BBC and LBC‘s career recycling-bin, The News Agents, are, anachronistically, what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote, “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” Still, I couldn’t help tuning in when Rupert Lowe, doing the media rounds after the Met Police predictably dropped their investigation into alleged coarse words exchanged with Reform chairman Zia Yusuf, appeared on the podcast. I had not, however, expected host Emily Maitlis to dismiss the Pakistani rape gang scandal, and accuse Lowe of racism for trying to prevent child abuse.
Maitlis opened by quoting professor Alexis Jay, saying she is “very unhappy with the politicisation of child sexual exploitation done, in her words, in a very uninformed way.” Maitlis blamed Lowe, but the same charge could be put to the Prime Minister, who accused those concerned about the rape gangs of “jump on a bandwagon of the far-right”. His Labour party, especially those in seats threatened by sectarian independent candidates, have tried to render the debate radioactive with accusations of racism and Islamophobia, in the hopes of retaining the Muslim vote. Last week, Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell had to apologise for dismissing the scandal as a “little trumpet” and a racist “dog-whistle”.
Not learning from her friends in government, Maitlis said to Lowe, “I’m telling you that you are focusing on Pakistani grooming gangs because, probably, you’re racist.” She did so after falsely accusing Lowe of profiting from a privately-funded public inquiry which he, I, and thousands of others have donated to. She did not apologise
Though Maitlis and the government want to wash their hands of the scandal after the Casey Inquiry, none of the recommendations made in 2022 will ensure that those complicit in the cover-up face consequences. What about the social workers in Bradford who attended an Islamic wedding ceremony where a child was married to her rapist, and then arranged for her to be fostered by his parents? What about the members of local councils who knew what was happening, but were too petrified of being “politically incorrect” or of facing “accusations of racism” to investigate? Why is Maitlis content to reinforce the very chilling effect which stopped victims from coming forward and being believed for decades?
As for the Times reporting that Mailtis quoted to accuse Lowe of racism, it shows that Asian males are twice as likely to commit group-based child sexual exploitation, and grooming offences than their share of the general population. These figures come from the Hydrant Programme, collected from all 43 police forces in England and Wales. So while we would expect the majority population of a country to make up the majority of perpetrators of crime, per capita, Pakistani and Asian males are vastly overrepresented. “A total of 23 per cent of group-based exploitation cases were Asian, including 7 per cent Pakistani, although there are also a large number of suspects whose ethnicity is unknown” writes the Times’ Tom Calver, in a sentence that Maitlis’ production team must have forgotten to put in her prep notes. Pakistani males are between 2-4 times more likely to commit child sex offences, making up just 2.7 percent of the population according to the 2021 census.
If Maitlis is suddenly sour on the stats she cited, there are others. In West Yorkshire, which has a high concentration of Britain’s Pakistani population: new figures show that between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2024, Asian suspects were between 23-43 per cent of child sexual abuse offence suspects. That’s a rate 2-4 times their share of the national population. Pakistanis in particular were 21.48 per cent (1,183) of all suspects; a rate of 507.7 suspects per 100,000 people in West Yorkshire. Among victims, White British accounted for 55.6 per cent (3,960), making up the largest ethnic group in absolute terms. Despite being the largest ethnic group among perpetrators, Asian Pakistanis comprised only 2.96 per cent (211) of victims, with a per capita rate of 90.6 per 100,000. So, the data indicates that the majority of these crimes are occurring across, rather than within, ethnic groups.
Other historic data corroborates this trend. In 2013, the National Crime Agency found that 75 percent of Type 1 group-based child sexual exploitation offenders were Asian. In 2017, the Quilliam Foundation found that, of the 264 people convicted for the crime of group-based child sexual exploitation since 2005, 222 (84 per cent) were Asian. The 2020 Home Office report, which concluded that white men are the majority of child sex offence perpetrators, actually showed Asian males were three times more likely to commit these crimes. Even Dr. Ella Cockbain, the Guardian’s go-to academic on the subject, found in her work that Pakistani men made up 80 per cent of the perpetrators of child sex offences sampled. “a clear majority of offenders — both on individual cases and overall — were of Pakistani heritage”, Cockbain wrote, but was “loath to speculate beyond the data” as to “a clear and definitive explanation as to why there were so many Asian offenders on these six cases”.
