Britain's grooming gangs scandal and the cowardice of the political class

There is a silence more deafening than denial: the silence that comes dressed in principle, that speaks the language of tolerance while turning away from the screams of children. For over a decade, working-class girls in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford were systematically abused by organised grooming gangs. The details are unspeakable, the victims countless, the perpetrators known. And yet, somehow, the institutions built to protect the vulnerable became accessories to their exploitation. It is a scandal not only of criminality, but of a moral failure so profound it invites us to reconsider what kind of society we imagine ourselves to be.

How Britain's institutions looked away

We begin not with the crimes themselves, as horrific as they are, but with the elite mindset that let them happen in full view.

The girls were young—some as young as 11—and mostly from marginalised, working-class white backgrounds. The men who targeted them did so systematically: isolating them, supplying them with alcohol and drugs, then subjecting them to industrial-scale rape and abuse. Reports were filed. Victims spoke. Social workers raised alarms. Yet time and again, authorities failed to act.

One cannot overstate how thoroughly these crimes were known and documented. In Rotherham alone, an estimated 1,400 children were abused between 1997 and 2013, according to the damning Jay Report. The same patterns recurred in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and elsewhere. The problem was not that the crimes were hidden—it was that the will to stop them had evaporated.

So what explains this paralysis? Not a lack of information, but a surplus of ideology.

To pursue these gangs vigorously, public institutions would have had to confront the uncomfortable fact that many of the perpetrators were British Pakistani men operating in tight-knit communities. And here, the bureaucratic imagination failed. Officials feared that acknowledging this pattern would expose them to accusations of racism. In an age where public reputation is managed more carefully than public duty, those accusations were deemed more dangerous than the ongoing rape of children.

This is a moral illusion—one of the most destructive of our time. In trying to protect themselves from reputational harm, officials enabled physical harm on a vast scale. In attempting to avoid a secondary, symbolic offence, they permitted a primary, lived one. It is the ethical inversion of a society that prizes optics over outcomes.

In an age where public reputation is managed more carefully than public duty, those accusations were deemed more dangerous than the ongoing rape of children.

The role of the Crown Prosecution Service under Keir Starmer is instructive here. Starmer, who served as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013, presided over an institution that showed repeated reluctance to prosecute these cases, despite mounting evidence. Whistleblower Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester Police detective, has repeatedly stated, that the CPS had the files and the means to act—and chose not to.

Why? Because doing so would have meant swimming against the dominant cultural current. And when personal risk meets institutional cowardice, the outcome is predictable: delay, obfuscation, and abandonment.

The cult of appearances

To understand how such a vast moral failure could unfold not in the shadows, but in the full light of public knowledge, we must examine the psychology of those who enabled it, not just through negligence, but through the peculiar habits of thought that now define elite culture.

Today’s elites are fluent in a particular dialect of virtue. They know the phrases: equity, inclusion, systemic harm, and unconscious bias. They recite them as talismans, cultural signifiers of moral awareness. But these words, in their performative repetition, often crowd out actual moral clarity. As Orwell once warned, the decay of language leads to the decay of thought. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the way our institutions have handled the grooming scandal.

The governing ethic was not "do what is right," but "do what cannot be misinterpreted." It was not "protect the vulnerable," but "protect the reputation of the institution." Instead of asking, "What will happen to these girls if we do nothing?" the question became, "What will happen to us if we act and are misunderstood?"

This form of moral risk aversion masquerades as wisdom. It claims to be principled when it is merely self-preserving. And it is uniquely potent in institutions dominated by the managerial class—those for whom the greatest sin is to be seen on the wrong side of a culture war. They are not the villains of old—corrupt, brash, indifferent—but the new villains of polite society: anxious, well-educated, status-sensitive functionaries who prize moral alignment over moral substance.

In this climate, confronting uncomfortable facts is itself an offence. To point out that a pattern of abuse is disproportionately perpetrated by men from a particular ethnic group is seen as a breach of the etiquette of virtue. So the facts are euphemised, the pattern is obscured, and the victims become inconvenient data points—less important than the moral safety of those managing the narrative.

This phenomenon of middle-class complicity arises when elites outsource moral judgment to consensus. They do not ask whether an action is good, but whether it is acceptable. They outsource ethics to the imaginary tribunal of Twitter, to the HR department, to a focus group. In doing so, they avoid the agonising responsibility of moral action.

And so, the girls were abandoned—not by monsters, but by managers. Not by people who hated them, but by people who were terrified of offending someone else. Their trauma was buried beneath a thousand diversity policies, each one promising fairness, none of them delivering it.

A nation that cannot protect its children has no moral authority to speak of anything else.

What happens when we lose moral courage

What happens to a society when it loses the courage to name what is in front of it? When it becomes more important to speak the language of virtue than to perform virtuous acts? The grooming gang scandal is not just a localised tragedy—it is a mirror held up to a nation that has become morally confused and spiritually anaemic.

At the heart of this is a loss of moral hierarchy. Not all evils are equal. And yet, the prevailing logic of elite institutions suggests they are. Causing offence is equated with committing harm. Challenging a cultural narrative is treated as a form of violence. Meanwhile, actual violence—brutal, sustained, and targeted—is met with bureaucratic delay and deafening institutional silence.

In such a world, truth itself becomes dangerous. Facts must be laundered through euphemism. Reports are rewritten. Categories are blurred. Even language retreats, unable to name what it sees for fear of the consequences. And in that void, predators thrive.

A nation that cannot protect its children has no moral authority to speak of anything else. The grooming gang scandal is not a peripheral story—it is the story. It reveals the terminal weakness of a ruling class more interested in protecting itself than protecting the innocent. It reveals a bureaucracy so performative that it cannot tell the difference between moral perception and moral reality. And it reveals the catastrophic cost of cowardice: lives shattered, trust betrayed, justice deferred.

The lesson here is simple, and it is urgent. We must recover the courage to see clearly. We must rediscover the moral instincts that prioritise action over abstraction. And we must never again allow ideological vanity to triumph over human dignity.

The girls deserved better. We all do.