Here’s a test of moral sanity. When you first learned about the grooming-gangs scandal — the organised rape of vulnerable working-class girls in the towns and cities of Britain — did you feel anger and disgust? When you learned of the institutional coverups and obfuscations, still unaccounted for, did that anger deepen? If so, you’ve already grasped the central truth of this story.
The horror of the grooming gangs is not just in the crimes themselves, but in the evasions and euphemisms deployed by the political class, allowing these crimes to continue, even to this day. We’re encouraged to think that what happened to those girls was a failure of the system, but the truth is much worse. This was the system working exactly as it was designed to, putting process over principle and reputation before truth. This is how rape gangs became a problem to be managed or “understood” through a political lens rather than a moral one. It’s how children were treated as mere collateral damage in a larger story about institutional failure.
It’s a story that goes back decades but for our purposes, we begin in 2006, when Jon Wedger submitted a list of 50 girls being groomed and sexually abused in London. The former Metropolitan Police officer provided car registration numbers, dates, and locations. In the sort of response that has come to define this whole affair, he was told to back off by social services because he was generating “extra work”.
This is modern Britain: a country run by a managerial class made up of officials, comms teams, and risk managers whose first instinct is to protect the institution and, by extension, themselves. Pay close enough attention, and you’ll detect the same vocabulary and cadences in every utterance. These are people fluent in the language of obfuscation and euphemism – practically a job requirement – and will speak of “community cohesion” while wearing a lanyard like a medal. They will hold a “listening circle” or “empathy huddle” but at that very moment, a young girl is being driven to a room somewhere with a stained mattress and a line of customers.