“British cultural and political life is governed, accordingly, largely by emotion and instinct.”
Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part essay.
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” So begins Franz Kafka’s posthumously published dystopic novel, written in 1914 and 1915, The Trial. “Someone must have been telling lies about migrants, or, more frequently, Muslims, for without having done anything wrong they were arrested one fine morning.” So might begin a similarly dystopic contemporary novel set in near-future Britain or almost any of the current European Union member states.
It would, however, be a crude heuristic to deploy if the intention of this hypothetical book was to instruct its audience about the dangers of the “regression of our public sphere,” as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek described the state of our present intellectual and political culture, in 2016, aptly arguing that “[a]ccusations and ideas that were until now confined to the obscure underworld of racist obscenity” have gained “a foothold in official discourse.”
Falsehoods, to be sure, abound in the new era of post-truth politics we entered in circa 2016. As I have noted elsewhere, the current Vice President of the United States of America, J. D. Vance, has openly admitted to being willing to lie (in a nominally trivial way) for his own political benefit. In this, among Machiavellians, he is exceptional only in his readiness to say so. Yet often, or indeed typically, the most prominent authors of conspiracies, myths, and untruths in Western politics and media are not lying. Which is to say, they believe the things they write and say are true.
In the age of crony liberalism, with its soft, decadent, stay-at-home, indulged Laptop-Class culture, and attendant enervation, standards of cultivation, erudition, and refinement have declined within the elite and among Men and Women of Letters to the extent that it is hard, in Britain at least, to assemble the names of ten competent public intellectuals and politicians. Taking George Orwell’s metaphor of society as a family, the country’s lame and selfish— narcissistic and grandiose—but not intentionally abusive, parents have failed. Expunged, or in the process of being expunged, from their role as guardians, the children, ignorant, unmannerly, and frequently disagreeable also, have effectively assumed control of the family’s affairs. British cultural and political life is governed, accordingly, largely by emotion and instinct.
British cultural and political life is puerile, naïve, and, increasingly, animalistic, driven by the pursuit of pleasure on the one hand and superegoistic aggression on the other. Pubescent at best, and preoperational at worst, the participants in public debate occupy a spectrum of subjectivity ranging from ingenuous to hysterical. Exposure to this unacceptable, low-grade aesthetic, didactic, and political fare, with little else which is currently on offer, is producing a citizenry to match. We are—the British elite, its aspirant substitutes, and the mass of British citizens—in other words, becoming stupid, incapable of looking after ourselves as individuals let alone maintaining a functional collective life as a state.
I.
The greatest hysteric of our time, the closest thing we have to a modern-day Joseph Goebbels, Goebbels minus the feigned masculinity, is a Frenchman, not a Briton, namely the author of the popular conspiratorial “Great Replacement” theory, Renaud Camus. Spiteful and ridiculous in equal measure—or better still: pathetic—though probably not actually deranged, for Camus is a conscious propagandist in the Goebbelsian sense (“Propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with truth!”), Camus holds that France is currently undergoing a “genocide by substitution”—the French, by which he means, without apology, white people of Christian faith, are being replaced by people from “North Africa or Black Africa,” what he suggestively calls the “new human Nutella spread.” (Camus, fortunately, is comfortable with being labeled a racist.)
Born in 1946, Camus did not experience the Nazi occupation of France, but he judges that life in France from 1975 to the present is remarkably similar. An insult to both the French Jews who were persecuted, deported, and murdered by the Nazi regime and the French State, or Vichy France, which assisted it, and the French Resistance who fought against fascist domination, many of whom lost their lives in the process, Camus refers to this period of French history as the “Second Occupation.”
A writer and an ideologue rather than a scholar and trained in the study of literature and political science as opposed to history, the relationship between so-called “consenting replacees” (Camus’ word for the “treasonous” white, Christian French)—or so-called “replacers” in general (it is not clear in You Will Not Replace Us!)—is akin to the Nazi-Soviet pact. Ready to admit that he has no time for statistics or newspapers, preferring Facebook and Twitter, Camus is, in short, a rancorous dilettante, or, if one were to afford him a charity he does not deserve, a fantasist.
Having never lived under a real dictatorship, where freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement is tightly controlled and subject to the arbitrary whims of an unelected individual or minority, French society or society in the West as a whole, he complains, is a “dictatorship of the lower middle class.”
