Will the BBC ever give up on its intellectually dishonest liberal bias? After the devastating Casey report exposing Rotherham Council’s bigoted concerns for Pakistani Muslim sensitivities at the expense of sexually exploited local children, it might have been thought that even the liberal BBC could not put a damage limitation or PC spin on Rotherham’s sex crimes.

Enter Edward Stourton of the BBC’s World At One.

Discussing Rotherham Council’s neglect of vulnerable children with Camilla Cavendish of The Sunday Times, Mr Stourton asked her:

“To what extent do you think part of the problem is what you might call ‘rotten boroughs’ -- in other words local authorities which have been under the control of one political party for a long period of time where the usual checks and balances that you might expect don’t apply?”

Got that? The Rotherham Council sex abuse problem, according to the BBC, might not be rotten councillors running scared of the Muslim community (one ethnic Pakistani councillor was praised by the police for his ability to stop Pakistani men coming out onto the streets to confront the English Defence League) but simply “rotten boroughs” suffering the usual bureaucratic complacency.

Had the BBC’s Mr Stourton even read the latest report on Rotherham? An objective reading of Louise Casey’s report does not allow for any ambiguity. The glaring fact about Rotherham Council and the local police is that underage children were being abused by Pakistani Muslim men and the authorities ran scared of the problem.

Amazingly, in one case the police even took the fight to the abused child. A 13 year old girl, “was found" by the police at 3am -- in a semi-derelict house alone with a large group of adult males. She was drunk, the result of having been supplied with alcohol, and there was evidence that her clothing had been disrupted.

She alone was arrested for a public order offence, detained, prosecuted, appeared before the Youth Court and received a Referral Order for which the YOT arranged ‘reparation’, drug and alcohol counselling, art psychotherapy and victim awareness sessions.”

What a wonderful example of crime-busting. It would be interesting to know what those “victim awareness sessions” were about. Incredibly, there’s a suggestion that the Pakistani abusers were seen as the victims of the abused child, a point confirmed by a reference in the report about the police:

“The sense was that if there had been any offence it had been by the girls, for luring the men in.” Those Pakistani abusers must have thought they were in paradise.

The fact is that in this shabby Rotherham affair, Muslim sensitivities and post-Macpherson subservience to ethnic minority self-esteem came before the right of local children to be protected by the criminal law.

That’s the big news in Britain today, everyone is not equal before the law. The failure of the police and councillors in Rotherham to protect vulnerable children is one of the greatest scandals of our time, and yet rather than do everything possible to expose such failure, the BBC appears to go out of its way to neutralise the Casey findings.

The problem, according to the BBC’s World At One, is “rotten boroughs”, not rotten councillors and police.

But of course there’s nothing new here. The BBC for years has been aware of the allegations about Pakistani Muslim sex abuse gangs in Rotherham, yet did nothing to find out the facts.

Instead, almost as an adjunct of the puerile but nasty Unite Against Fascism (UAF) movement, the BBC launched an undercover investigation against those making the allegations, the British National Party (BNP), -- a nasty bunch to be sure, but not a bunch that has raped thousands of children.

In 2004, the BBC made a documentary The Secret Agent which exposed the BNP as racist. The documentary, based on a report by a BBC undercover investigator, did indeed show unsavoury racist BNP characters -- no surprise there -- but it also showed BNP claims about Muslim sex abuse gangs, claims that are now accepted as fact by the police and by the mainstream media, but at the time ignored by the BBC.

The truth is that until recently the only people shouting loudly about the Rotherham child sex scandal were those on the far Right, such as the BNP and the EDL Indeed, the Casey report refers to police concerns about the BNP as possible reasons for backing-off from bringing prosecutions against the Pakistani child-groomers.

For years, what was happening in Rotherham was a time-bomb of a story just waiting to explode, yet the mainstream media left the story to the likes of the BNP. That says as much about the BBC as it does about the BNP itself.

The BBC was more interested in its self-righteous and bigoted United-Against-Fascism-style moral crusade in exposing BNP thuggery (a fact of no surprise to anyone) than it was in exposing the much bigger story of police and local authority evasions of responsibility that left vulnerable little girls to the mercy of criminal Pakistani gangs.

Vincent Cooper is a regular contributor to The Commentator