisemitic regardless of motive; this includes sections of the ‘official’ Left, notably including this sickening article by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian last Friday, who tells us that the affairs “stirs deep-seated fears” of being “obliged to retreat from mainstream spaces to spare everyone else the awkwardness of having to battle for their inclusion”.

How many times do we have to say that this is not about the right of Jews to walk any street they like, but about the ‘right’ of a group of foreign football supporters, most of whom have served in an army whose principal role is oppressing people, supporting violent settlers as they encroach on more and more native Palestinian land, and who have for the past two and a half years been slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, to travel through the streets of Birmingham or indeed any other city in the UK where there is a large Muslim population? Let’s not forget that Russia has been excluded from international sport since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so there is no danger of its fans antagonising Polish or Ukrainian communities, and its war crimes, though still dreadful, do not approach genocide. Everyone who has been on a Palestine demonstration will know there are Jewish allies; you would not know who was Jewish and who was not unless they wore Haredi clothing and you do not know which of them supports Israel or not unless you ask or they tell. When it’s Jews who claim to feel threatened, of course, it’s another matter: when anti-genocide demonstrators wanted to demonstrate outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House on a Saturday, the day most people have off work, it was banned because there was a synagogue a few streets away. 

The same people expecting Birmingham’s Muslims to tolerate this complain constantly about “fighting-age males” from Muslim countries being offered asylum, accusing them without any evidence of being a stealth invasion. We have been told that the real threat was to the Israeli fans and came from “Islamist thugs”, a phenomenon unseen in this country and who went unnamed but no doubt referred to the potential for demonstrations: actual peaceful demonstrations against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza and its ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank are referred to as “hate marches” while the media refers to actual thugs who stop aid reaching Gaza as ‘demonstrators’ or ‘protesters’. There has been outrage that the panel which selected Craig Guildford included an imam; it would, surely, have included other faith leaders as well. It was meant to represent the community and Muslims are a major part of the community in Birmingham. Matthew Goodwin (who until recently was a senior fellow of the UAE-funded Legatum Institute, which now trades as Prosperity Institute) lectures us that “Islamists” are starting to have influence, not bothering to distinguish between Muslims and “Islamists”; it is natural, in a democracy, that sections of the community have influence over decisions that affect their lives.

Jews do not have a right to be cosseted if they choose to throw in their lot with violent football hooligans and a foreign power that is oppressively and murderously racist. They deserve to be held accountable. Over the past several years, we have been lectured endlessly that their feelings are all-important, that they must feel safe and they alone have the right to dictate what constitutes antisemitism (and it must be the right kind of Jews, i.e. not dissenting ones). David Baddiel wrote an entire book called “Jews Don’t Count”, castigating the Left for failing to acknowledge Jews’ feelings of oppression or to count them among the oppressed, regardless of their whiteness in an age when that matters more than anything else, their ample access to media and to power; people who question their status as an oppressed minority stand to lose out, as Diane Abbott did in the years before the 2024 election. Meanwhile, a drumbeat campaign goes on to drive Muslims out of public life, which has now culminated in a senior police officer losing his job for failing to treat Muslims with the contempt they believe we deserve. Yes, he made some stupid mistakes, but none of these are the reason he was forced out. We all remember the quote about Islamophobia “passing the dinner-table test”; we are now entering an age in which it is less risky to be racist than not.

