There comes a point when institutional cowardice morphs into complicity. The Casey report didn’t tell us anything fundamentally new. What it did was shout—officially—what victims, frontline workers, and communities have been whispering for years: that in towns across England, white working-class girls were raped, trafficked, brutalised, and discarded like used tissue, and the authorities looked the other way. Why? Because the perpetrators were often men of Pakistani or South Asian heritage—and calling that out was deemed more dangerous than letting the abuse continue.
Welcome to liberal authoritarianism. A world in which “community cohesion” became a euphemism for cowardice, and “diversity and inclusion” became a shield for institutional paralysis. In a desperate bid to avoid being seen as racist, social services, police forces, councillors, and even some journalists abandoned the most vulnerable members of society—girls who were often in care, already failed by family and system, and then sacrificed again to maintain a politically correct illusion of social harmony.
This is the shame of our generation. Not just the acts of the predators, but the silence of the gatekeepers.
When the 2020 Home Office report downplayed any ethnic pattern to these grooming gangs, it was welcomed as vindication by those terrified of nuance. Yet Casey’s audit has now ripped that fiction apart. Her team could not find evidence for the oft-repeated line that most perpetrators were white. Quite the opposite: in areas where data was actually recorded (a scandal in itself that so much wasn’t), there was significant overrepresentation of men of Pakistani or South Asian background.
And yet we still hear the chorus: “Don’t stigmatise communities.” But which communities? The men in question were not acting on behalf of their communities. They weren’t noble ambassadors of culture. They were sexual predators exploiting racial taboos, institutional fear, and the social invisibility of poor white girls. They are not representative of their race—but failing to name them honestly does damage to that very race and community.
In fact, do you know who is often the first to suffer when society refuses to face such truths? It’s the innocent from those very communities. Women in hijabs, children with Asian surnames, elderly Muslims in prayer. When anger boils over—as it surely will now—they will be the ones spat on, shouted at, assaulted. Trial by pigmentation is coming, because we were too cowardly to separate culture from criminality, and identity from individual guilt.
And it won’t stop there. Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon) will step forward like a seedy messiah, reciting Enoch Powell and bathing in the rage. Farage will polish his pint glass. Musk will amplify every demagogue from Kemi Badenoch to Suella Braverman. And Keir Starmer? He will shuffle his feet and change his tune again, having once dismissed a national inquiry as a “far-right bandwagon”. He has now jumped on that bandwagon, no doubt reading every word of the Casey report through his polling data.
And let us not forget the BBC, the police, the CPS, the charities who knew. Or guessed. Or suspected. And chose silence. They will now look for low-hanging fruit to sacrifice in a desperate bid to stay clean—some low-grade social worker, a retired copper. Someone who can be publicly flogged so that the powerful can claim redemption.
But make no mistake: this isn’t about race. It’s about power and who gets protected. The working-class girls of Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Oldham, Oxford, and elsewhere had no power. No lawyers. No lobby. No safe spaces. They were from broken homes, care homes, or no homes. They were easy prey for gangs—and easy to ignore for suits and sirens terrified of being branded racist.
Well, guess what? You don’t have to be racist to see a pattern. And you don’t have to abandon anti-racism to tell the truth. In fact, real anti-racism demands that you hold everyone to the same standards of behaviour, regardless of skin colour or surname.
This is not a clash of cultures. It’s a collapse of courage. A nation so afraid of being impolite it left children to be raped.
So here’s the uncomfortable truth: those girls were not failed because their abusers were Asian. They were failed because we, the state, the system, the society—refused to look.
We still are.
