The BBC went from claiming it was racist to talk about Muslim grooming gangs to admitting the UK has a national epidemic.

On 3rd July 2017 the BBC broadcast “The Betrayed Girls”, a TV documentary ostensibly about the Muslim grooming gang in the small town of Rochdale in northern England. This 90 minute programme followed just two months after the BBC broadcast a 3 hour drama about the trial of this same Muslim grooming gang. Yet thirteen years earlier, when the grooming gangs in another town were first exposed on national TV in the UK, the BBC’s reaction was to amplify the claim that only racists would believe such a thing was going on. A few years later in 2008, when the BBC (Orwell’s Ministry of Truth) broadcast their first documentary on grooming gangs operating in yet a third town, the BBC did not even mention the single most distinctive feature of this kind of criminality: that the ethnicity of the rapists was different to that of the schoolgirl victims. As late as 2010 the Muslim Council of Britain (representing some 500 Muslim organisations) was still saying the Muslim grooming gangs were “a racist myth”. The organised rape of English schoolgirls over decades was something the British establishment were prepared to conceal to prevent Islam or Muslims being seen in a negative light. The entire establishment had worked for decades to conceal that these gangs were Muslims and the victims were non-Muslims. A generation of schoolgirls was sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism.

What happened to bring this scandal to the point that it could no longer be concealed? “The Betrayed Girls” offered no explanation, other than the desire of the liberal establishment to wrest this issue from “the far right”. The British National Party had been campaigning on the scandal for years. The BNP’s attempt to use the democratic process to get these issues addressed was blocked at every point, with the BBC even funding covert reporters to infiltrate the BNP and publicise what the BNP was saying in member-only meetings (the BBC made no attempt to infiltrate the mosques to see the grooming gangs pimping their schoolgirl victims). The joint actions by the far Left, Muslim organisations, the liberal establishment and the media to prevent the BNP from using democratic process to address the problem of Muslim gangs raping schoolgirls showed how little democracy there is in Britain. By 2009 the English Defence League took to the streets protesting about this scandal. As my book Easy Meat first argued in 2014, without the campaign by the EDL, there is no indication that the liberal establishment would have addressed this scandal. Now that there is no chance of any political party having the strength to expose the truth about the grooming gangs, it seems that The Ministry of Truth has decided that the next stage of the managed narrative should be deployed.

What was notable about this BBC documentary was that, for the first time, the establishment has admitted that these grooming gangs are primarily Muslim men. As is evident from the conviction data, where there is barely a single case where the gang didn’t have Muslim members, or where the gang wasn’t operating in a town where Muslim gangs have got away with this kind of crime for years (I have maintained a list of those convicted, since no newspaper or government agency has bothered to do so). The narrative has also moved on with key figures now professing their shame that they kept quiet for so many years (their decisions to remain silent were also exposed in Easy Meat).

In “The Betrayed Girls” that journalist for TheTimes, feted for his 2011 reporting, now admits his shame that he “decided to let my liberal principles get in the way of me doing my job”. In this documentary he goes on to ask “How had this pattern developed… apparently completely unseen by the authorities. How come every single aspect of the British establishment treated every single case that had cropped up as an isolated one-off case with no pattern whatsoever to any of the other cases that were so similar.” Yet the only detailed account of this scandal is Easy Meat, where I prove there were clear indications from 1988 onwards that the media and the authorities did know what was going on, they did see the pattern, but they deliberately chose not to do anything and Muslim organisations were keen that political parties change the law to imprison those who tried to alert the public. From 1997 to 2006 the Leftist government of the UK tried over and over to pass laws which would criminalise those who so much as offended any Muslim – the establishment sending a clear indication to journalists, social workers and police officers that if they said “we have a problem with gangs of Muslims across the country systematically trapping, raping and pimping schoolgirls” not only would the speaker’s career be over, but they might face years in prison. The leading politicians publicly stated that they would keep changing the laws to ensure they could jail those who said such things. In 2006 that government managed to pass this law, with the most draconian version of this law only failing to pass by just one vote. Britain came within one vote of having a blasphemy law, instituted to protect the Muslim rape gangs from being exposed.

As they re-write the narrative, the BBC documentary purports that the UK Parliament was on the ball with this scandal, with a committee reporting on the scandal in 2013. However, at no point did the cross-party committee even admit or accept that these gangs are Muslims (when asked to denounce this association by one member of the committee, the committee simply declined to denounce this association). Given the tiny number of Muslims in the country and when all the evidence since 1988 showed that these gangs were mostly Muslim (both in the UK and in the Netherlands), not noticing the elephant in the room required deliberation. The UK Parliament had a Muslim Sheikh speak to the investigating committee, but no Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish cleric was called to speak.

