“Grooming gangs” are the gift that keeps on giving to the new radical right. But who is the giver? What circumstances did this trope emerge from? How did it become so huge, so quickly, why is the left so useless in fighting culture wars like this one – and what can we do at this stage?
Back in the noughties, I was working as the director of the Oldham Race Equality Partnership, a voluntary sector organisation run by local people elected to an executive committee. We had just three other workers.
We faced many challenges – a strong local BNP, the 2005 terror attack in London, the controversy over the Muslim veil and the long hangover from the Oldham riots of 2001.
The Ritchie Report into these riots was supposed to be the basis for the local authority learning the lessons of these riots but, on my very first day, I was taken aside by the director of housing and was told the council had no intention of implementing Ritchie’s recommendations.
In late December 2006, I was called to a mysterious meeting by the police and the council, along with community representatives from the local Kashmiri, Bangladeshi and Caribbean communities, where I learned that a major investigation was underway into the sexual abuse of as many as 20 young girls, some as young as 12, by a group of around 20 men, five of whom had been charged with offences including abduction and rape.
The five charged all had Muslim names. The police told us they realised that this was extremely racially sensitive and wanted to hear from us about how to respond. Our response was clear and unanimous: the police and CPS should use the full force of the law to crack down on the perpetrators and make an example of them.
But the senior police and local authority felt they knew better – good race relations was threatened by this, they said, and so the ethnic origins of the perpetrators should be played down or omitted from press releases.
As an advisor to them, I had had a front-seat view throughout the 1990s of the Greater Manchester Police’s adoption of “ethnic monitoring” – the deliberate splintering of the unity around the concept of ‘Asian’ that had been formed through the struggles against organised racism in Southall and Bradford in the 1970s.
The ethnic monitoring framework they came up with was unduly complex and set in train ethnic ID politics by which, for example, Kashmiris came to differentiate themselves from Pakistanis, Pakistanis from Indians and so on; it dismally failed to deal with racial attacks, because what matters there is not the actual but the perceived ethnicity of the victim in the mind of the perpetrator – but then, that was never the intention.
The police were very proud of this framework and never shy in telling other people and groups – including people who ran community centres in Asian-majority areas – where they were going wrong in race relations or in any aspect of what they called ‘diversity’, a new buzzword to replace ‘multiculturalism’.
This was a new language behind which educated professionals could hide their own racist and misogynistic practices and pontificate endlessly.
Worse, ’diversity’, which included the monitoring of discrimination against women, gays, lesbians and eventually people in transition to a changed gender, fractured the unity that these groups, alongside black and Asian people, had forged – there would be no more protracted solidarity between gay groups and the striking miners, which had been one of the most positive developments of 1984. ID politics became a novel method of ‘divide and rule’.
While ID politics has undoubtedly helped some people to find themselves, find their voice, feel happier in their own skin, and find support and safety among others experiencing the same or a similar discrimination, it has this internal contradiction in that it also encourages a centripetal, inward-looking approach to political awareness and activity that makes finding allies and solidarity with other vulnerable and oppressed groups harder than was previously the case.
This was the police and local authority background to the decision, taken in many other places apart from Oldham, to pussyfoot around the apparent racial dimension of grooming; as a result, inter-ethnic grooming continued, when it could have been nipped in the bud.
It wasn’t nipped in the bud, though, because the key state institutions of police and local authorities were on a mission to ‘manage’ the issue on their own, and according to their own frameworks of understanding.
Communities played no role in applying the kind of centripetal pressure on would-be perpetrators, a social pressure which bears down particularly effectively within communities which feel they have to pull together stronger than ever in the face of an escalating Islamaphobia amid invasions of Muslim-majority countries and Cameron’s declaration that the West was in “a generational war against terror”.
Had these communities been enlisted in this, child sexual abuse carried out by British Muslims would have had no place to hide – but the ‘war on terror’ narrative would not allow it.
There’s nothing new about the manipulation of the credulous by the spread of fake news, but over recent decades, it has spread to become the prevalent form of what Noam Chomsky called “the manipulation of consent”.
Not long-ago, Donald Trump was claiming that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pet cats and dogs, and the point is, that it really doesn’t matter that this defied all reason, evidence and logic. Oh, how we laughed – yet Trump was subsequently elected president!
The allegation about Asian grooming gangs operating in Oldham had already gone viral soon after surfacing; Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford each had their own linked allegations, which consolidated this trope. I picked it up on football chat forums and elsewhere, where it was widely believed.
More recently, the subject received renewed media attention when comments were made by Elon Musk demanding a public inquiry, which Starmer bowed to almost immediately, instituting a new national “review” and local inquiries, despite the fact that this duplicated what already existed, complete with recommendations for action.
The 1998 Daily Mail campaign about paedophiles, which incited a mob to roam the streets of a Portsmouth Council Estate in search of a supposed paedophile, had long since sensitised the antennae of the mass of people to child sex abuse by the time the Asian grooming gang trope emerged.
This trope went viral in the noughties also because, by then, an international network of culture warriors was consolidating, as revealed by Peter York’s recent book A Dead Cat On Your Table, published in 2024 by Byline Books. It also involved racism and Islamophobia, both already well-established tropes, in a “killer combination”.
All politicians, but particularly right-wing populists like Trump, Farage, Milei and Victor Orbán, who know that they cannot stand on their records, prefer to use culture wars instead, to attack the character and values of their opponents, to cause diversions and to get their narrative working below the radar of rational faculties, in the emotional and mass psychological area.
