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The Failures of Multiculturalism in the United Kingdom | Peter McIlvenna
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A
Two cases of child rape, three and a half years in jail. How is that acceptable?
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Today I sit down with Peter McElvena, co founder of Hearts of Oak. He's been tracking the UK's grooming gang scandals for years and what he sees as a systemic failure to act.
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It was because of a fear of Islamophobia or racism that the police turned a blind eye. They wanted to keep the peace and that's why they have not policed properly, because they want an easy life. That is a dangerous situation for society to be in.
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Now the issue has been forced into the spotlight.
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They're being called Muslim Pakistani rape gangs. Now the UK government have been forced to do an inquiry on grooming gangs.
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But Michael Venice says this points to something deeper, a broader clash over values, freedoms and identity.
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This is what happens when you have multiculturalism, that you begin to accept another culture, another belief, and you automatically say, it must be acceptable, it mustn't be negative to our society.
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He also warns of growing limits on speech when multiculturalism leads to isolationism.
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The Online Safety act came in, so now a social media company can be fined 10% of their global turnover. If you say something that someone else might find offensive.
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What does this mean for the us?
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This is a difficult conversation the America needs to have.
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This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jania Kellick.
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Peter McElvena, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
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A
Thank you, Jan. Great to be with you.
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C
Well, so what is it that people don't understand about Islamism, this extreme version of Islam in America? You've been going around, you've come from the uk. There's been some really troubling developments in the UK over a while that seem to have been ignored. What do Americans not understand?
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Well, I think it's difficult for anyone who does not live in the situation to understand the changes of a society and the rapid change in terms of demographics, the change in many of our institutions because of Islam. Slowly, slow, slowly beginning to change. And I've lived in London. Melanie Phillips calls London, London a stand. Just that Melanie calls that I. I wouldn't consider, but I've lived there for 23, 24 years and I have seen a huge change in London. What I would say to Americans is that Islam brings a clash. It brings a clash of what you want is freedoms, it brings a clash of how you live your life, but it is really in terms of freedoms, in terms of freedoms to choose or change your religion, in terms of women and how they're treated in terms of those who leave a faith, how they are treated, in terms of how children are brought in. I've got a friend I think you talked to Nisar and his story of how he was being to the point of death because he converted. Many other friends have had to flee countries because they have converted. Others have been told to leave their area and that is a failure of the UK justice system, failure of the police, failure for politicians to understand what type of Islam is being taught and what that means.
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What happened in the uk, for example, we hear about these grooming gangs, or some people call them rape gangs. It's a horrific decades long crisis where all sorts of young women were horribly abused and not given any justice whatsoever. How do things like this happen?
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So I have followed the grooming gangs, as it's now known, for 15 years. I'm actually heading up the first legal case for one of the survivors to get compensation from her perpetrator. Never been done before. We're now five years into that. She's been awarded half a million dollars. We want to get that money for her. But this had been going on since at least 1975 was the first reported case. So we are 50 years into this. My anger is against the authorities for turning a blind eye. My anger is against the police for arresting the fathers who complained their daughters were getting raped. My anger is against the politicians that cover this up. The amount of inquiries that we have had into this and they've whitewashed everything and not a single action point has come to happen. My anger is against a lot of these. There are about 500 of these men who have been jailed for rape of children. 90% of them, or 91% are Islamic and more are Pakistani. You look down the names of them, there seems to be something that ties them together and it was because of a fear of Islamophobia or racism that the police turned a blind eye. We had two police officers that said the reason why they did not was because they didn't want a race riot. They wanted to keep the peace and that's why they have not policed properly, because they want an easy life. That is a dangerous situation for society to be in when the authorities want life to be easy and will arrest the victim because they don't want to arrest the perpetrators because it will stir things up. So we had these girls arrested for prostitution, 14 year olds, 15 year olds, a girl cannot consent to sex, that is rape. We had these girls arrested for drug abuse and alcohol abuse because they were plied with alcohol and that was how they were kept in this, the scale of this. Sarah Champion, a Labour mp, so on the left, she is an MP for Rotherham, one of the epicenters of these regions. She says up to 1 million girls have been affected. 1 million girls. So.