And swapping infantile hyperbole for malicious, indeed outrageous, disgraceful, provocation, Camus describes the repudiation of the concept of race by many intellectuals in the late 20th century as “The Second Career of Adolf Hitler.” (Emphasis original)
II.
A covert anti-Semite who quips that France “has always splendidly integrated individuals,” citing Émile Zola, or “Zola” rather, who was compelled to flee France for England over his support for Captain Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair, which was motivated by anti-Semitism, as an example, as well as racist towards black Africans or people of black African origin, we are nevertheless told by the comedian and writer, Simon Evans, in The Critic—”Britain’s most civilized magazine”—that we ought to be “touched” by Camus’ “hauntingly melancholic” analysis. Unconcerned by Camus’ thinly veiled racism, which gives rise to claims such as what made Europe desirable for Africans—the past tense is notable—was precisely that “they were not there,” unworried by Camus’ enthusiastic approval of the Neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and heedless of Camus’ advocacy—laughably, since Camus was either not paying attention in graduate school or his juvenile grandiosity knows no bounds—of a European Confederacy, Evans assures us that “there should be no doubt” that Camus’ views are “carefully unfolded, temperate, qualified and caveated and developed in a manner as reasonable as you are likely to encounter.”
Civilized, indeed. I will come to Jinnah later.
III.
Skin tone. Physiognomy. Head shape. These all “give relatively reliable clues” about a person’s heritage, we are told by another author writing in The Critic who recommends in the same article “anthropological examination of new arrivals to the country.” It is unfortunate that Kemi Badenoch, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, has managed to elude this kind of biological scrutiny. It is “a position that liberals will” scarcely “be able to sustain.”
Another Critic author, as with Camus, similarly nonchalant about having the label racist fixed to his ideas or the political party he wants to support—Reform, UK—if only it would stick to its “modus operandi:” hostility, apparently, to Muslims—writes defensively in “Britain’s most civilized magazine” that “what ‘Far Right’ really describes are English people who still dare to be cognisant of themselves as an ethnic group, with an ancestral tie to the land that is stronger than that of any newcomer.” It has nothing to do with Nazism. On the contrary, to be “Far Right” is to believe in the primacy of blood and soil. This author identifies the broadcaster Trevor Phillips and David Lammy, Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs as subjects, who, like Badenoch, could do with retroactive examination, in short order too.
Delinquents.
Tommy Robinson, the co-founder of the English Defense League (EDL), Pegida, UK activist, and so-called “poster boy” for the international Far Right, does not write for The Critic. But, then, it is unclear if Robinson has read Camus. In truth, the evidence that these other authors who write for Britain’s most civilized magazine have read Camus is tenuous. However, there are other sources, besides the French conspiracy theorist, who hold and articulate racist, exclusionary, and anti-Muslim views, not least the French 21st century fascist politician Éric Zemmour, who, when asked in 2014 if he thought it realistic that five million French Muslims could simply be removed from the country, replied: “I know it’s unrealistic, but history is sometimes surprising.”
IV.
We must be realists. This is what Aris Roussinos, a columnist for UnHerd, the online political magazine owned by Paul Marshall, who also owns GB News and The Spectator magazine and whose Twitter/X account betrays Renaudian preoccupations, with, perhaps, a more vituperatively Islamophobic twist, counsels. Dispassionately, but perhaps inaccurately, describing the riots which occurred in England and Northern Ireland last summer as a pogrom, “there is a matter-of-fact social scientific term for the ongoing disorder,” he wrote four months later: namely, “ethnic conflict.”
Prone to exaggeration, with a depressive edge, rather than an aggressive one, Roussinos’ claim is absurd.
First, “ongoing”? Second, conflict presupposes reciprocity, more than one side as active participants. What happened in the summer was violent persecution of refugees, Muslims, and people of different nationalities and races by a feral minority of British citizens. Ethnic scapegoating is what Roussinos is attempting to understand, unsuccessfully.
Roussinos is not a bigot, unlike the authors named above. Yet, one still detects traces of Camus in his work—a fixation, chiefly, on the primacy of ethnicity in human behavior, which is to say, the primacy of instinct over reason. This is not surprising. With uncharacteristic optimism, Roussinos speaks of a “majority native British” ethnicity: I suggest he tests that idea in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, on Connor Tomlinson, in Cornwall, in Essex even, a region with strong suggestions of its ancient Roman heritage. Combining conscious fear with unconscious denial, “sympathetic elites,” he reassures us, “aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilization do not exist.”
