I CAN’T hold Rupert Lowe’s rushed release of his Rape Gang Inquiry Report against him, despite its politically convenient timing immediately ahead of the Makerfield by-election. I can however raise a cynical eyebrow at his vociferous disbelief that the BBC et al would roundly ignore it. Really, Rupes? You actually thought they’d fall for that?
The Restore Britain party leader’s independent inquiry was and is worthy and meaningful to the very many survivors, whistle-blowers, experts and distraught parents who contributed to it. Rotherham survivor and activist Sammy Woodhouse and her team gave its process a gravity of which I doubt Labour’s anointed national inquiry chair Baroness Longfield will venture within a country mile.
In its released format this week it is also, sad to say, old news in almost every respect. As shocking and harrowing as much of the courageous testimony is, bereft of much redacted detail (however legally necessary) it amounts to little more than a lengthy summary of the scandals that have been increasingly in the public domain this past 20 years and more.
If there are compos mentis British citizens who are remotely unaware of what has been done by overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men to white British girls (and boys) estimated at a minimum – a minimum – of 250,000 victims, I would suggest they are people who specifically refuse to acknowledge these realities. They won’t be reading the inquiry’s discomfiting narrative and I suspect they probably vote Green or Lib Dem. The Labour supporters among them undoubtedly know about this crime against humanity but prefer to blame the scabby kids or shoddy parenting, of which the report details plenty.
If the 218-page report’s release came with any real meaning, it was in Lowe’s public promises, as MP for Great Yarmouth, to name the allegedly guilty parties under the cover of parliamentary privilege. He insinuates that this list will include politicians, public servants, NHS and healthcare practitioners, senior police officers and more. I imagine accused perpetrators will fall into that category. Without belittling any of those victims’ truly horrific ordeals – and the report does make very difficult reading at times – what this horror demands is far wider accountability.
Locking up child rapists cannot be underestimated and of late there does appear to be a greater appetite for investigation, even among police forces like West Yorkshire that were most complicit in the decades of cover-ups. While this report leans heavily on anonymised stories of the survivors’ ordeals, it is so reduced in detail that we can’t identify the complicit police forces, local authorities, NHS trusts, supposed care providers or even the timescales in which the attacks reportedly took place. It leaves a somewhat hollow feeling.
The testimonies of the survivors and whistle-blowers appear at their most courageous and compelling in the appendices, where post-inquiry victims came forward to tell their own stories and raise the barbarity of horrors – I’m almost reluctant to say – to barely believable levels.
‘Felicity’ claims to have been abused aged eight by what sounds like a white Christian man who then trafficked her to Muslims. The rapes and sexual abuses are essentially normalised compared with her stories of a punishment room where girls are kept caged, one is branded with a red-hot iron, is strangled and later ‘dies’. Felicity describes seeing another girl shot, says she remembers the face and name of a serving police officer present in the house, and describes a time when a group of children are taken to a field where one of the girls is stabbed to death then burned. If that doesn’t turn your stomach sufficiently, believe me, her story gets worse. These are horrors beyond imagined horrors in a supposedly civilised nation that tragically continues in so many fashions to bow and scrape to this pre-medieval cult.
If Lowe and his team have achieved anything, it is to keep such an important matter firmly in the public focus and – when the final version is released – hopefully to set a standard that Labour’s inquiry lapdog Baroness Longfield must seek to match at the very least. That said, matters will no doubt be kicked so far down the road that we’ll have a different government by the time it concludes, which to my mind suggests its complicity in the cover-ups.