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And it's, you know, pure. So you're saying the motivation is not wanting to cause a stir. I mean, that's kind of like a bit of a stereotype against British people, isn't it?
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The reason this has carried on, the reason it's been allowed to continue for over 50 years and is happening to this day. You talk to any of these survivors, they say they still see the taxis driving around, driving these girls around, to be. To be raped. And it is still happening. The police still turn a blind out. We are having probably every fortnight there's another legal case of 10, 15, 20 men being tried for these crimes. So it's still happening and it's not historic.
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C
Like the police have been groomed themselves or something. Like, it's like, I find this so astonishing, right? Like, it's just. It's one of, you know, I deal with issues, as, you know, that are hard for people to believe. I know, but this is really hard to believe because this is like one of the most, you know, the most vulnerable. It's really sad. So, you know it is.
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And I know your fantastic book on organ harvesting killed order, and that is gruesome, but you tell it well. This is another gruesome story of how something which has been sanctioned by the state and allowed by all the levers of power. This is what happens when you have multiculturalism. I would say that you begin to accept another culture, another belief, and you automatically say, it must be acceptable, it must be good, it mustn't be negative to our society who makes that decision. Or even if you accept another religious faith, just because something has religion tied on it doesn't necessarily mean it's good. I would argue Scientology. I don't agree with that. And how people are treated. So just because something is defined as a religion does not make it good. But because it's defined as a religion, it means the police and the courts have turned a blind eye. Do you know, we had a court case that was collapsed by the police up in Huddersfield in the north of England. There was a case of 29 individuals that were being tried for these crimes. And after two and a half years, it went to court and the police turned up with no evidence to zero, purposely to collapse it purposely, because they didn't want this problem on Their streets. But if you say something online, on Facebook, on X, that's a hurdy word. You can be arrested for two and a half years. But this. And on top of that. Yeah, and on top of this, to add to the utter confusion of what's been happening, we have a lot of these men. So the girl I'm working with, Liz, is her story or her name. And she was raped twice as a 14 year old, 15 year old. Her perpetrator was jailed for six and a half years, was released after three and a half years for good behavior. Two cases of child rape, three and a half years in jail. How is that acceptable? So we have shockingly lenient sentences from our courts and the way you deal with this is to put a 25 year sentence, a life sentence for child rape, then we will maybe begin to see changes. But if you let these people out for three and a half years for good behavior, that's the problem. There's no punishment for the crime.
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I think that part of the reason this hasn't moved forward is similar because it's just so, it's so astonishing for the regular person to fathom, right? Like how could. I mean these are these children, these are our future, right? And we're allowing these horrible things to be happening, happen to them. Why? Because we don't want trouble.
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Like it is just like what you've talked about, it's too gruesome to talk about. You don't want to talk about this over a cup of coffee with a friend. It's not really polite conversation so people ignore it and it is. I've a lot of these girls have written books and I've been given the books and I understand the issue but I couldn't imagine reading about their stories or. The BBC has done a three part series, think six years ago called the Three Girls and they looked at the three girls in one of these stories of what had happened to them. So this has become entertainment kind of in a gruesome way that they are three part series.
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BBC did a very like a highly factual expose on all this and that didn't lead to a massive inquiry or it did and it was ignored or like what happened to all these inquiries. I'm so confused by this.