V.
For Camus, modern France is “a living Hell.” For Roussinos, “modern Britain isn’t hell.” The latter it seems was not touched—pace Evans—by the former. Matthew Goodwin, the bestselling author, pollster, speaker, erstwhile Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, at Chatham House, Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute, Senior Advisor to the United Kingdom’s Education Committee, Social Mobility Commissioner, and now presenter on GB News, evidently has been, however.
Capable of reason, yet inclined towards a self-serving opportunism, which undermines what results from it, Goodwin, previously a conspicuous parvenu member of the British establishment, has been driven to distraction—or should I say panacea?—by wokism and its most obviously unjust excesses.
Like Roussinos, Goodwin does not foresee “ethnic” Britons being “eaten, devoured, absorbed” by incoming refugees and immigrants or those who have already settled in Britain. He probably would not hesitate, much, to phone the Polish plumber if his boiler unexpectedly packed up. He is, though, increasingly anti-Muslim. In 2013, when Tommy Robinson quit the EDL and briefly allied himself with the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank, Goodwin condemned Robinson, describing his resignation as “disingenuous nonsense,” censuring Robinson, or Yaxley as he called him, for his “warped view of Islam,” what Goodwin referred to then as “slapdash generalizations of sharia law and misinterpretations of the Qur’an.” In the light of his public utterances on social media and elsewhere, Goodwin might not employ a person with a recognizably Muslim name (say, Muhammad?) now.
A victim, also, of the Coddling of the British Mind, Goodwin is Britain’s loudest and most high-profile proponent of the Renaudian notion that Britain—and, perhaps, Europe, or the West?—is being “invaded.” His grandfather fought in Burma in the Second World War. I will say no more on that, only that when Goodwin tells us that he smiles when he recalls that, in his grandfather’s eyes, he was an “intellectual,” he should be reminded that he is right to smile.
Stoicism and altruism were the foremost Victorian values, the values that shaped the “greatest generation” to which his grandfather belonged.
VI.
Muslims, in short, and “migrants”—a category which comprises asylum seekers, economic immigrants, and refugees—are being slandered, if not intentionally lied about, in British public life. Indeed, as some of the names invoked here—Camus, Zemmour, Pegida—would suggest, this is a Western phenomenon, rather than an exclusively British one. And, while the working class Britons guilty of committing violent disorder and other crimes during the riots of July and June of last year rightly—in most cases, it seems—went to prison for the crimes they committed, the 21st century fascist intellectuals, a great deal higher up in the social pecking order, who subtly urged them on, saying many of the same things, or implying them, in more considered language, go unpunished. This is especially relevant right now because of the resurfacing in British media of what Goodwin calls, fittingly, “one of the most disgraceful and darkest episodes in modern British history,” namely the large-scale organized rape of children in British town and cities, beginning, it seems, in the mid-1990s.
The purpose of this article is to deal with this issue in a rational and reasonable way, establishing what broadly happened in Rotherham and towns like it—Barrow and Oldham and Rochdale and Telford, perhaps—and to explain why, approximately, this dreadful episode occurred. If ethnicity is a factor, and it is a large one, but in a complicated way, then so too is social class.
The events in Rotherham, and elsewhere I suggest, cannot be understood outside of Britain’s imperial history, the failure properly to integrate immigrants in the United Kingdom when they were invited to work and live here, their persecution when they did take up the offer to do so, and the neo-imperial adventurism, corruption, and contempt for working-class people of all ethnicities and races displayed by New Labor. The 21st century fascists are not the only set of individuals who ought, perhaps, in a really just world, to be in prison. Some of the proponents of the “third way,” pseudo-angelic and preposterously evil, should, maybe, be there too.
VII.
