Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:00]
Pharmaceutical Representative
Are your ulcerative colitis symptoms proving difficult to manage? Tremfiab can help you manage the cycle of UC symptoms. At one year, many patients taking Tremphya achieved clinical remission and some patients also achieved endoscopic remission. Individual results may vary. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections may occur before treatment. Your doctor should check you for infections and tb. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or if you need a vaccine. Ask your doctor if Tremphya can help you manage the cycle of UC symptoms. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit.
- [00:43]
Investigative Journalist
Tremphyaradio.Com In Rotherham, the whistleblowers came from an organization called Risky Business that worked with at risk girls. They had an office. One morning they came in and they found that someone had got through the front door, got through the door into their office, got into the locked filing cabinet and gotten onto the password protected computer and files that they had had suddenly gone missing. And new documents had been written onto their computer, creating minutes of meetings that had never occurred. And they could prove hadn't occurred because the individual involved was on holiday at the time, wasn't even the country, I think. So that was a real cover up. Has anybody ever been prosecuted for that? No, we have no idea who did that. I mean, we can guess who did it, who had the keys and the passwords and everything else, but we don't know who did it.
- [01:33]
Interviewer
All right, so we're going to take this interview in a slightly different direction than I've taken some of the other interviews here at ark. You've been writing a lot about the grooming scandal here in the uk, which for about two weeks is the us About a month ago we were talking about quite heavily because Elon started tweeting about it, but before that, not much subsequently, not much. So I guess my first question to you is how did you get involved in that? Interested in that and then where is it at at the moment?
- [01:59]
Investigative Journalist
So the grooming gang scandal is about something that happened primarily in the 1990s and the early 2000s. It came out in the newspapers in Britain in 2010s and the big sort of marker is, is in 2014 there was a report into a town called Rotherham and this is a not terribly large town. It's a fairly depressed area, steel works somewhat left behind. And they found that within the time period they were looking at, there had been they estimated 1,400 girls raped, primarily by Pakistani gangs. That has subsequently been upgraded. The police now believe it's 1,510. And that obviously was a big story back in 2014, but Twitter was not quite as big, so it was a big story. And then over the years, it faded, as stories do. And I read about that story when I was a young man. I remember sitting at my grandmother's table and reading the papers and just being absolutely appalled by this. And then in about 2021 thought, what's going on with this? Nothing seems to change. These gangs still periodically pop up in the papers. There's a brief thing. We've sentenced some people, they've committed this, but nothing's changed, nothing's actually ended. And. And so with a friend of mine, Charlie Peters, who's now a reporter at GB News, we got together and we started trying to make a film and we made a film together which GB News then acquired and broadcast called Grooming Gangs, Britain Shame. And we basically just put together for the first time in a film the whole story as well as we could. And then we followed up with doing some reporting on basically tracking down the people involved, what had gone on in the sort of 10 years since. And the answer in most cases was nothing. They'd moved on, they got jobs, in some cases, quite nice jobs. A lot of the criminals had gone to jail and then, as is the case in Britain, usually get out after you served about half of your sentence. So a lot of them were back on the streets, they'd gone back to the community, so that laid the ground. And then early this year, Elon Musk got interested. And I love the way that Elon works. You can see that he uses Twitter to sort of learn in real time, and that he basically sped run the whole history of it and it was fantastic. He put the pressure on Britain and he asked the important question, which was, why the hell would you let this happen? Why the hell have you not done anything about it? Since the government obviously freaked out and they've now made some small concessions, they said that they're going to do a sort of an assessment and they're going to do some local inquiries, but that's just code for shove it down the line.
- [04:16]
Interviewer
Right? And of course then we saw the usual attacks on Elon for even bringing it up and all of that kind of stuff. So there's sort of two things here. There's the horrific incidences themselves, obviously, but then there seems to be. It's a bit of an overused Word these days, but a systemic coverup within the entire system. Can you talk about that a little bit?
- [04:37]
Investigative Journalist
Definitely. So you've got probably two types of COVID up. You've got the COVID up that happened at the time. That's the COVID up at the local level. It's the police, it's the council, those people. We know about that because in a place like Rotherham, they had two inquiries. So we know that the authorities knew this was going on. We know that they were briefed on it and they said nothing, did nothing.
- [04:56]
Interviewer
And why do you think that is?
- [04:58]
Investigative Journalist
I mean, they were afraid of race. Ultimately, that's it.
