They were victims of anti-racism: that’s the really shocking thing. At least — at least — 1,400 girls were systematically abused over several years in the grim post-industrial town of Rotherham. “Abuse” is a flexible term, but we’re talking here about the most nauseating forms of exploitation: gang rapes, people trafficking, threats against victims’ families to ensure their compliance.

Last week, the council was declared dysfunctional and, in effect, taken over by central government. But how could such things have happened?

Well, the girls were overwhelmingly white and the abusers were, in almost every case, men of Pakistani origin. To council staff taught to see everything through the prism of anti-racism, this presented a problem. As one employee told the official inquiry, “the white British are very mindful of racism.” The council tried to bury the whole issue, the report said, “for fear of upsetting community relations.”

The girls weren’t victims only of anti-racism. They were victims, too, of the incompetence and lethargy that has become normal in some of Britain’s one-party towns. To give you an idea, the average wage in Rotherham is $26,000, but the council’s chief executive gets $210,000 and the official in charge of child protection $170,000. When the enormousness and enormity of the abuse was first revealed, councilors dismissed the story as “politically motivated.” Incredibly, even now, after everyone knows what happened, Labour candidates romp home with huge majorities.

But this is not just a story of self-serving Leftist bureaucracies. No one imagines that the abuse would have continued unchecked for so long had the perpetrators been white.

I don’t normally write about British news; but we’re dealing with a trans-Atlantic phenomenon. For many on the Left, in your country as in mine, anti-racism is the strongest card in the deck. It trumps absolutely everything else: free speech, free contract, free association, equality before the law, fair treatment, even child protection. In the United States, anti-racist dogma is strongest in universities; in Britain, in local authorities. In both nations, though, it produces the same malign effects — not least among which is a deterioration in race relations.

The worst things in politics generally begin from good intentions. The original race campaigners felt as strongly as they did because they were dealing with brutal bigotry of a kind that has now become mercifully rare. They saw their fellow citizens abused, denied jobs, even physically attacked because of their color. In parts of the United States, segregation had a legal basis. People rightly became angry, and their focus on race was proportionate to their anger.

There are still instances of racial abuse, but their rarity now makes them newsworthy. On every measure, race relations have improved markedly over the past 40 years, and the nasty epithets that I used to overhear as a small boy in the 1970s are now exceptional and shocking.

In the mean time, though, an entire industry — indeed, an entire way of life — has grown up around anti-racism. Its exponents now argue, not for people to be treated the same, but for people to be treated differently. The less they can point to overt racism, the more obsessed they become with inferring its presence indirectly.

I had hoped that the election of Barack Obama would put a stop to this nonsense, palpably falsifying the notion that ethnic minorities could not reach the top. Some race professionals plainly feared the same thing, which is why they tried to undermine his 2008 campaign. (Remember the Jesse Jackson “I wanna cut his nuts off” moment?)

As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. By the 2012 campaign, anything said by any conservative on the subject of either immigration or benefits was ipso facto racist. I remember watching a truly surreal debate on CNN about a Republican ad that showed only white welfare claimants. According to one pundit, this was deliberately done to look incongruous, and so subliminally to make viewers focus on race.

The phrase everyone used was “dog whistle,” which was perhaps an apter metaphor than they intended. A dog whistle is heard on a frequency that the rest of us miss. Yet it was Leftie pundits, not wicked Republicans, who could hear ultrasound racism in even the most incongruous remarks. They were, so to speak, the dogs.

If anti-racism were only the stuff of electoral knockabout, fine: all sorts of silly things are said on the campaign trail. The trouble is that it has become the ruling creed of a huge chunk of the public sector — and here the results are not comic, but tragic.

Rotherham is not the first case of its kind. In the 1990s, in another Labour fiefdom, the London borough of Islington, children in a care home were found to have suffered abuse as a result of the council’s anti-racism policy. In 2000, a little girl from Africa was tortured to death in yet another Labour council, Haringey, because local officials were reluctant to be culturally insensitive toward her murderous guardians.

To quote again from the official report into the Rotherham abominations: “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist.”

That’s isn’t about good intentions; it isn’t about helping people from ethnic minorities who, on the contrary, tend to be the chief victims; it isn’t really about race at all. It’s about using doctrine to bludgeon all opposition aside, flattening even the most basic human instincts in the process. The councilors concerned have been sacked. If only the ideology that warped them could be so easily dismissed.

Dan Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament.