Fury over Britain’s grooming-gangs scandal seems to have finally reached boiling point. This week, it was revealed that Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips had refused last year to initiate a formal government inquiry into the historical child-sex abuse that gripped the town of Oldham, in Greater Manchester, throughout the 2010s. The response online has been fierce, attracting international attention. Even X owner Elon Musk weighed in, going as far as to say he believes Phillips belongs in prison and accusing prime minister Keir Starmer of being ‘complicit in the rape of Britain’.

The shameful treatment of England’s grooming-gang crisis really does deserve this global outrage. The mass rape of mostly white, working-class, underaged girls by groups of primarily Pakistani-heritage men has been largely swept under the rug by our own establishment. The horrors suffered by the victims deserve to be faced head-on.

Perhaps even worse than the abuse itself was the authorities’ indifference to these girls’ suffering. A 2013 inquiry into the Rotherham gangs found that 1,400 children had been sexually abused there over a 16-year period. Despite this, Rotherham has been named as the first-ever ‘Children’s Capital of Culture’ – a multimillion-pound opportunity for the council to try to cleanse its deservedly dire reputation, at the UK taxpayers’ expense.

Similarly, in Telford, an independent report found that more than 1,000 children had been groomed over 30 years. Abusers even set up a ‘rape house’, where victims were ferried to. But ‘unease’ about the perpetrators’ race meant this abuse was not properly investigated. For decades, grooming-gang paedophiles operated with impunity across the country.