- [05:00]
Interviewer
They didn't want to be called racist.
- [05:01]
Investigative Journalist
Yeah, they didn't want to be called racists. They're very clear. Like they would leave anything involving the Pakistani community to Pakistani heritage counselors or to imams. They didn't want to touch it. They made people senseless. There's a famous quote where somebody was reporting on abuse involving Pakistani taxi drivers abusing girls. And they were told in the presentation, you must say men of a certain ethnicity involved in a certain occupation. So you had to cut race out. That is the reason why no one will touch it. That was the first cover up and that was in some cases a real cover up. So in Rotherham, the whistleblowers came from an organization called Risky Business that worked with at risk girls. They had an office. One morning they came in and they found that someone had got through the front door, got through the door into their office, got into the locked filing cabinet and gotten onto the password protected computer and files that they had had suddenly gone missing and new documents had been written onto their computer, creating minutes of meetings that had never occurred and they could prove hadn't occurred because the individual involved was on holiday at the time, wasn't even the country, I think. So that was a real cover up. Has anybody ever been prosecuted for that? No, we have no idea who did that. I mean, we can guess who did it, who had the keys and the passwords and everything else, but we don't know who did it. Then you've got the sort of. The second one, which is the more cultural cover up. That's the. Don't look at it too closely. So it came out in 2014, there was a big scandal, it was a big stink. And then. Walk it back, slim. Nobody wants to touch it because, all right, it's been there. But do you want to write an academic paper on that? Do you want to be called a racist? No. Fine, leave it be. And the authorities, the People that did look into it desperately tried to hide it. So you can look at the Home office report in 2020. So finally, there was pressure on the Home Office. We're going to look at the contested issue. Is ethnicity a real issue here? Well, the civil servants deliberately tried to do nothing and then when they're forced to do something, they produce a paper which is incredibly poor quality. It's the Home Office. They have access to all the data they want. They can question anybody they want. They can go into prisons and talk to all the abusers. They can talk to the police officers. They don't do any of that. What they do is they do a little summary of all the papers have been done so far, all of which say the data quality is really bad. And they say on the basis of this, we can say that the largest group of abusers in child sex cases are white. Well, most is not even the same as majority. That means under 51%. And Britain is a country that at the moment is about 75% white. Was previously 85% white. The census before that was 95% white. Census before that. If you're talking about a country that is overwhelmingly white and they're a small group, you're actually talking about other groups being overrepresented. And in fact, their own evidence admitted that. But all they wanted was that headline, whites are the largest group. Once they had that, they pretend nothing had happened.
- [07:45]
Interviewer
So how do you connect this issue to more broadly, what's happening with immigration and the demographics of the country and what so many people here are talking about and what you can see on the streets of London, which is that this country and this city have significantly changed.
- [08:01]
Investigative Journalist
Well, there's a. I think you've got two things. You've got culture. You know, why is this happening? To some degree, it's because there was a culture that said it was acceptable to target white girls, that they had a very different attitude. So if you look at.
- [08:13]
Interviewer
Did they not go after any Pakistani girls? Was it exclusively white girls?
- [08:18]
Investigative Journalist
They did go after some Pakistani girls as well. So in the 1,400 in the J inquiry, I think about 140, 150 are Muslim or Pakistani, but so about 10%. About 10%. But I would also point out that the offending method is different. Generally.
- [08:32]
Interviewer
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates progress price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.
- [08:58]
Investigative Journalist
So in those ones, what you're talking about is abusing girls within your family or close network. And it tends to be one on one. Whereas the difference with the rape gang stuff is it tends to be gang rape by large groups of people where you're sharing them around friends and family. Both are obviously very, very bad crimes, but they're different offending patterns. Which again, I think comes back to the culture. You know, there's a culture of if I have the opportunity, I can rape this girl within my community, but these girls outside of the community, they are fair game and I can share them with my friends and we don't feel any shame or guilt about that. So the culture is a huge issue. And then I think the second one is the element of power that comes with demography. So one of the reasons in Rotherham why things didn't happen was because the local Labour Party needed Pakistani votes, needed the Pakistani councillors. And so they basically outsourced anything involving them to the community or to the community leaders. And those community leaders in many cases made poor, in some cases, I think criminal decisions to essentially cover it up and not touch their own guys. I think what you can see in London with, let's say, the protests over Palestine and other things, is that when you have groups of people, they're going to represent their interest. And if you have large groups of foreigners who've come into the country very fast, they haven't integrated terribly well, a lot of their interests are going to be the interests of where they come from, not the interests of the population as a whole. And I think that is one of the real dangers for Britain in the Next sort of 10, 20 years is that increasing trend towards sectarianism.
