GB News broke a remarkable story this week as part of their ongoing investigation into UK grooming gangs — an issue that may not be occupying the headlines as much as it once did, but which has certainly not gone away.
Mahroof Hussain is a former Labour Party politician who was forced to resign from his cabinet position at Rotherham Council in 2015 after the Casey Report named him as one of the figures who had “suppressed discussion” of grooming gangs operating in the town.
And yet, despite his disgrace, it is reported that Hussein has succeeded in reinventing himself as an anti-Islamophobia activist, working with groups including Tell MAMA and Faith Matters. And, in an extraordinary example of failing upwards, in October 2020 Hussain was appointed as the NHS Health Education England Regional Diversity & Inclusion Manager for the Midlands. In September 2022, he was promoted to become the national lead.
This follows further reporting last month which revealed that Dominic Beck had been selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Rother Valley, despite the fact that he also served on the Rotherham Council cabinet, alongside Hussain, and was also forced to resign following the Casey Report. Beck stood down following the investigation.
These two men were both implicated in the cover-up of the largest sex abuse scandal of this century, and possibly also of the last century. The number of victims in Rotherham alone dwarfs the number of victims abused by Jimmy Savile, and it is believed that across the UK it is “highly likely that the number of victims stretches into the tens of thousands.” The scale of this scandal is almost certainly far larger than we know, given how little investigation there has been, and how few consequences have been visited upon those involved.
I suspect that future historians will be puzzled by these last few decades, during which the widespread prostitution of children by organised criminal gangs — sometimes escalating to murder — was met with embarrassed silence in much of the media and among most feminists. This was even while far less serious incidents (say, Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle) were met with outrage. Why would feminists jump to the defence of a princess, but raise barely a peep in response to the raped 11-year-old branded with the initial of her rapist?
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