Musk, Goodwin, racism and rape

The past week or so we’ve seen the incoming American presidency flex its muscles by threatening countries hitherto thought to be their allies, with Donald Trump proposing the annexation of Greenland, a country that is a self-governing territory of NATO member Denmark, and Elon Musk shooting off his mouth about the British political system which he clearly knows nothing about; he tells us that Reform will form the next government, while also telling that party that Nigel Farage is not the leader he wants (if it is to have millions of pounds of his money) because he refuses to entertain the football hooligan “Tommy Robinson”. Musk has also called for the ‘liberation’ of this country from its ‘tyrannical’ government, while both Reform and Tory politicians have taken the opportunity to reopen the issue of the “grooming gangs”, groups of mostly Pakistani criminals who lured young teenage girls, mostly from poor white families in provincial towns, with sweets, drinks, rides in fast cars and promises of love and then raped them, and allowed their friends to do the same. The agenda of Reform and other ‘populist’ Right politicians here has been to portray these men not just as the criminal scum they are, and as most people including most Pakistanis and most Muslims consider them to be, but as typical Pakistanis, acting out of prejudices that all Pakistanis and most Muslims share.
To answer some of Musk’s claims first: we have a political system here, a democratic process, which is the focus of much criticism but we have elections and indeed we had one last July. It was widely discussed on his ‘X’ social media platform (i.e. Twitter) so I’m sure he heard about it. Reform gained five MPs from nothing. Labour won a parliamentary majority and the majority of the popular vote went to progressive parties, including Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. Reform and the Tories, combined, lost. Farage’s parties have never gained as much as 15% of the popular vote, not least because Farage is a one-trick pony who diverts every discussion onto immigration. As in most democratic countries, we have elections every few years. In the US’s case, it’s four; in ours, it’s usually five. As for our system being ‘tyrannical’, our system has benefits the US’s does not, chiefly that outside Scotland and Wales, there is one law for everyone and laws do not change when you go from town to town and there are fewer opportunities than in the US for people to make a living telling others what to do. We do have local councils, of course, but they are circumscribed in what they can do; they cannot make laws as such, only administrative decisions. They don’t tell people what they can and can’t grow in their own backyard, for example, and we do not have “homeowners’ associations” doing the same. The US’s constitution has a poor history of supporting ordinary people’s rights and freedoms; it defends the right of those with power and wealth to use them, and the judges Republicans have recently stacked the Supreme Court with have heightened that tendency.
Musk also fails to understand why Nigel Farage did not want to allow “Tommy Robinson” anywhere near his party, let alone have influence over it. The answer is that Robinson is a thug with a substantial criminal record, and a history of self-serving, counterproductive publicity stunts which on one occasion nearly caused the collapse of an actual trial of a grooming gang. His fans, including some in the “Reform” party, portray him as a political prisoner; he is in prison currently because of having been held in contempt for persistently repeating disproven claims about a child, putting the child and his family in danger. Political parties need to be respectable to get votes from people who are not thugs and have a modicum of intelligence and education; allowing “Tommy Robinson” in would have the opposite effect.
Musk’s claims have resulted in the “grooming gang” issue exploding out of nowhere this week; there has not been a new case nor any other reason why it should be in the news. There was actually an inquiry into various kinds of sexual abuse ten years ago; its findings were not acted upon by the former government, which now accuses Labour of complicity, while populists claim it was not good enough because it did not treat the Pakistani gang angle as some sort of issue unto itself nor reach the racist conclusion they wanted. We now have Reform MPs with a private school education and a background in finance posing as champions of the working class, yet they rarely if ever use that phrase without putting ‘white’ in front. They weren’t doing so when Thatcher was destroying the industries that fed those communities forty years ago; Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage were both adults during the miners’ and steelworkers’ strikes of the 1980s. Were they on the picket lines? Of course not; Farage, after leaving Dulwich College in 1982, was in a cushy job trading metals for Drexel Burnham Lambert, while Rupert Lowe was working with his buddy Nick Leeson at Barings Bank. The only connection they have with the working class is a fondness for pitting some working-class people against others by exploiting resentment and prejudice.
