Manchester once had a brave and crusading newspaper edited by CP Scott. The Manchester Guardian was libertarian, reformist, anti-establishment in stance and valued journalistic integrity. If it were published today, it would probably be my go-to newspaper, but sadly it exists no longer. A shadow of its former self, it moved to London, became The Guardian, and disavowed its libertarian and reformist stance to become a platform for bigots and cranks and a tool of the new establishment takeover of the UK's state institutions.
During its incubation in Manchester, the Guardian has a sister publication, the Manchester Evening News, founded in 1868, and owned by Guardian Media Group until the sale of the title to Trinity Mirror, now Reach plc, in 2010. It is the MEN that has inherited the crusading honesty of its former press-partner, while the Guardian has become complicit in the lies, cover-ups, distortions, misrepresentation and obfuscation of one of the foulest scandals of this millennium.
The Manchester child sexual abuse scandal is the just the latest in a tsunami of child abuse scandals in the UK that became institutionally embedded as acceptable amongst police, social workers and local politicians. It is the most egregious tale of police and official malfeasance, maladministration and misconduct in public office, and heads must roll and persons must do jail time for the wrongs they did. The bromides of the guilty establishment - "we empathise with the pain you must feel" and "lessons have been learned" - don't work any more. We want prosecutions.
We owe a debt to the Manchester Evening News and the city's mayor Andy Burnham for this story being fully investigated.
I was in two minds whether to write this piece, as I know the assortment of deeply bigoted comments it is likely to attract. So let me make things clear. This is primarily a story about public officials, the police, the media, local government and many senior figures in government wilfully covering up the most shocking and disgraceful abuse of the most vulnerable in our society. The crimes were carried out by paedophiles, nonces, who also belong in jail. Those officials were covering-up paedophilia.
And this piece is a piece in praise of the upright and the righteous who abandoned their establishment comfort-zone to expose the wrongs. It is not an opportunity to vent vile and disgusting discrimination against the adherents of the Muslim faith or the nationals of a single nation. Or a deluded opportunity to aver that the harassment and victimisation by a convicted street-thug of this minority under the pretence of exposing wrong has any equivalence to the actions of the MEN, Andy Burnham and Maggie Oliver. It does not. So although I'm not closing comments, please be very careful.
31 comments:
The point is that police forces all over the country are so woefullyn ot fit for purpose; that's a bad sign, and as Radders says, we must now see prosecutions, sackings, loss of pensions.
This vile activity (mainly) in the north is where "political correctness" ends up if left unchecked. Therefore it is PC that needs to outlawed and it's adherents brought to book.
Clearly the perpetrators have been serious let down by our uncaring authorities who neglected to finance their re-rehabilitation to a modern, caring society when they arrived, innocent of our ways.
(if I put /sarc at the end will you let THIS one through?)
It is interesting, though, that the "other" paper with Manchester roots (one) reports it thus:
The report found that although Augusta identified 16 child victims and 97 potential perpetrators — mostly men working in the restaurant trade —
Ah yes.
As I commented on the View From Cullingworth blog, but it hasn't appeared yet, the death of Sir Roger and talk of the Salisbury Review reminded me of the article by Ray Honeyford in 1984. He identified the cancer that would eventually lead to the establishment's wilful ignorance and cowardice that would eventually lead to this situation.
Just wondering how those pill filled take away dinners made their way into the marketplace last week.
Could this activity amongst our "friends from the far east" still be part of our rich fabric?
I yhink we should be told, however I know that we will not.
I predict that not one of the police officers or public officials who deliberately ignored these crimes and the pleas for help from the victims and their families will be prosecuted, let alone do jail time for their malfeasance. They will be quietly retired on full pensions, or if the MET's Midland Investigation is anything to go by, they'll be promoted. After all, its not like the girls were part of an imported minority the Government seems to fear - they were all "white trash" and deserved what they got.
We will be told it was all a dreadful mistake on the part of multiple public agencies; lessons will be learned; training will be given so that officers/officials have a better understanding of the issue;
officials will work with "community leaders" to build better relations blah, blah, blah.
Congratulations to the MEN for breaking the story. But after all, that IS what they're supposed to do.
I agree, that historically, the Guardian could have contributed to a climate, in which certain classes of professional felt inhibited about raising certain subjects. Those would include the risks posed by some groups not integrating with post-Enlightenment European values for instance. (Plenty of the natives refuse to do this too, but that's another topic).
However, over the last decade or fifteen years, once the facts began to emerge, as far as I can recall, all the articles in the Guardian on this matter have expressed very similar concerns to those raised by Raedwald.
Listening to Nick Ferrari on LBC. He's not afraid to raise the issue of the
ethnic heritage of MOST of the perpetrators; not just in Manchester, in Rotherham, Oxford and others.
Until others do likewise, this kind of state-sanctioned abuse will never stop.
He is now discussing why THE AUTHORITIES continually turn a blind eye to the crimes committed by this minority.
Delete if you like Raedwald. If you do, you are part of the problem.
This is a responsible blog, which does not share the need of shock-jocks and fading social media pundits to scrape the gutter in their quest for likes and ratings.
There is also a constitutional problem here - we have had police forces bullying people to shut them up using the 'hate crime' agenda.
Politicians know that they are using hate crime to cover up these issues; our civic institutions know also - and the police and judges have fallen right in behind.
When Common Purpose was wending its insidious way through our institutions there were not enough people who stood up against them.
That is to the UK people's shame.
There are parts of this country which are effective no go zones.
I appreciate the sentiment Radders re blame and responsibility, but it didn't just happen. Sorry, DeeDee has a point.
Shock jocks and fading social media pundits are not enforcing "islamophobia". Its the police who will visit you, threaten you, charge you and ruin your life if you say "well maybe islam is only 99.999% perfect".
So, like millions of others I keep quiet and do nothing.
The ghettos are here.
One day they may well wake up and find there's a fence around it. I'll likely do nothing then as well.
I support Raedwalds view that the heritage of the perpetrators is not the most important aspect of the situation. The overwhelming majority of people with the same heritage do not indulge in such activity.
After all most of those who turned a blind eye are of white heritage but you wouldn't conclude that all white people were indifferent to the fate of the abused.
And yes, those who turned a blind eye should be prosecuted, or in appropriate cases be handled within an organisation's disciplinary system. Prison sentences and job losses would help reset the standards expected of public officials. Plus, perhaps, a national whistleblowers line that always follows through...
I agree with Mark and DeeDee.
Mark, there are countless instances of the police acting outside of the law.
When I was a teenager I used to get visits from them for playing the old Strat too loudly. That, private noise nuisance, is a civil matter, none of their business. Nowadays they will use any amount of force to evict students peacefully occupying property in protests - again a civil matter, yet not move on travellers where they have broken and entered private property, where they reasonably have a duty to act.
It is the same over "Hate Crime". There are no laws against people saying the sorts of things where the police have behaved as if there were.
I can only assume that they intend to mislead the public as to what that law is. Why they should do that is cause for thought, I'd suggest.
That's the problem. The police now are not what they were. They are now the provisional arm of the anti-British establishment.
I can well remember Gene Hunt types when I was a teenager. Never happened to me but I heard tales now and then of scrotes getting on the wrong side of the police and getting a good kicking.
Letter of the law and spirit of the law. Rules exist for the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools and all that. The lines might not have been strictly legal but we all knew what they were, why they had been drawn and accepted the reality and necessity.
There are people out there lurking. Call them "populists", "demagogues", whatever.
These are not people I really want to see near power but they're getting closer. I need to have a reason to stop them. I am increasingly struggling.
This is not Brexit, nor is it related before you say anything. This is something happening across the western world.
Mass immigration is not necessary nor do we want it. Population may be falling. It is in Japan and Korea too. This may well require changes, mass uncontrolled immigration is not one of them.
Labour really started it as they clearly stated - again, before you say anything - the tories did nothing to stop it.
They didn't like the electorate so they decided to replace it. Well we're not too enamoured with the establishment and don't think we can't, or won't replace them.
Not here first I suspect. Maybe Italy or France where these problems are a lot more serious (and where they do have some past form). The less said about Germany in this context, the better!
Unspoken certainly, but people are looking at Boris to start resigning this anti-British hatred in. I hope he realises this (but not holding my breath)
My take on why the police wrongly act or fail to act is that some among them intend to stir up exactly the sort of backlash that we see in many comment threads across the web, mostly from people whom they have successfully misled as to the law.
The backlash is then against those politicians whom the angered wrongly accuse of passing those non-existent laws.
When my job was maintaining drains I received reports of drainage problems from the general public. Many of those reports could not be accurate (water doesn't flow uphill) and most were garbled. Most of the proposed solutions would not have worked. Nevertheless on investigation 99% of the time there was a genuine problem in need of resolution. All fair enough, I didn't actually want the general public to do my job better than me.
Politicians should take the same attitude. When Nick Griffith started attracting support they should have both investigated the situation and interviewed his supporters in the grounds that there clearly was some sort of problem even if it was poorly described.
Instead they lazily fobbed it off as racism and studiously did nothing.
I could easily have halved my workload by ignoring incoherent reports, but I wouldn't have been doing my job.
Further consider the possibility that people brought up in a foreign culture might actually behave in a manner that Brits would find unacceptable.
Brendan o'Neill in Spiked! has written a very good article on the subject, including ethnicity, the authorities failures and the "liberals" priority concerns.
Well that's Manchester and you’re right to mention it. There is also Andrew Norfolk and others (Nick Griffin anyone, 15 years ago, well and truly the messenger shot) Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Banbury, Derby, Bristol, Newcastle, Halifax, Peterborough, Berkhamsted, Norwich, Exeter, Belfast, Belfast ...back in 2014 a charity told the BBC that mainly vulnerable young girls are being groomed in "every town in Britain”, sadly this is most probably true.
The Rotherham scandal, and by extension this Manchester one, make up the worst scandal in my lifetime and yet nobody apart form the actual perpetrators (mainly NOT white,* black, Christian, oriental, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu or Pakistani-Christian heritage) has been visibly punished – loss of job? Pension? Demoted? Gaoled? Most continue in the same line of work.
It is an absolute mind-boggling disgrace and the MSM, government and ALL, limit official action by limiting ‘the debate’.
*as soon as someone says ‘more whites blah, blah blah, you know they are intentionally hiding despicable evil in a numbers game
Yes DeeDee Spiked has the story as I do OF THE COVER UP - it's not a Muslim / Pakistani baiting fest which is what we particularl;y need to avoid and which so many seem to want to promulgate. O'Neill writes
"We have to talk about this. We have to talk about how officialdom’s shameful reluctance to investigate these kinds of cases allowed the abuse to continue. We have to talk about how the cultural elite’s silence on these crimes further denigrates the victims, treating them as if they are unworthy of public sympathy. We have to talk about how the new elite’s denigration of white working-class communities as backward and stupid and trashy could well inflame some people’s view of these communities as unimportant, as worthy of abuse. And we have to talk about how the ideology of multiculturalism, the PC unwillingness to look community tensions and divisions in the face, is harming the country."
Quite. I restate, these are are terms on which we must have the debate, and not degrade to crude racist tropes. It's about, in O'Neill's words NOT inflaming "some people’s view of these communities as unimportant, as worthy of abuse"
What is it that is so hard to understand?
Brought up on both newspapers. The descent of the Manchester Guardian since the move to London makes me very sad. Much of my early vocab came from reading the back pages of the MG, as my father had it in front of him every day as he ate his breakfast.
Moral of the story. Stay clear of London.
It's not difficult to understand at all.
That horse has bolted. All I hear - endlessly, remorselessly - is what a crude, nazi racist "Islamophobe" I am for even asking the question.
White this, white that, white the other. Are we not a community? Prick us, do we not bleed?
This is not about a few harsh words, it's about disgusting savagery visited on teenage girls.
Somebody will answer for this. It's just a matter of who and how. Do it now to those responsible legally and properly, or things might turn very ugly.
I'm sorry you simply cannot pretend that its largely Muslim Pakistanis doing this (and they're targeting Sikhs as well, helped by a common language).
Sorry, forgot a "not"
Raedwald, the atrocious behaviour of the authorities is a consequence of the problem. If there wasn't a cause there would have been no consequences.
If we only address the consequences or side effects and not the root cause it makes no sense at all.
Worse, it guarantees that the abuse will continue.
I don't want that on my conscience.
Mark, they targeted the Sikh girls first, started back in the 80s. then realising that white girls were 'easy meat' their focus changed. Must have really thrown them when they realised nobody would do anything to stop them so it got as bad as it did (in open view as per the MEN article and others)
Trying to simply cover it up, pretending it's not happening - no matter how debased and cowardly those doing the cover up - I could at least understand.
Instead we are bombarded with accusations of "Islamophobia" almost by the second. Islam this, islam that, islam the other.
It's not pouring petrol on the fire, its powdered aluminium!
Are these people truly that detached? After reading the labour manifesto I'm starting to think they are.
I actually agree with the late Roger Scruton that "islamophobia" is a propaganda word.
As practised by the more extreme - but by no means small - sects, this creed is arguably not what would reasonably be called a belief - they claim absolute knowledge - but rather a totalitarian doctrine.
It is not irrational to be deeply critical of that, and that does not amount to a "phobia", an irrational hatred or fear.
But we digress.
The appalling standards in which the behaviour of the perpetrators had its roots are apparently cultural rather than religious. That is, among people from backwards, rural villages, where the most crude, primitive sexism holds sway.
There are a number of distinct problems, and we need to identify and to isolate them where we can, rather than to conflate them.
Raedwald said:
'Those officials were covering-up paedophilia.'
Yes they were. What makes it all the more staggering is how these 'officials' managed to carry on as normal knowing that on their watch little English girls were being raped on an industrial scale? Go back to your youth and imagine the same? You can't because multiculturalism had yet to devour our English towns; enriching them, beyond our/their wildest dreams. But it wasn't just rape, was it? First came the threats when the sweeties and alcohol had been consumed. The threats increased when she started to bleed between the legs and wanted to go home to mummy - for details read the Jay Report.
Old men in their 80's chauffeured by their grandsons in taxis they owned to have anal sex with a 12 years-old who'd been injected with opiates and lying on a dirty mattress, legs tied open. That one was an imam. A further 60 plus men would que up for the remainder of the day as the child lay belly down in a pool of South Asian semen. She'll never have children. Her nightmares will never end as she remembers the faces of the men who forced a coke bottle into her anus and vagina: to "open her up". She was pretty, and white, and lived at the wrong time in the wrong place.
A few decades from now tens of thousands like her will have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Steve
OK it's becoming self reinforcing now. I reckon everyone's had a fair say within the limits so lets keep it that way. I'm going to lock this now.
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