Rotten Boroughs

Dan Hodges calls a spade a spade in this hard hitting comment piece on the Rotherham sex scandal and as a former Labour Party member himself it can't have escaped Dan's attention that Rotherham is a traditional Labour 'fiefdom' or 'rotten borough' in democratic terms, evidenced by the fact that at the 2012 local elections Labour held 57 of the council's 63 seats - or 91% of the total.

I can't think of a better argument in favour of proportional representation (PR) because the domination of a local council by a single political party is very unhealthy as well as being bad for democracy. 

The same was true in Scotland up until 2007 when PR was finally introduced for Scottish council elections which means there is always a sizeable opposition that is capable, in theory at least, of holding the ruling administration to account.

Clearly that was not happening in Rotherham and I suspect the political culture within the council has contributed to the way in which senior councillors and officials dealt with difficult or controversial issues. 


Rotherham sex abuse scandal: we cannot ignore that race played a part in these crimes

By Dan Hodges - The Independent

Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. He is on Twitter at@dpjhodges.


The abuse experienced by the children of Rotherham is beyond belief. Sexual abuse. Physical abuse. Psychological abuse. It is all laid out in brutal detail in the report by Alexis Jay.

But one equally vicious aspect of the assaults on these children is identified in a less explicit way. And that is the manner in which the vast majority of the Rotherham victims were also racially abused.

Ever since the first reports, and subsequent convictions, of so called “Asian grooming gangs” began to appear, a debate has opened up about how to confront the racial element of these crimes. It was inappropriate, many people argued, to explicitly describe them as “Asian” or “Muslim” gangs at all. Others said to even touch on the race of the perpetrators, or the victims, was to itself pander to racism. When I first heard the reports, I sympathised with this argument.

I was wrong. There is no longer any debate about what happened in Rotherham. A major British town was turned into a rape camp. The overwhelming majority of the abusers were Asian men, primarily of Pakistani descent. And their victims were overwhelmingly white girls.

The section of Jay's report dealing with the victims of the crimes is unequivocal: “In a large number of the historic cases in particular, most of the victims in the cases we sampled were white British children, and the majority of the perpetrators were from minority ethnic communities. They were described generically in the files as ‘Asian males’ without precise reference being made to their ethnicity.”

In the section that deals specifically with what Jay euphemistically calls “issues of ethnicity”, the report tortuously expands on this. It says, accurately, “there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, and across the UK the greatest numbers of perpetrators of CSE are white men”. But it then goes on to demonstrate that in Rotherham there was indeed a clear link between race and abuse.

The 2011 census in Rotherham showed that 3.1 per cent of the population of the Borough were of Pakistani or Kashmiri ethnicity. Yet as Jay states, “In Rotherham, the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage including the five men convicted in 2010. The file reading carried out by the Inquiry also confirmed that the ethnic origin of many perpetrators was ‘Asian’.” This is despite the fact that, as Jay underlines, the perpetrators of crimes of this nature normally select victims of the same ethnic origin. In Rotherham the opposite occurred. Pakistani men targeted white girls so that they could rape them.

But race did not just provide a motivational element in these horrific crimes. It was also a major contributing factor in the perpetrators' ability to get away with their abuse on such a scale for such a long period of time.

The evidence is again damning. As Jay recounts, the abuse was organised in such a way that “it offered career and financial opportunities to young Asian men who got involved”. Yet time and again the racial element of their crimes directly or indirectly obstructed efforts to prevent them.

Local councillors admitted they “believed that by opening up these issues they could be 'giving oxygen' to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion”. Local youngsters confirmed to the Jay inquiry what had been reported to a previous inquiry, namely that ”young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism”. Several people interviewed by Jay “expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police”. Jay herself states that “messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of child sex exploitation”. Although the report claims not to have found evidence of direct influence on individual cases, it then adds “Unsurprisingly, front line staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'.”

When I first saw the headline findings of the report my reaction was almost identical to the findings of the report into the Jimmy Savile abuses. How could crimes that vile have been committed over such an extended period?

The answer to that question is the same in both the Rotherham and Savile cases. The attackers had a cloak. Savile’s was fame. In Rotherham it was race.

I understand why people want to downplay the racial element of this case. That was my own initial reaction.

But consider this. Imagine if it came to light that in another region of the country, organised gangs of white men had been systematically engaging in the rape and abuse of black children. The local white community knew about it, but shielded the crimes behind a wall of silence. Officers in the local authority were aware of it, but were told by their political masters to keep quiet about the racial element of the crime for fear of offending their local constituency. Police officers who attempted to investigate where specifically warned by their superiors to ignore any racial aspect to the offences.

There would be a national outcry. The racism inherent in those crimes would not be pushed to the margins, but to the forefront of our enraged response. There would be a full public inquiry, along the lines of Lawrence. And that reaction would be wholly appropriate.

We cannot just ignore racism because it doesn’t fit a neat binary perception of the victim being black and the perpetrator being white. When a Pakistani man calls a white child a “white bitch” because she tries to stop him raping her, that isn’t just horrific sexual abuse, it’s also horrific racial abuse.

Those who tried to cover up the racial aspect of these crimes did so because they feared giving “oxygen” to racists. But what kind of perversion is that? You counter racism by covering up racism?

For those who endured the abuse, the racial origin of their attacker will seem irrelevant. But as we’ve seen, it wasn’t irrelevant because it was their racial origin that contributed to the abuse continuing unchecked for so long. That’s why we must never again allow a situation to develop where racism is allowed to flourish simply because it challenges our conventional belief of what racism is.

The children of Rotherham were abused racially, as well as sexually, physically and psychologically. We don’t just have a right to say that, we have an obligation.