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So we have had many inquiries have looked at because the grooming gangs are called group based child sexual exploitation. That's the definition for them now they're being called by many of the commentators, they're being called Muslim Pakistani rape gangs. Which then begins because what does grooming gang mean? It Means it doesn't define your terms. So now we are seeing a lot of journalists, GB News now begin to define what they're talking about. Gad Saad now defines. Elon Musk now defines. So you've got a Tommy Robinson defines. So you've got conversation about what this is. But we have had numerous inquiries that have focused on, have focused on child sexual exploitation, so the grooming of children, the trafficking of children, the rape of children, but not the subset that this is talking about, which is in communities that have closed and have not reported this. The police, that's one of the big issues. So back to your own inquiries. We have had 15 inquiries, 14 inquiries, local and national. Now the UK government have been forced to do an inquiry on grooming gangs. They've been forced, kicking and screaming into doing this. They've just appointed a chair. This is going to last two years. It's going to cost 30 million, 40 million. And they don't need another inquiry. The information is out there. Just read the transcripts of the court and you will hear the stories from these girls. Begin to act. Begin to arrest the police officers who turn a blind eye. Arrest the local politicians who turned a blind eye. Arrest child services that turned a blind eye. Let's go after those in power who turned a blind eye. But yet the government saying, no, we need a new inquiry. The Conservatives, and this is a plague on all their houses, Jan. This is the Uni party working in the uk, the Conservatives, Labour, left and right. The Conservatives had a huge inquiry in this and they had 20 action points at the end. Not one has been actioned, not one. So why start a new inquiry and pay tens of millions whenever you can? Go back to the old ones, let's look at the recommendations, let's implement them immediately. That's what you would do.
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So it's one thing to have, you know, good conclusions in an inquiry, it's a completely. A different thing to actually enact them.
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Yeah.
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And so, and so where. Why is again, is it just because enacting them, you know, disturbs the peace or what? Why are they not being enacted?
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They haven't been enacted because who the perpetrators are and the communities you're dealing with, Islamic communities, they are a shame and honor culture. So they will not go to the police. I think the tip offs we add to the police were something like 5% or 6% from the Muslim communities because they don't want to bring shame on their culture as a culture of honour. The last thing they would do is go to the police and that is why part of the issues we have with this, the UK government have allowed Sharia courts to operate, for instance, on a slightly different tact on this, there are 84 charia courts operating in the UK, legally operating, and it means the government allow communities to deal with issues in a range of issues. Now, they have not dealt with grooming gangs, but they deal with marriage, divorce, they deal with disputes. And of course, in the case of marriage or divorce, a woman has to be told, I divorce you three times and she's divorced. She has no rights to children, she has no rights to finance. In Islam, if a woman is raped, she has to have two or four witnesses to back up her claim.
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What do you mean, witnesses?
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Witnesses to the act, because a woman's testimony is worth half to a quarter of a man, so she needs to have extra proof to show what's happened.
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Basically what you're saying is that these courts are functioning with a very dramatically different value system than the Western rule of law system. I mean, that's what you're saying, right?
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Which is what I said at the beginning about how women are treated. This is a huge issue that I have on how women are treated in Islam generally, according to the stories in the past, now, in some countries they have freedom, in other countries they have not. So it is about how women are treated and it is how women being allowed to go out, being allowed to engage with society, being allowed not to be covered head to foot. Because the mass. The big change we have seen in terms of the rise of Islam in the UK has been through demographics growing at 10 times the rate, 10 times faster than the national population. And those come from. Many come from countries that. That see women as very different to how we see them. That's why we've got ourselves in this situation. So maybe we have to go back to educating people from Islamic countries how you treat women, or helping these women speak English, because many of them can't speak English. They're trapped in those communities. If they could speak English, that would help them engage with wider society.
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C
This is something I interviewed Michael Antonio. You know, he's had a number of roles in the government. I think he was in this administration and State Department policy planning, I believe, some years ago. And he said something that was revelationary to me. You know, someone who grew up in Canada, very multicultural society, structured that way intentionally. And he said, yeah, well, if you. I mean, basically, I'll summarize. But he said, yeah, so if you import people from a different country, if the people immigrate. And they're not asked to assimilate to the local culture. They import the culture they came from. And in many cases that culture is rather destructive. That's why they're bad and that's why they came in the first place to theoretically get away from that. Right?
