Grooming Gangs and Collective Working-Class Trauma

Working class England continues to be abused because we are the wrong race, wrong socio-economic status, and wrong politics.

Americans now know what “Muslim grooming gangs” are. For years, I would use that word to describe my early entry into the political world to my American friends, only to be met with, “grooming, what?”

The idea that gangs of men, with their cousins, brothers, and fathers, could groom and rape vulnerable young girls is so obscene, and so unthinkable - but the fact that politicians, police officers, and local authorities conspired to literally cover these stories up is somehow worse. It is England’s national shame, and unlike the many perceived wrongdoings of the British Empire that see us endlessly apoligising in the age of Woke, it is not a shame confined to our past. It is a crime that persists to this day.

England’s working-class towns have carried the weight of these crimes for decades now. The girls - the ones who didn’t lose their lives - have been permanently scarred by the crimes committed against them, and the people in authority who let it happen to them. But there’s an untold story behind the crimes, one that I think is important to tell, not because it’s more significant than what happened to these girls - truly, nothing is - but because it shows the real extent of the betrayal here. I’m talking about the impact that these crimes had on the lives of the men and young boys of these communities who were effectively victims of entrapment; after being ignored by the politicians and smeared in the media as “racists” for speaking out about what was happening to our friends, sisters, and daughters, working-class English men were permanently condemned for the political allegiances they MADE?? in the wake of these crimes. Without representation in mainstream anything, working-class men joined the far-right movements and parties of the day. After fathers were arrested for responding to crimes their daughters suffered, and after young boys were declared “yobs” and mocked by middle-class snobs (remember Muslamic Ray Guns?), they were forced to choose: side with extremist groups who gave them a voice and accurately identified some of the problems impacting working-class towns, or keep on voting for the mainstream parties who abused you in the worst possible ways. It was an easy decision to make for many, myself included, and that’s how I and a million other people in 2009 found ourselves supporting the British National Party.

This is a story I’ve told a million times, so I apologise to old readers rolling their eyes. But this is an overlooked dynamic, and to this day, BNP voters are universally considered racists, neo-Nazis, and extremists. Even Nigel Farage bans former BNP supporters from his party. The visceral hatred is hard to avoid, and the same snobbery exists in the press about all of those people. There is an accepted narrative in English media and politics, and it’s one that nobody actually believes - namely, that one million Brits are neo-Nazis and should shut up forever. The reality, obviously, is that a million Brits were so let down by their own political and media establishment that they sided with the devil. And as someone heavily embedded in BNP politics in my teens, I can tell you honestly that many of the members were thoroughly decent working-class mothers, fathers, and grandmothers who were simply tired of being treated like dirt. Sure, there were racists. Quite a few of them. There were even neo-Nazis, Gaddafi obsessives, and white nationalists who put me on their “Stab On Sight” list for allegedly being a “Jewish spy.” Nobody is denying that - and in fact, if I were denying it, my entire argument about working-class people being driven to extremism wouldn’t make any sense.

Working-class England’s collective trauma led us down that path, and for those of us on social media, that trauma has come flooding right back as media reporting about grooming gangs goes viral in the States. Elon Musk is talking about it, for heaven’s sake. Do you know how big this is? Do you know what it’s like when the only attention you’ve ever had from the national media and politicians is negative, for elected officials and high-profile figures in the United States to now tell us that we were, in fact, right to be outraged? It is simultaneously relieving, cathartic, utterly depressing, and melancholic. I have spent the entire day today reliving old memories. Getting spat on in college by fellow students. Assaulted in the street. Called a Nazi in the national media. Getting so angry that I gave the real Nazis more of my time than I should have done. It is a trauma I have felt for the last 17 years, and one I think the rest of working-class England feels.

Our girls were brutalised, we boys had our lives ruined to the point where lads I knew committed suicide or had mental breakdowns, and many other young boys were completely lost to the Neo-Nazi rabbit holes in which they found themselves after a few years of exposure. And make no mistake, this only happened to us because we were poor. When it happens to the plebs, it doesn’t matter so much; it was hard for us to resist in a way that could be covered in a flattering way on the pages of Britain’s broadsheets. We had to fight, shock, and shout until our lungs bled. We were easily painted as the bad guys by what Rotherham MP Dennis MacShane might call “Guardian reading leftie liberals.” The journalists who never leave the Home Counties and aren’t quite sure what a leccy metre is, and who certainly can’t imagine a world where girls are systematically groomed and raped by gangs of Muslim men. That couldn’t possibly happen, because it doesn’t happen in their communities.

I first became exposed to the problem when I met the family of a girl whose body was never found. Over the years I met dozens of other victims. I campaigned with them. And I watched as the media ignored their stories and allowed far-right groups to prey on their trauma and effectively use them as election campaign surrogates. When I reached my 20s and started standing in elections, I even went door to door with victims, expecting to educate them about the problem. What we found is that the vast majority of people we spoke to, the majority of people on whose doors we knocked, knew about these disgusting crimes, were directly impacted by it, or knew somebody who was.

This crime runs much deeper than people think, as does our working-class trauma, and despite the 2014 Jay Report that vindicated all of us who said it was happening in the 2000s, grooming gangs persist to this day. I could probably tell you some places where it is happening right now. Snooker clubs and kebab shops in Yorkshire and East Lancashire. By name.

And I am expected to think that now a handful of British politicians are speaking out publicly and admitting it was wrong - the same politicians who called me and my mates “racists” for years - that something is going to change. Well, I’m not daft as I might look. I know it’s not going to happen because it’s happening to the wrong class of people. Wrong race, wrong socio-economic status, and wrong politics.