Fortunately for Cockbain, the perpetrators themselves are happy to provide insight. Badrul Hussain, when caught travelling without a ticket on public transport, told the female ticket inspector, “All white women are only good for one thing. For men like me to … use like trash. That’s all women like you are worth”. In a new trial transcript, read by Katie Lam MP in Parliament, another perpetrator told his victim, “We’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the Government.” In 2013, Rochdale rape-gang ringleader Shabir Ahmed launched into a racist tirade during his trial, saying:
We are a civilised society. We are the supreme race, not these white b******s (pointing to police officers in court). … You will not get a CBE. You will not get an MBE. You will get a DM, a destroyer of Muslims. You were born one thousand years too late. You f***ed my community. … White people trained those girls to be so much advanced in sex. They were coming without hesitation to Rochdale,Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Nelson and wherever.
He accused the jury of “taking instructions” from Nick Griffin, and then smiled as he was sentenced. Another gang, convicted in Rotherham in 2017, shouted “Allahu akbar” as they were led out of court.
Why is Maitlis’ blase attitude toward this scandal so common among the establishment?
The rapists are not shy about the racial, ethnic, religious, and even political reasons for their crimes. To dismiss, downplay, or obfuscate the vast overrepresentation of Pakistani Muslim men among those preying on white British girls, in the face of all this evidence, is tantamount to denying these ongoing atrocities.
But why is Maitlis’ blase attitude toward this scandal so common among the establishment?
Maitlis and her News Agents co-host Jon Sopel described being “incensed, and unsettled, and destabilised” by the “appalling scenes” of Hamas violence on October 7th in Israel. And quite rightly so. Thousands were abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered at the Nova musical festival. One story in Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults still haunts me: of Rada, one of the Druze brothers who catered the festival, who watched three terrorists argue in Arabic over whether to kidnap or kill a 19-year-old girl, before another Hamas militant arrived and shot her in the head. She was still begging for her life after half her face had been blown away.
Neither Maitlis or Sopel would give any quarter to bad-faith actors who deny such atrocities — especially when the perpetrators live-streamed their crimes on Facebook, and called family members to brag “Look at how many I killed with my own hands, your son killed Jews!” Had an antisemite sat opposite Maitlis and said, “There were 20 million military casualties in the Second World War, so why do you only talk about Jewish victims?”, Maitlis would correctly object to him distracting from and minimising the horrors of the Holocaust. Nobody sane would blame British Jews for worrying that such a person wished their people harm.
So why, when the perpetrators of the Pakistani rape gangs are just as unrepentant about their abuse of English girls, and just as vocal about the racial and religious motives for their crimes, does Maitlis dismiss them as a non-issue? Why are those, like Rupert Lowe, concerned about the cover-up of these crimes precisely because the ethnicity and Muslim faith of the perpetrators, derided as racists? Why are Charlene Downes, Laura WIlson, Lucy Lowe, Victoria Agoglia, and thousands of other girls less deserving of Maitlis’ sympathy than the women raped and murdered in Re’im?
When, in 1616, eleven theologians denounced Galileo’s theory of the universe, they did so in the face of empirical evidence. It took another century before Pope Urban VIII’s reluctant prohibition on heliocentrism was lifted. When you subordinate truth to ideology, you operate on a faulty model of the world, and are bound to make errors. When you subordinate the pursuit of justice to concerns about inflaming “community tensions” or racism, then you ignore atrocities and make it harder to prevent them from happening again. It’s clear that Emily Maitlis’ morality is orbiting the wrong celestial bodies. Her belief in the blank slate, and in the ineluctable power of Cool Britannia to assimilate even the most ardent Jihadist, is not worth preserving over the innocence of Britain’s children. But her treatment of Rupert Lowe helps to explain why the media were so silent about the worst scandal in British history for so long.