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Yeah.
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So what doesn't make sense. And I was like, I thought to myself, wow, that's kind of obvious. But it certainly never occurred to me that this is the reason why you have assimilationist policies. Because we believe this is a good system and it actually is a fantastic system. And the problem is that we don't expect that people actually follow it, but import systems that aren't actually very good at all for these core rights, like exercising your First Amendment right, for example, you know, your protection from government to exercise your conscience, your faith, your being where you want to be. But so, you know, going back to this public displays of faith, I mean, in America that's protected and it should be, right?
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So, and this is a difficult conversation America needs to have. We are seen in the UK when we don't have integration, we have isolationism, we have ghetto communities generally in all cultures, but certainly in Islam. And often those communities, they revert around the mosque in Islam or in other cultures and, or they may revert around maybe where the embassy is based or where there are certain food shops or. So there are reasons why. But you know, what area you're in. It's. Not everyone comes as a melting pot. It's. No, it's at one area and another area. But when you've got another culture or faith that dominant, that wants to dominate, you've got an issue. And I think what you're seeing up in Michigan and that's going to spread and what you're seeing here in Texas, actually where we are now, the issue in the UK are not allowed to have this conversation. If you look at our hate speech laws or Islamophobia definition that's just coming in, which has now been proposed and accepted, we are going to have an Islamic blasphemy law through the back door. And who knows what's going to happen? Who knows whether I can come and talk to you again? Because the, the, the expectation from the Free Speech Union is that we're going to have eight times the arrests that we currently have.
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C
Because, I mean, off the charts, I know now, like, just summarize for me what that looks like.
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So the, the Online Safety act came in and that was to do with prosecuting conversations online. So now a social media company can be fined 10% of their global turnover. If you say something that someone else might find offensive. There's no absolute. It's utterly subjective.
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It doesn't. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Is kind of what you're telling me.
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It doesn't. If you've. If you've annoyed someone.
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I could just. Anything that I don't like, that's against my agenda could be offensive to me. In fact. It is. I'm kidding. But obviously. But you could. People could use this as a very powerful weapon.
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It's how you jail your enemies.
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Yeah.
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You say he said something nasty I didn't like. Oh, well, we'll better lock him up and arrest him, sir. That's what happened. So that's where you are in the uk.
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C
How many people are locked up right now for violating this law?
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We are having around 30. 30 to 35 arrests a day. That was the time said that a year ago. Whenever we had 30 to 35 arrests a day. A day.
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How many are charged?
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And now this is very difficult to find out. This is where the government don't want to give out the information. We've got FOIAs just like you have here. But it's quite difficult to get the police to give this information out. Often what happens is that these people will be arrested, they'll be held for two days and then told, don't you dare do this again. You're released. And that's enough to silence most people. No one wants to go to jail.
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C
Right?
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You've got.
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Yeah, but just the idea that people are being picked up for this at all. I mean, it's, It's. It's just a. It's almost. I mean, I would. I think I'd be in big trouble. And I'm a nice. I'm pretty nice, you know, I mean, imagine, you know, what the Chinese Communist Party thinks about talking about forced organ harvesting for prisoners of conscience. Right. You're just evil. They say you're evil for talking about it. Anyway, we're gonna have to finish up. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today. A final thought as we finish, please, a final thought.
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This is all about identity. And I would encourage Americans to make sure that you hold on to your identity. Because in the uk, we've lost our identity. What does it mean to be English or British? No one knows. Is it fish and chips? Is it a cup of tea? We don't know. And the British Empire ruled the world. And I think there is this clash in America at the moment. What does it mean to be American? And I think America need to hold on to that understanding of life, freedom, liberty, that American dream, the freedom to practice what you want to believe. They need to hold on to that because when you give that away, you end up like Britain. That would be my last thought.
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C
Well, Peter McElvena, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
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Thank you, Jan, so much.
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Thank you all for joining Peter McElvena and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janek.