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 intended, making children collateral damage, a secondary effect of its instinct for process over principle and reputation over truth.
As far back as 2006, Jon Wedger submitted a list of 50 girls being groomed and sexually abused in Londo…