American author James D. Hunter wrote the first book on culture wars in 1991 and York draws attention to the subsequent development of ‘data mining’ technologies in social media, and to working with and through a myriad of ‘influencers’ at a number of levels. Eye-watering amounts of US and UK money is ploughed into culture wars by the Anglo-American super-rich, with several specialists firms operating out of districts of Washington DC and London funded to supply the wherewithal.
This network, initially US-based, has the capacity to identify any story, however local or untypical, which fits its political narrative, have one of its firms draw up sophisticated, well-written stories and take them viral overnight via its networks of influencers, bots, sympathetic journalists, newspaper proprietors and ‘astroturf’ groups (fake grassroots-sounding campaigns). This is how the far-right made the most of the false rumours around the Southport murders last summer.
“The Asian grooming gang scandal is just one topic in a long list of favourite right-wing tropes, each of which is kept regularly primed by the international culture wars network.”
The Asian grooming gang scandal is just one topic in a long list of favourite right-wing tropes, each of which is kept regularly primed by the international culture wars network. The trope has by now been nurtured for almost two decades – so Musk was tapping into a rich seam with pre-existing, massive popular resonance, in order to attack British politicians like Jess Phillips and push the UK government into compliance.
One typical ‘soft left’ response was from Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who appointed two childcare specialists to examine how the authorities had failed victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Greater Manchester, including Oldham. After two-and-a-half years of investigation, they did find that some victims of CSE had been let down by the authorities and that there had been “historic failings” in the protection offered to “specific vulnerable children at the time”. It did not find any evidence of widespread grooming in Oldham.
We know that there have been Asian grooming gangs in various parts of Britain, but we also know that there have been white grooming gangs that have sexually exploited children. Many of these people have been put on trial and convicted and jailed for their horrific crimes (including recently in Glasgow).
The evidence suggests that most children who are the victims of CSE in Britain are not sexually abused by grooming gangs but by people they often know. Very often, the perpetrator is a family member or someone known to the family and the victim; most online grooming is perpetrated by white people.
The press regulator Ipso has ruled that ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman misled people when she falsely claimed that child grooming gangs in the UK were “almost all British-Pakistanis”. Ipso said that what Braverman had claimed had contradicted data from her own Home Office department. Although a number of high-profile child grooming gangs have involved British-Pakistanis, research published by the Home Office in 2020 showed that offenders are “most commonly white” and come from diverse backgrounds.
However, this scandal should remind us of what the 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift said: “Where falsehood flies, truth comes limping after it.” The ‘facts on the ground’, in communities, both real and online, the narrative of culture warriors on this and on its range of tropes have not been dislodged by factual refutation – far from it.
Culture wars cannot be fought by factual or rational or evidence-based refutation, because culture wars entail a deliberate reversal of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, the 18th-century Age of Reason, and the evolutionary, philosophical and other sciences of the 19th century. It operates at a mass psychological level, in the emotional areas of fear, anger, frustration, and alienation. It blind-sides the casual assumption that consciousness flows from the material circumstances of life.
This is a particular problem, not for the professional class of politicians or their media, which has traded in image and self-presentation above political programmes for several decades, but for the western left, which is so deeply attached to the rational, materialist view of the world and to the world of verifiable fact that we have, as yet, no answer to the tide of culture war washing over Western societies; in fact, most of us are only dimly aware that this has happened.
Like Andy Burnham, like Ipso, like the Civil Service, we think we have done the job by rationally refuting the latest claim from the right. We arrogantly laugh at and mock the ‘idiotic’ ranting of Trump, Orbán, Milei, Le Pen and their ilk, even as they are undermining our ability to engage with working-class people on the basis of our socialist ideas.
Unless and until we find a far better way of responding to this challenge from culture wars, we will simply be left on the sidelines of politics, gasping incomprehensibly as yet another country goes to the right-wing authoritarians. Lots of people on the left are talking earnestly about a new left-wing organisation, completely oblivious to the fundamental change that has taken place in how political narratives win and lose the battle of ideas.
York’s own advice is to forensically investigate each example of a potential culture wars trope by asking questions like:
- Who’s talking, who (or what) exactly is bringing you this story?
- Where do they belong politically, culturally and financially?
- Who actually owns the platform(s) you’ve seen it on?
- What’s the track record of the think tanks involved? What do the various transparency scrutineers – Transparify and Desmog – say about them?
- What connections do they have with other right-wing groups, funders and individuals? We can be sure that they are incredibly well interconnected, as York’s book demonstrates this throughout.
This forensic investigation is in order to keep a closely-monitored check on what the web of culture warriors is up to, but York is adamant that “you just cannot disabuse people [of culture wars tropes] with rational argument and fact-checking”. He advises: “Keep it simple – audiences can only take so much reality!”
We on the left, particularly the older ones among us, need to find an emotionally intelligent approach to responding to culture wars, and that has to begin with becoming more emotionally intelligent ourselves, learning to listen in a non-judgmental way to people we want to engage with who are, inevitably, prey to the beneath the radar way in which culture war tropes invade our minds, as we are ourselves.
We have a notoriously poor record in this emotional realm; witness the quite vicious sectarian exchanges that have characterised the modern British left down the decades, and the ingrained habit of polemicising and focusing on what divides us rather than what unites us. Our collective toleration of different points of view has plenty of room for improvement. We have, in many cases, lost most contact with working-class people who are subject to different ideological influences than we are.
We must allow ourselves to be led in this by younger people, who have grown up with culture wars and seem, at least to me, to be more emotionally aware and intelligent in their personal relations than those who are longer in the tooth. Yes, we must defend the values of rationality, materialist explanation and fact-based argument, but we have to be brave and aware enough to step outside this, too!
Photo credit: Alisdare Hickson, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0
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