Rupert Lowe last week stood up in the Commons and put a litany of loaded questions (which he said had also been submitted in writing) to the government, among them demands that any relatives of members of the gangs who he presumed were complicit because they knew should also be deported. Obviously he’s a banker, not a lawyer, but in this country you cannot presume guilt by association; you have to prove that someone knew or was complicit beyond reasonable doubt, and besides, mandatory reporting for professionals — not ordinary people — was proposed in Alexis Jay’s report ten years ago, and not delivered. He demanded that visas for Pakistanis and aid to Pakistan be paused until the government there agrees to accept the deportees; the fact is that the gangs were formed here, largely by people born here, whose parents or grandparents (not all of whom are still alive) were innocent of any such wrongdoing when they left Pakistan, that many of the original migrants from Pakistan were Pakistani for fewer than 20 years between independence (at which point they may have only just moved to Pakistan from elsewhere in former British India) and moving to the UK (indeed, many never relinquished their British citizenship), so their connection to Pakistan is tenuous, and that British aid to Pakistan is largely aimed at assisting minority communities, including Christians. As demonstrated in the case of Shamima Begum, a theoretical and unclaimed right to nationality of any country is not the same as actual nationality, something British politicians are well aware of.
These people also respond with contempt to any mention of racism in regard to their sudden ‘concern’ for rape victims. Well, if you are only interested in this issue when the perpetrators appear to be Pakistanis, or as a pretext to shout about “mass immigration”, it’s reasonable to presume that your motive is racism. Abuse of all sorts has been exposed in a variety of settings, including institutional, from time to time over many years and the same people now frothing about “Pakistani gangs raping our white working-class girls” were nowhere to be seen or heard when previous cases of organised abuse were uncovered. Their demand that we withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights will make some of these abuses more difficult to escape, because those rights safeguard everyone’s right to a family life, to dignity, to freedom, which includes the disabled people, the children and others most likely to find themselves institutionalised. They accuse Pakistanis of looking down on “our girls” and allege that the police and social services failed to act “because they feared being called racist”; any member of any visible minority who has had dealings with the police will know how absurd this claim is, while those who supported the victims will tell you that police and other professionals harboured the same views and believed the same myths as the offenders, and were liable to blame victims and their families.
The members of the grooming gangs, or rape gangs, whatever we call them, were criminals. Many of them had prior criminal records and were involved in other criminal activities at the same time as they carried out their sexual exploitation. They are not the only organised crime outfits to also abuse and exploit women and girls; the difference with some of the others is that the exploitation is inter-racial rather than intra-racial (i.e. of girls and women of their own background). Statistics on sexual crime show that in fact Asian men’s representation among sexual offenders is proportional to their share of the general population, if not lower (bear in mind that sexual assault generally is underreported); it is not sexual abuse per se but this particular modus operandi that is peculiar to them. While some of them may have appeared respectable, all of their activities are contrary to Islamic law on numerous levels. It’s against Islam to deceive people (such as by posing as a lover or friend to ensnare someone in order to harm them), to separate a child from their family without reason, to supply or traffic alcohol, to supply or traffic any other narcotic for recreational use, to kidnap or assault anyone, to have sex or sexual contact outside marriage, to rape anyone, to organise the rape of anyone. These are all crimes, and criminals and criminal gangs exist in a variety of communities, some of which abide by religious laws that explicitly or implicitly forbid such behaviour. It does not make the whole community guilty, nor does it put any onus on the other members of that community to somehow prove their opposition.
Finally, one of the most odious of those making political capital of the grooming gang situation is the academic turned demagogue Matthew Goodwin. In his speech to the Reform party conference posted as a video on Twitter, he claimed that the British people had had “a new religion” shoved down their throats whereby people were required to accept that the majority was bad and the minority good, but that “this time it’s a little different; it’s the Pakistani Muslim minority that has been abusing the majority”, offering examples of three young girls who were killed by men linked to such gangs, including Lucy Lowe (pictured above) whose older ‘boyfriend’, although he behaved in similar ways, was not part of a gang, and Charlene Downs whose two abusers, although from Muslim backgrounds, were not Pakistanis. So this is open racism, the stereotyping of a whole community according to a small number of its worst members and lumping in all Muslims with Pakistanis, being delivered at Reform’s conference, without interruption from party officials and applauded by his audience. As for why the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK and George Floyd in the US got more press coverage, it is because the police who killed George Floyd and failed to bring Steven Lawrence’s murderers to justice for decades or ever are paid for by the public to protect all of us. It was demonstrations by the Black community that brought these issues to public consciousness; are they supposed to sit quietly because their long-standing oppression is less important than the abuse of white girls in other parts of the country, or the world?
So no, it’s not racist to be concerned, outraged even, about the existence of gangs grooming and sexually abusing girls. However, if you are only interested in the matter when the girls are your colour and the perpetrators not, and you talk in a way that suggests that this is all there is to the matter when it is not, when you conflate a crime with one specific modus operandi in order to incriminate and foment hostility to the ethnic group associated with it, and you refer to white women and girls but nobody else as “our girls”, that suggests that your motive is racism rather than any sincere concern for victims of sexual abuse.
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