And so the truth is coming out.......from an article posted this morning from an ex-Labour MP
This is exactly what everyone has been saying and suspecting......
The cover-up was done, to protect votes for the Labour party....
Despicable....
I know the sickening reasons Labour wanted to cover up the rape gang scandals. What I was told when I was Rochdale MP is utterly shocking... and now I'm exposing those politicians: SIMON DANCZUK
By SIMON DANCZUK FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Published: 01:53 GMT, 13 January 2025 | Updated: 01:59 GMT, 13 January 2025
Even today, more than a decade after the rape gang scandal first exploded, I still struggle to read the court transcripts from the trials of the perpetrators. The cruelty of the criminals is too depraved, the suffering of their victims too traumatic.
What makes their testimony all the more painful for me is that I was the Labour MP for Rochdale, one of the northern towns where the scale of the abuse had been at its worst.
On the streets of my constituency, vulnerable, white, working-class girls were exploited by groups of men of Pakistani origin whose ruthlessness was matched by their inhumanity.
In my parliamentary role, I had played a significant part in exposing their vicious activities as I sought justice for their victims and demanded much greater urgency from the authorities in breaking the cycle of abuse. But it was a harrowing experience that revealed to me the strength of the Labour Party's willingness to cover up the scandal in order to protect its support among local ethnic minorities.
In effect, innocent young girls were sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. That cynical, opportunistic spirit still lingers on today, as exemplified by the Labour Government's refusal to set up a national inquiry into this grim saga. In the long and lamentable catalogue of child abuse in Britain, this could be the biggest scandal in our history. It is certainly the worst of this century. That is why no stone should be left unturned in the quest to find the truth.
The British public, shocked and bewildered that this could have happened in our once well-ordered, gentle civilisation, rightly wants answers as to why the agencies of the state were paralysed by inaction for so long. But under Sir Keir Starmer's pedestrian leadership, the party has dug itself into a hole by its inexplicable and unjustified rejection of the proposal for a national inquiry.
Indeed Labour's values seem badly warped on this issue. On public platforms and in interviews, Starmer appears far more vexed about attacks on his frontbench – particularly the embattled Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, who rejected a request for a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation – than the physical and psychological scars of the real victims.
But we should not be surprised by such hypocrisy and lack of integrity from Labour. After all, the party has often been a malignant force in this tale. Compassion is meant to be one of the central qualities of the Labour movement, yet when it came to the activities of the rape gangs, the party's representatives – motivated by cowardice, ideology and vote-grabbing – often turned a blind eye.
I became aware of Labour's instinct to conceal when I wrote a biography of Cyril Smith, one of my predecessors as the MP for Rochdale. Beneath his genial image, the Liberal MP was a serial and sadistic abuser of vulnerable boys.
As I discovered in the course of my investigation into his activities, he was also protected by the State and the local political establishment, including some Labour figures, though when I challenged them, they denied it.
The book sold well and was given several awards but its findings were eclipsed by the far darker revelations about the grooming gang scandal. Before I became Rochdale's MP in 2010, I had been a Labour councillor in the nearby town of Blackburn and, through the local government grapevine, I had been dimly aware of talk about gangs operating outside children's homes.
As the Rochdale rape gang story broke in 2012, some local councillors tried to deter me from examining the evidence too closely but I was not prepared to be dissuaded, especially when I met some of the victims' families and learnt about what they had endured. I was also encouraged by signs of more rigorous action from Greater Manchester Police.
Yet even after the first arrests of gang members, other Labour politicians and municipal bureaucrats seemed more worried about self-protection than achieving justice.
I will never forget a briefing I received from one of the directors at Rochdale Town Hall in 2012 during the trial of nine gang members. When I asked the director what further steps the council would take to crack down on the exploitation of working-class girls by these predatory groups, the director said to me: 'This is a new phenomenon and we haven't had guidance yet from the Home Office.'
I could not conceal my amazement at this complacent and morally stunted attitude. 'You don't need guidance from the Government to know that any type of child abuse is wrong,' I said. But that briefing was typical of the unco-operative, at times hostile, outlook I encountered whenever I raised the subject in Parliament or with the Press.
At one point Jim Dobbin, the veteran MP for the neighbouring seat of Heywood and Middleton, took me to one side and told me not to make any link between the abuse of girls and the local Asian Muslim community because that would undermine Labour's election prospects.
In essence, Jim was a decent man but such a comment showed how his anxiety to retain the local Muslim vote had eroded his moral judgment.
A more aggressive stance was taken by Tony Lloyd, who represented a Manchester seat and was chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
He made strong objections whenever I highlighted the predatory conduct of the British Asian rapists. 'Keep religion and race out of it. You'll lose us votes,' he said, a disgraceful comment which showed that the rights of the victims mattered less to him than the votes of local Muslims.
Later, when Tony became Police Commissioner for Greater Manchester, I attacked him in print over his dismal performance on grooming gangs. He rang me and said that if I ever repeated such comments, he would 'bounce me all the way from Rochdale to Westminster'.
While an obsession with retaining Muslim votes has obviously been the key factor in Labour's shameful approach to the rape gangs, there are two other contributory factors.
One is the Left-wing orthodoxy which paints ethnic minorities as eternal victims and white people as permanent oppressors. This is the theme at the core of so much progressive thinking about race. It can also be seen in the ugly attempts by Labour to paint concerns about grooming gangs or calls for a public inquiry as the product of agitation by the 'far Right'.
But this is a recipe for division and a denial of reality. In the rape gang scandal, the worst racism came from the perpetrators, who treated their targets like dirt because of the colour of their skin. One victim recalled that her attacker told her that he raped her 'because she was sinful and a non-believer. He said that he would not have done it if I had been a Muslim'.
The other factor is the sheer snobbery towards the victims. Labour was created as the mouthpiece of the working-class but in its modern incarnation – particularly in the affluent, intellectual circles of the metropolitan middle-class – it is impossible to escape the whiff of disdain towards the lowest income groups in the white population.
These are, in the words of one commentator with impeccable Left-wing credentials, 'the always complaining and wretched classes' kept in their beer-swilling indolence by 'taxpaying migrants'.
There was something of that outlook on the campaign trail in Rochdale in 2010, when Gordon Brown – thinking he was speaking in private – described local voter Gillian Duffy as 'a bigoted woman' after she had challenged him about soaring levels of immigration.
As the sickening cover-up of the rape gang scandal shows, the real bigotry can often come from Labour.