- [10:21]
Interviewer
What do you think Britain is going to do about that? I mean, that seems to be one of the big questions that's happening on the main stage here.
- [10:27]
Investigative Journalist
I think it's the question for Europe. I think it's also to some degree the question for America. You can look at something like California where you had, I'm forgetting the name of it, but the big vote back in the 1990s about Spanish, about should English be the official language of California? They won that one. But there was a sort of gradual Hispanicization of certain things and you did get low level corruption with that, or community corruption.
- [10:47]
Interviewer
Unfortunately, as a Floridian, we don't consider California part of America anymore. So we're okay.
- [10:52]
Investigative Journalist
But there you go, you're fantastic. Well, Florida is the capital of Latin America. Exactly, exactly. So I think it's a huge issue across the entire west because it's just easier than ever before to emigrate to places. And that can be fantastic. That can be great. I myself live in a foreign country a lot of the time. My wife is an immigrant. My children have dual nationality. That's fantastic. But it also brings the bad things to the world. I particularly like the economist Garrett Jones, who has a great book called the Culture Transplant, and he points out that when you get people from other countries, they'll bring their culture, and that will include the good and the bad. So let's just pick an inoffensive example. If you bring over lots of French people, you'll probably get wonderful boulangeries. You'll probably get some great fashion. You might also get a sort of increase in adultery. But that's not the world's worst problem in a sort of developed country. But if you're bringing people over from the Third World, you're going to get Third World problems as well. That's not to cast aspersions on any individual, but if you bring over a group, you're going to get the aggregate. So I think everyone is tackling that issue at the moment. America is showing that borders matter, and they're actually going to reintroduce that. They're going to get rid of people who've got no right to be there, and they're going to ensure the primacy. Francis. Sorry. Of American values. I think that has to be the example for a lot of people across Europe and the west more generally.
- [12:05]
Interviewer
Is it kind of strange that everyone is waiting for America to do the right thing? I mean, because, you guys, the problems of Europe are far more significant, not to say ours aren't. And we've let in about 15 million people in probably seven years, something like that. It's an extraordinary amount of people. But it doesn't seem like our problems, at least at the cultural level, are nearly as bad as what's going on in Europe.
- [12:25]
Investigative Journalist
Definitely. I think there's a level of cultural difference. So one of the advantages you've got is a lot of the people coming to America are from south of the border. So if you've been to Texas, that stuff already crosses over a little bit. There's quite often a shared faith. Spanish is, of course, the European language. It's not a million million miles away. Whatever problems there come, in the case of Europe, increasingly the people that are coming are coming from very foreign cultures, very different cultures, often cultures with links to the country already because of the imperial history, but with strong cultural difference. So I think that is a greater shift, a greater change for Europe. The reason why it's happening in America, I think, is partly because America is the leader of the west, partly because it has a more vibrant politics, partly because Donald Trump really did change things. Been a great man theory. He really did shift things and Europe has not had that yet. I think Europe's on a time lag and a lot of these things will clip through. But everyone's going to be looking to America for guidance and encouragement. So that's, that's going to be the future.
- [13:24]
Interviewer
So we're about a month after Elon tweeted about the scandal and there was that two week blip, as we mentioned. Has anything changed here? Are there any inquiries now? Is anything going on?
- [13:36]
Investigative Journalist
Well, so Elon's pressure was extremely valuable because it did push the government, did create domestic pressure. It put the subject back in the newsline, in the headlines. That meant that the government had to make concessions. The concessions they've made are they're going to do a sort of rapid assessment and they're going to do some local inquiries. But we're talking about a couple of local inquiries where, I mean, do you.
- [13:56]
Interviewer
Have faith that any of that will come to. Does it mean anything?
