The pietites of wokeness made the grooming gangs scandal possible
Dan Hannan
Identity politics is sometimes justified as a regrettable but inevitable overcorrection. In a perfect world, the argument goes, there would be no need for racist university admissions policies. In a perfect world, no one would be hounded out of public life for accidentally using the wrong form of words. But given our past, some overshoot is said to be a small price to pay. Canceling people on social media, pulling books from publication, unfairly firing academics — these things are lesser evils than slavery or segregation.
I’m not sure that argument ever worked, as wrongs can surely be righted without committing new wrongs. But in any case, the abuses now being carried out in the name of equity go well beyond cancellation. I argued here a couple of weeks ago that America’s obsession with racism blinded people to the much larger problem of police impunity and that it has taken abuses by black police officers to make people acknowledge that the balance of power between the police and the rest of the population is badly off.
But if you want a truly terrifying example of the price that wokeness can exact, look at the scandal of Britain’s grooming gangs.
For more than a decade, thousands of vulnerable underage girls were drugged, raped, and passed around by gangs of predatory men. Simply to list some of the towns where the abuses took place is to get a sense of the scale of the outrage: Telford, Oldham, Rochdale, Hull, Coventry, Middlesborough, Oxford, Peterborough, Bristol, Keighley, Aylesbury, Derby, Huddersfield, and Halifax.
These atrocities are the subject of a documentary on the young and countercultural TV station GB News. That fact is in itself telling. Why have there not been dozens of BBC dramas, let alone news investigations, of these horrors?
You have probably guessed the answer. The victims were overwhelmingly white, and the perpetrators were mainly men of Pakistani origin. Had those categories been reversed, we would be talking of little else. The names of the victims would be familiar in every household. Parks and gardens would be named after them, monuments would have been erected in the Northern and Midlands towns where the abominations took place, and soccer players would take the knee in their memory.
But Britain’s public discourse, like America’s, holds that there is a pyramid of oppression with white people at the top of it. These cases inverted that imagined pyramid, and so they went unremarked and unreported.
I don’t mean “unreported” only in the sense that the media showed little interest. I mean that the people whose job it was to prevent such crimes (police, local councils, and social workers) were so paralyzed by the fear of being thought racist that they did not intervene.
Again and again, racial politics trumped considerations of justice. When law enforcement in one of the towns suggested targeting local cab drivers, they were told by the local authority that doing so would provoke “a lot of community tension.” The father of one of the victims was warned that telling the truth would “cause a riot.”
A confidential report in Rotherham, England, was shot through with fear at saying the wrong thing. The criminals had “cultural characteristics which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity,” it read. “It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided.”
This was the town where, in 2013, social services removed two children of Roma origin from the care of white foster parents, partly because the parents were supporters of the U.K. Independence Party, a democratic and constitutional Euroskeptic party. Yet one of the councilors named in a report into the Rotherham grooming scandal, Mahroof Hussain, went on to become a diversity and inclusion manager with the National Health Service.
It is often said that wokeness is a religion, given its obsession with (white) original sin, its belief in an elect who have found salvation, and its constant hunt for heretics. It has its blasphemy rules, too. More than 100 years have passed since the last person in Britain was jailed for blasphemy, and the law has been removed from the statute books. But although no one can now be prosecuted for insulting Jesus, it is a different matter if they insult, say, George Floyd. As with all blasphemy, privacy is no defense: People can be fired for making inappropriate remarks in private emails and WhatsApp messages.
Fear of blasphemy (or fear, if you prefer, of the career-ending accusation of racism) prevented government workers from discharging their basic functions. Or, to use an older and grislier religious parallel, the abused children were a sacrifice made in the name of the ruling ideology.
So, no, don’t tell me that this is just a bit of political correctness.