The full scale and nature of what the media has variously referred to as “child exploitation,” an “abuse scandal,” “the grooming scandal,” the “grooming-gang scandal,” the “Asian grooming gang scandal,” and no doubt other euphemistic and poorly chosen phrases used to describe this heinous string of crimes against children, is unknown. It, if it is indeed possible to establish stable and coherent commonalities and shared causation between all of the cases currently known about—thus justifying discussing all of these episodes under one heading—may well still be occurring. The number of children involved is, at any rate, huge, leaving a giant scar to form on the British body politic. Considering Rotherham alone, where, according to a conservative estimation, 1,400 children were sexually exploited by an organized pedophile group comprised mainly of men of Pakistani “origin,” the soul of the four nations has plainly been tarnished: sullied and befouled. The British state has been unable to keep its children safe in the most quotidian places: in its schools, on its housing estates, on its streets, in its town centers, in its children’s homes, in its police stations; and its citizens have acquiesced in maintaining an environment of insecurity and danger—for some children at least. The British state has looked away—British adults have looked away—as thousands of children, girls for the most part and mostly white, but not exclusively, were targeted, manipulated, raped and abused, and tortured by adult men, for the perpetrators’ “personal gratification” and, or, “career and financial opportunities.”
When the writer Louise Perry says this was a “catastrophic elite failure” she is correct. When she continues that, for the “teachers, carers, and NHS staff” who were broadly aware of what was going on, the acute suffering and trauma experienced by these working-class girls—11, 12, 13, 14 years of age, many of whom came from homes where there was domestic violence, poor parental mental health, and parental addictions—was unworthy of empathy or legal redress, justice, that they were not recognized as victims, but as “slags,” Perry is right again.
What Perry is wrong about, however—woefully, irresponsibly, perhaps maliciously wrong—is the motive for these crimes—or at least she is woefully, irresponsibly, perhaps maliciously wrong to generalize about motives. According to Perry, misleadingly generalizing once more about the ethnic?; religious?; or racial? (she does not seem to know) profile of the perpetrators, the “men targeted these girls because” the girls “were white and non-Muslim.” For Perry, instrumentalizing, rather than ignoring, the suffering of the victims, “Rotherham”—for “Rotherham” she is sure is a country-wide phenomenon as opposed to a unique, stand-alone case—is, above all, a “race hate scandal.”
More cautious, certainly, than Elon Musk who triggered the current debate about the scandal (or non-scandal for many mainstream opinion writers, notwithstanding their deployment of the phrase) in the first place (Musk admitted to being “naïve” about anti-Semitism after making an anti-Semitic remark last year; his skills as a political analyst are, in other words, deplorable), and more cautious than Julie Bindel, the first writer to address the subject in 2007, who was compelled to pay damages for a two week campaign of abuse, including Islamophobic abuse, aimed at the opinionator and writer Ash Sarkar, Perry’s analysis, while strong in places, is far from impartial. Indeed, it is subtly and aggressively anti-Muslim. An uncharitable interpreter might suggest that it implicitly incites violence.
VIII.
In his palpably angry but mostly measured article on the subject, written in 2023, Goodwin complained that “ideological concerns have been consistently prioritized above the need to protect vulnerable children.” Now Perry is either pathologically paranoid—a familiar psychological frame on the Radical Right—because when she claims there can be “no disputing the fact that the motivation” for the “kind of crime that ‘Rotherham’ represents” was “—and is—anti-white,” the evidence she produces for it does not bear that judgement out, neither the excerpt from the sentencing remarks relating to the 2013 conviction of members of an Oxford gang which was circulated on Twitter (or X?) or the sentencing remarks document itself, or she too, as I have already suggested, is subordinating the care and well-being of vulnerable women and children to ideology and personal political ambition.
Delusional or lying, the effect is, in any case, the same: another step on the well-trodden path towards the demonization of all Muslims in Britain, despite Perry not seeming to be able to define what a Muslim is.
In addition to the judge’s sentencing remarks in the case of the five men sentenced in Oxford, Perry brings two other claims to bear, which serve as “evidence” for her argument that “Rotherham,” as she calls it, is “absolutely racialized” and “is not rare.” First, the nominally common-sense claim that “the post-sexual revolution culture of Britain and the very conservative sexual culture of a country like Pakistan would not mix happily.”
As I have said, I will come to Jinnah, or a Muslim leader like him—Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Reza Khan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Gamal Abdel Nasser?— later. But it is worth remarking here that Perry wrote a 2022 book titled The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Like the opinionator and UnHerd columnist Mary Harrington, cited above, who coined the term, Perry is a reactionary feminist, even if she does not recognize herself as such.
As I have said, I will come to Jinnah later.