Recently I listened to two BBC podcasts in the Crime Next Door strand. One was about the kidnapping of Lesley Whittle, the teenage daughter of a local bus company boss, in the mid 1970s by a notorious serial armed robber and killer named Donald Neilson and was found hanged in a storm drain under a public park; the other (Death on the Farm) was about a brother and sister, Griff and Patti Thomas (right), murdered in a farmhouse in west Wales around the same time, a death ruled a murder-suicide by the police, the coroner and the chapel pastor who refused them a church funeral, a verdict believed by none of her family and friends. In both cases, a senior detective was in charge who had the reputation for “always getting his man”; in the first, he had solved a number of murders but was new to investigating kidnappings for ransom (as, admittedly, was the whole profession), while in the second, it appears that he did not want to ruin a winning streak by being unable to solve a high-profile murder, so he jumped to the conclusion that it was a murder-suicide because there was no evidence of forced entry. These two stories reminded me of two more recent cases of a killer left to carry on killing or not apprehended as soon as he could have been because of a senior detective sold on a pet theory: the Yorkshire ripper case in the early 1980s, where the lead detective believed the killer was from another part of the country on the basis of a hoax and ignored (and aggressively rebuffed) leads that suggested a local culprit, and the White House Farm murders in which Jeremy Bamber murdered five members of his adoptive family and then tried to frame his adopted sister; the senior detective believed his story, and would only accept that he was wrong when other detectives proved to him that it was physically impossible for the sister to have killed herself with the rifle.

Last week Sue Marsh, a disability activist I came to know while campaigning against the Tory austerity programme of the early 2010s, published an article on her Substack about the culture she found while a patient at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge in the 90s and 2000s with Crohn’s disease, an obstructive bowel disorder. While the hospital carried out some pioneering research and some of its doctors were brilliant, there were also consultants who were sold on unscientific and irrational beliefs and treated patients cruelly on the basis of them, and because of the status of Addenbrookes and of Cambridge, what those consultants said and did became common practice. Ultimately the hospital was put in special measures because of botched operations and mistakes known as “never events” (i.e. they should never happen, such as the wrong part of someone’s body being operated on or removed or an instrument left inside them), and the health watchdog Monitor kept them under observation for 18 months, during which surgeries could not go ahead without them present. Even after this, however, doctors trained there at that time were appointed as consultants elsewhere, and good practice was replaced with bad (and cruel) practice learned at Addenbrooke’s. They were spreading like a hospital-acquired infection.

And Sue’s story about how the hierarchies in the health sector undermined good care reminded me of the tragedies and scandals in policing caused by the obsession with hierarchy at the expense of justice, human life or getting the job done (especially when that job was justice or saving lives). People are unable, or face punishment for, raising concerns; they are expected to address a superior officer meekly and always acknowledging their superiority; the superior rank is taken as proof of their being more experienced or better at their job, and though they may have experience, their rank may have had as much to do with impressing the right people at the right time or being in the right social clubs, or discrimination against a competitor because of their race or sex, or something else. Certain people, because of who they are, are assumed to know best, or they are assumed to be right because they were right in the past. In the case of the Pembrokeshire farm murders, the senior detective (DCS Pat Molloy) came from out of area, was a hero from having solved a triple murder in Staffordshire but knew nothing about the local culture and did not speak Welsh, but drew conclusions based on assumptions that anyone familiar with it could have put right, had he listened. All of these situations in policing happened in the 1970s and 80s; no doubt someone will say that this was years ago and the culture of CID has been reformed since and the Ripper disaster could not happen again, though the ongoing scandals about misogyny, domestic abuse by officers going unpunished and sex offences by police officers going unpunished until they kill someone suggests otherwise, at least in some forces.

Hierarchitis affects other institutions as well. For much of the 20th century, co-pilots on civilian airliners could not dissent from their captain, even when the captain was plainly wrong, and planes crashed and whole planeloads of people were lost as a result, because the captain’s mistake could not be challenged. In the book Longitude, Dava Sobel told the story of a naval officer who believed that the ship he was on was a long way from where his superior officer thought, and when he raised his concerns, he was shot for mutiny. The ship then wrecked, as he had said it would, and the surviving crew robbed, and the superior officer murdered. Hierarchies and chains of command are, of course, sometimes necessary and maintaining them in normal times conditions people to act on them when discipline is vital, as during war or a life-and-death situation such as the arrest of a dangerous, wanted criminal or the extinguishing of a big fire. Hierarchitis occurs where they result in bullying, the shouting-down of valid dissenting opinions, the wrong people being promoted and then assumed to be always right because of that promotion, with unjust or lethal consequences for junior staff, patients or the general public.