Britain’s Pakistani community often seems frozen in time; it has progressed little and remains strikingly impoverished. The unemployment rate for the least educated young Muslims is close to 40 percent, and more than two-thirds of Pakistani households are below the poverty line.

My early years in Luton were lived inside a Pakistani bubble. Everyone my family knew was Pakistani, and most of my fellow students at school were Pakistani. I can’t recall a white person ever visiting our home.

Rotherham has the third-most-segregated Muslim population in England: The majority of the Pakistani community, 82 percent, lives in just three of the town’s council electoral wards. Voter turnout can be as low as 30 percent, so seats can be won or lost by a handful of votes — a situation that easily leads to patronage and clientelism.

Rotherham is solidly Labour; the last Conservative M.P. lost his seat a month after Adolf Hitler was elected the chancellor of Germany. The Labour politicians who governed Rotherham in the last decade came into politics during the anti-racism movement of the ’70s and ’80s. Their political instinct — and self-interest — was not to confront or alienate their Pakistani voters. Far easier to ally themselves with socially conservative community leaders, who themselves held power by staying on the right side of the community.

These dynamics help explain why so few spoke out about the culture that produced the crimes — a culture of misogyny, which Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative politician who was raised near Rotherham, criticized in 2012, saying that it permits some Pakistani men to consider young white women “fair game.” It would be a brave leader, Pakistani or otherwise, who would tell the Pakistani community that it needed to address such issues, or that the road to progress required Pakistani parents to relax their strictures and allow their sons and daughters to marry out.

If working-class British Pakistanis had been better represented in the groups that failed them — the political class, the police, the media and the child protection agencies — it is arguable that there would have been a less squeamish attitude toward the shibboleths of multiculturalism. British Pakistanis may be held back by racism and poverty, but by cleaving so firmly to outmoded prejudices and fearing so much of the mainstream culture that swirls around them, they segregate themselves.

I owe much to the fact that my family moved from a Pakistani monoculture in Luton to a neighborhood that was largely white, where I learned to challenge many of the attitudes and expectations my parents had instilled. An enlightening breeze of modernity needs to blow through those pockets of England that remain forever Pakistan.