And second, Perry asserts that online pornography “contributed to the sense that white girls…were fair game.” Citing the experience of a victim of non-sexual violence, rape, and torture from Rotherham, who, writing in The Independent in 2018, claimed that her perpetrators felt “justified by their religious beliefs” to commit their crimes, suggesting, unconvincingly, that Islamist terrorism and the rape and torture of non-Muslim children by Muslim men in Britain were entangled, while insisting at the same time that she condemned the prejudice and hate she observed directed at ordinary Muslims, the article does not mention pornography. Declaring that the “predominance of white and East Asian women in online porn means that it effectively functions as racist propaganda,” Perry may be right, or it might just be another invention of her imagination? Certainly, in the absence of data, one can only speculate.
IX.
Perry, then, it seems fair to say, is about as insightful on the question of motivation as the Reform, UK Member of Parliament (MP) Lee Anderson when he alleged that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, “hates” Britain and was under the control of Islamists. Her feminism, similarly, is not only reactionary—Thomas Carlyle, Britain’s greatest reactionary, and Europe’s, René Guénon, who were driven mainly by compassion or the pursuit of truth rather than hate, were not Islamophobes—it is also shallow, about as shallow as Boris Johnson’s, who, when he was Prime Minister, compared Muslim women who wore the niqab to “letter boxes” and “bank robbers.” Published shortly after the xenophobic and Islamophobic riots in August of last year, an article in Politico furnished evidence from a 2019 report which found that “more than a third of people in the UK believe that Islam is a threat to the British way of life.” “Nearly a third of the public (32 percent) subscribes to anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, including claims of ‘No-Go zones,’ which nearly half of conservative voters (47 percent) believe are true.” Statistics are inherently unreliable, but if the British public is in any way susceptible to the influence of British elites—it is—then we can expect British society right now to be more Islamophobic and anti-Muslim than it ever has been before.
A frustrated Reform, UK, supporter, like Tomlinson, Perry welcomes the insurgent party’s disregard for human rights, yet she is more keen than Farage and Richard Tice, Rupert Lowe, and Lee Anderson even, it seems, to bring back the death penalty—execution by lethal injection. Or is it hanging? The now anti-Muslim and similarly retributive Matthew Goodwin addresses Reform, UK conferences. The question then must be posed: How much longer will Zia Yusuf, the recently appointed Chairman of Reform, UK, continue to refer to himself as “a British Muslim patriot,” since there are intimations that some of his party’s MPs and, certainly, most of his party’s most influential ideologues clearly think the phrase is an oxymoron.
As the researcher and writer Rakib Ehsan points out, remarking on the perhaps separate theme of family fragility in British society, its rampant loneliness, its intergenerational disconnections, and the vacuous celebrity worship often observed within it, is it any wonder, when one puts the two things together—Islamophobia and anti-Muslimism and a newly decadent, or increasingly decadent, British culture—that some Muslims do not want to integrate, or to integrate only selectively? Or indeed—disintegrate? Because, being a person of immigrant heritage myself, a person who is, to some extent, “between two cultures,” as the sociologist Harry Goulbourne put it, I could foresee a time when I too might begin to disintegrate from British society. I do not have Irish citizenship, but I am…
I will come to Hermann Kelly, I mean, Salman Rushdie later.
X.
I say Perry’s analysis is strong in places, what I really mean is it is strong in one place because I sense a certain discomfort, as well as duplicity, in her deployment of the phrase “white slags.” Perry, after all, is a proponent of “lifelong monogamy.” A realist to her core, like Roussinos, only more comfortable, perhaps?, with the language of race and racialized interpretation, as well as the inevitability of violence, lifelong monogamy may not be our “natural state” she writes in the aforementioned The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, but it is “spectacularly successful.” The social penalties suffered by women viewed as promiscuous—the “stigma around single motherhood”—may seem harsh. But they “existed for a reason.” Referring to the modern state in Britain as “a kind of ‘back-up husband’,” which, in many ways, it is, she is not at least proposing that this substitute husband now withdraw—not immediately, in any case.
The connection between authoritarian ideology and sexual repression and restraint, the lauding of the economically self-sufficient petty bourgeois nuclear family, which cleaves to principles of honor and duty, the treatment of the middle class mother as “the homeland of the child” and the family as the “nation in miniature,” is longstanding in the historiography of fascism. (Paul Marshall it is interesting to note is very exercised by homosexuality.) There has also been a murmur in the literature on group psychology—just how deep that murmur is, is not apparent to me—that fascism is a species of collective psychosis. One would have to be mad, surely, to consider the idea of exterminating an entire people? Or are mad people rational too, as the cultural Marxists believed—something about a dialectic of enlightenment?
I do not know. What I do know, however, is that the concept of class is sorely neglected, not only in Perry’s piece but in all of the recent articles on “Rotherham” that I have encountered. For “Rotherham” occurred at more or less the same time as hatred of working-class people became socially acceptable in the 2000s, encapsulated in the word “chavs,” which was used liberally throughout the decade. As the author and Guardian columnist Owen Jones documented in Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, there was “a widespread middle-class image of the working-class teenager” during the period as thick, violent, criminal, and “breeding” like animals. “Chav-Free Activity Holidays” were available and punters were told that it was simply “time the middle classes stood up for themselves,” much like the ethnic British at present, I suppose.
“We’re all middle class now,” wrote Jones, recounting the popular New Labor mantra, adding with irony and opprobrium: “all except for a feckless, recalcitrant rump of the old working class.” It is impossible to understand the events in “Rotherham” without understanding “just how mainstream middle-class hatred of working-class people,” as Jones put it, was in Britain during the New Labor years, namely 1997-2010. The consequences for the “unrespectable” segment of that class of this unwarranted vitriol—the absence of empathy on show, the lack of intelligent understanding, the propensity to scapegoat—were enormous.
In his 2023 article on the topic, Goodwin wrote: “Were this about the systematic abuse of children from any minority group in Britain there would be endless, loud, and shrill demands” for justice. Goodwin knows all too well, however, that this is not true. People from gypsy, Roma, and traveler ethnic groups still face a huge amount of prejudice in the United Kingdom and are persistently discriminated against. As Goodwin acknowledged in an article written for the Daily Mail in 2020, the “only groups with worse educational outcomes than white, working-class boys are their peers from gypsy, Roma, and Irish traveller backgrounds.” And as Camus, Goodwin’s new lodestar, argues—or, well, close enough—”there are tides of fashion and shifting favours” in politics. How long, in other words, will the current middle-class vogue for equality, diversity, and inclusion, selective and shallow as it is already, last? Goodwin, then, was half right. What he ought to have said is: “Were this about the systematic abuse of children from middle-class families in Britain there would be endless, loud, and shrill demands” for justice.
Where Perry, finally, is undoubtedly correct is in her claim that the definition of Child Sexual Exploitation is too imprecise (Perry says “expansive,” but we all falter sometimes) to enable a proper understanding of what “Rotherham” represents to emerge. As Goodwin also notes, the data are unacceptably vague. The terms child sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse are used interchangeably; we are told by researchers from the University of Essex that “while some child sexual abuse is perpetrated by gangs, evidence indicates that this is a small percentage of the whole.” Office for National Statistics data from 2016 shows that “around two thirds of perpetrators were either family members or close to the child.” And the “Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated in 2019 that 7.5% of adults aged 17-74—about 3.1 million people—experience sexual abuse before the age of 16.” Ghastly as these statistics are, however, it is hard to believe that all of these children have experienced the kind of abuse recorded by Jayne Senior in Broken and Betrayed: The true story of the Rotherham abuse scandal by the woman who fought to expose it.
Senior recounts, for instance, the experiences of one child who was sexually assaulted repeatedly at the age of 4 and 5 by her alcoholic mother’s various boyfriends, who was forced by a man into prostitution at the age of 14, who then fell in with a different pimp and his drug-addicted entourage and was raped one night over a 12-hour period, who was coerced into selling her underwear to other pedophiles, who was the subject of a plot to lure her out into a remote and secluded part of the moors where she would be videotaped being raped and then murdered, and who subsequently had a nervous breakdown, after which she was told by the landlord at the bed and breakfast she was accommodated in that he would only make her breakfast if she gave him oral sex. So when the researchers from the University of Essex assert that, while “addressing the issue of grooming gangs is important, portraying the ‘stamping out’ of such gangs as the solution to child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom obscures what abuse looks like, where it is perpetrated and by who,” they may be right in a formal sense, yet it is plain that, seemingly incurious about chronology, geography, and difference—the spectrum of abusive behavior—their power of analysis is severely lacking. What else is plainly lacking is compassion for the people they are writing about.
It seems safe to say that the middle-class monopoly of the professions delivers middle-class justice, which is closer to the principle that might is right than the principle that each person ought to receive what they deserve.
Seamus Flaherty is a historian of ideas and the author of Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism. He lives in the United Kingdom.