- [13:58]
Investigative Journalist
I don't think it means anything. We're talking about grooming gangs, rape gangs have been found in 50 different places in Britain and they're talking about a handful of local inquiries. That's clearly insufficient. And even if they do go ahead and even if they've got the best of intentions, they're not statutory inquiries. They have no power to compel anybody to come and give evidence. And that means that a lot of people simply won't. And there's no guarantee that they won't do what they've done previous inquiries, which is deliberately make sure the inquiries are happening in faraway places where there's been no reports beforehand and you can safely come back and say, well, we asked a couple of people and they said there wasn't a big problem, so no biggie. That is clearly not what's needed. At a minimum, we should be talking about a national inquiry. It should probably be, it should be independent, it should probably be headed up by someone foreign who's got no links to the British government to ensure that they don't have any, any level of coercion on them and it should have statutory powers to go in everywhere. And if people don't want to speak to the inquiry. That should be enough for criminal charges. That should be enough for them to, you know, go to jail.
- [14:52]
Interviewer
Wasn't there also a bizarre connection between Keir Starmer's former job 10 years ago, when they were looking into this, and.
- [14:59]
Investigative Journalist
And the grooming gangs? Yeah, yeah. So he was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, and there've been various conspiracy theories about his time as DPP and the grooming gangs. He did do some reforms. They were good reforms. But if I was a sort of level of criticism, the criticism would be at the time he said, we failed these girls and we should never do that again. And the truth is that they've never gone back to it. You know, once the stuff was out of the headlines, they forgot about it, they moved on. And he's not shown any real interest in reopening that subject.
- [15:28]
Interviewer
So what do you think a resolution to the immigration and cultural problems actually looks like? Let's say you're able to get your borders under control the way we have. There's still a homegrown issue of this. I mean, are we talking deportations? What does it actually look like, say, five years from now, if you had a serious government that was doing the proper things?
- [15:48]
Investigative Journalist
So first thing, like America, border control, you've got to do that. Second thing, you've got to slow the rate. You just simply can't handle the number of people that are coming in. I think there's no reason why you couldn't slash things to a very, very small amount. In fact, if you just took people who were earning sufficient money to actually, really genuinely be net contributors to the country, you'd already be talking about a very small amount. So if you included them and spouses, and even with the spouses, you'd have a certain lever to make sure they can support themselves. You'd already reduce immigration to a tiny amount.
- [16:14]
Interviewer
And that seems doable. I mean, that's something a country can still do.
- [16:17]
Investigative Journalist
Yeah, absolutely. If a government got intomorrow and wanted to do it, they could go to the immigration rules, they could change those rules, it would go into force immediately, and you could slash immigration with basically zero negative economic impact immediately. Then you get to the second one, the harder question, which is, what do you do with the people you've got here? If they've committed criminal acts, you can and should deport them. That's been made very hard. Unfortunately, that's going to require us dealing with international law, because it's international law that hobbles us. There's been a huge Huge growth in that stuff post 1945. A lot of it gets instituted. It's got very universal utopian aims. And then it gets progressively taken over by lawyers and judges and it expands. So in our case, one of the big problems is the European Convention on Human Rights. Not a bad thing when they instituted it, but it's grown. It now has a doctrine called the Living Instrument Doctrine, which basically is we can reinterpret it. And the end result is that in many cases, you simply cannot deport people, criminals who've committed serious crimes, including rape gang members. You know, we have never deported a single rape gang member. Never. And that's in well over a decade or sort of maybe 15 years of these guys going on trial. Not.
- [17:24]
Interviewer
It's unimaginable, actually.
- [17:25]
Investigative Journalist
It's completely unimaginable. And I think that's where it will have to change. We'll have to again, look at America and say, we international law exists to help and protect human dignity. It shouldn't be hindering, it shouldn't be putting the rights of the rapists over the rights of the victims.
- [17:40]
Interviewer
So one more question for you to connect this to the ARC Conference. If this country is able to fix some of these things, what do you think a positive vision for this country looks like in, say, five, 10 years?
- [17:52]
Investigative Journalist
I think Britain has an incredibly positive future if the changes can be made. We have an incredibly smart population. We have a fantastic position just outside of Europe, between the Europe and the United States. We have a wonderful natural position, a wonderful history, wonderful set of laws, of institutions, of culture, of everything else. All that's needed to do is clear out the rubbish, clear out the regulations, clear out the nonsense that is in the way and that can be done. And then Britain will be a rich, a prosperous, God willing, a safe country.
- [18:23]
Interviewer
Good luck, my friend.
- [18:24]
Investigative Journalist
Thank you very much.
- [18:25]
Interviewer
Thank you.