After the Parliamentary report came out the Sheikh who gave testimony produced a sermon denouncing the grooming gangs (yet only a minority of mosques would read out that sermon). The liberal establishment still dared not say in 2013 that these gangs were Muslims. In the year between this committee taking evidence and its report being published, the British media devoted virtually no time publicising that this parliamentary investigation was underway (it is normal practice for the news media to regularly discuss excerpts from such controversial committee hearings). In recent years the government has instituted an Inquiry into these grooming gangs, which is trundling on with barely any mention in the media of what is being said to them. All manner of child abuse has been bundled into this Inquiry’s remit, so that when it reports the scale of the “national epidemic” of grooming gangs will be obscured by child abuse committed by those from the 95% of the UK who are not Muslim. What did feature in the news was the multi-year struggle of the UK government to find someone to lead this Inquiry, with the New Zealand judge flown in to lead it, only to have her resign 18 months later amid allegations she had said that Britain’s problem with the sexual abuse of children was because the country had “so many Asian men”.

In admitting that the gangs were Muslims last week’s BBC documentary is thus a landmark in the writing of the history of this scandal. However, what the BBC would still not address is why these gangs should be made up of Muslims. Over and over, the BBC narrative in this documentary was “nothing in Islam[…] justifies these types of despicable & evil crimes” [33:45]. Yet in Easy Meat I have an entire chapter explaining the Islamic motivation for these crimes. Moreover, the BBC implied that it was no longer the case that these gangs were being treated as isolated incidents, when that is exactly how they are being treated (my collection of news reports shows that individual convictions of these gangs are treated as individual convictions, with virtually no reporting in recent years that these trials are proceeding across the land.

The BBC documentary was very duplicitous: rather than discuss details from trial after trial in order to show the national problem, the BBC used a specific trial in Rochdale interwoven with the events from the national scandal. For years another small town (Rotherham) was used as a scapegoat to indicate that the problem was only in one town only, but with the conviction data proving that the problem is across England, the BBC has used Rochdale to gradually accustom the nation to the admission that these grooming gangs were operating in scores of towns with Muslim populations (a senior police officer is cited as saying there are only four streets of Muslims in his area, yet Muslim grooming gangs there are now targetting the daughters of women previously groomed when they were children). I have informants who have complained to the police for decades of Muslim grooming gangs in their towns, towns where there has not been a single mention in the newspapers of there being a gang there. Thus the BBC manages to continue the cover-up of the national scandal whilst appearing to talk about the national scandal.

Coming shortly after a three hour drama on the trial of a grooming gang in Rochdale, a documentary that appears to be on the same subject ensures that most of the nation would think “I know what happened there, I’ll watch something else” (Google returns 10 pages relating to the drama for every 1 web page relating to this far more revealing documentary). Orwell knew how The Ministry of Truth worked back in the 1940s, and they continue their manipulation of what the public thinks and what the historical record must show. Many of the newspaper headlines for this documentary stated that it was the “true story of the Rochdale grooming scandal”, with no mention of the wider purview of the documentary. No doubt the BBC invited journalists to preview the show and perhaps even provided summary material that specifically framed this documentary as being about Rochdale, to ensure the smallest possible impact for the documentary. The BBC had asked for and received a free copy of Easy Meat, yet the documentary made no mention of the book, and the BBC did not contact the author either for input to the programme or to any preview of the show. In years to come the BBC will be able to point to this documentary admitting there was a national epidemic of Muslim grooming gangs, whilst ensuring that the documentary itself made barely a blip in the national debate. Since the Ministry of Truth (created in the heyday of Fascism) is funded by a direct tax on the citizens, the BBC can afford to produce a documentary like this with the deliberate intention that it should not be watched by many people. In the UK it is a criminal offence to own a TV and then not pay the state tax to the Ministry of Truth. This relic of the Fascist 1920s is allowed to persist, because the Ministry of Truth is too useful to the political class.

Whether the BBC knows it or not, the only conclusion an objective viewer of this documentary can draw is that it was “the far right” who were prepared to face the facts (where “far right” means: anyone who is brave enough to criticise Muslims or Islam). I do not believe the liberal establishment’s attempt “to wrest this issue from the far right” has succeeded: in recent months I’ve had life-long Leftists tell me “the EDL were right, the EDL were not racists, the EDL were not far right”. As the photographs in Easy Meat show, in 2010 the UK’s national extremism police experts (who investigated the EDL) were denounced for stating that the EDL were not far right. But this bogeyman is just too useful to the establishment, in order to prevent many ordinary citizens from looking objectively at the impact of Islam on the world.

Incidentally, the day before this BBC documentary was broadcast, my Twitter account was suspended. None of my requests to Twitter for an explanation have received a reply.

Peter McLoughlin is the author of Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal.