The independent ‘Rape Gang Inquiry’, set up by Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, published its report last week. So did it add anything fresh to our collective understanding of grooming-gang activity or shed new light on the factors driving this decades-long, nationwide scourge?

Credit should certainly be given to the inquiry for thrusting grooming-gang activity, formally known as group-localised child sexual exploitation (GLCSE), back into the spotlight. And the survivors who contributed their testimonies to the inquiry – describing the torture, abuse and exploitation they endured – are deserving of the utmost admiration.

Furthermore, Restore’s inquiry has at least injected some urgency into proceedings. The UK government’s own national statutory inquiry into grooming-gang activity – reluctantly being held by the Labour government after it was recommended by Baroness Louise Casey in her national audit – is moving at a glacial pace. Restore has reminded us that Britain needs to face up to these horrific, unspeakable crimes against some of the most vulnerable and exposed members of our society, and explore the institutional mismanagement and neglect that allowed it to happen.

However, the report has not gone down as well as its authors may have hoped – even among those who have a proven track record of highlighting the horrors of grooming-gang criminality. Much of this criticism stems from the nature of the inquiry. It already had no statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend and provide evidence under oath. And it compounded these limitations by proceeding with no clearly defined objectives or ‘terms of reference’.

The report itself provides little in the way of fresh insight. It fails to dig into the scale of this nationwide epidemic or explore the societal, cultural and economic drivers of grooming-gang activity. Instead, the report is overly reliant on the victims’ admittedly harrowing testimonies. These then form the basis for what often amounts to pseudo-intellectual analysis. Much of the report reads more like punditry than a genuine examination of how these vile paedophilic crimes have been allowed to take place over decades.

The report is simply not a credible piece of research. Some of it is closer to anti-Muslim slop. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the ‘influence of Islam’ in the context of grooming-gang activity. It is true, as academics Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe argue in their 2020 paper on GLCSE (which was not cited at all in the rape-gang inquiry report), that Muslims dominate grooming-gang prosecutions. But they clearly show that it is specifically Pakistani Muslims originating from the Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir who comprise the vast majority of perpetrators. As they put it in their analysis of GLCSE prosecutions in local areas, ‘the proportion of the local population of Pakistani origin is more powerful in explaining the level of GLCSE than the Muslim proportion’. By the same token, the proportion of Bangladeshi-origin people (overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim) in an area had no effect on the level of GLCSE, in their analysis.

While it may be tempting for some on the radical right to exaggerate the role of Islam in the context of grooming-gang activity, it doesn’t do them any favours. The tight-knit, biraderi-style multi-generational kinship networks (reinforced by cousin marriage) and the patriarchal clan structures dominant within certain British-Pakistani communities seem to have played a far greater role than religion. These kinship and clan structures provide the bonds of secrecy and mutual protection that allow such large grooming gangs to operate undetected.

It is also somewhat baffling that Bradford is barely mentioned in the report. It should have been a case study in its own right, especially since previous local investigations into grooming-gang activity in the city have been threadbare at best. What needs to be thoroughly investigated is not only how these child-abuse networks operate within communities, but also how they were allowed to do so by public institutions – including local councils, police forces, schools, social services and safeguarding partnerships.

Tellingly, grooming-gang convictions involving non-Muslim criminal enterprises receive no mention whatsoever. Hence the exclusion of the Romanian grooming gang jailed last October for raping and sexually abusing 10 women in flats across Dundee in Scotland.

The Rape Gang Inquiry was a golden opportunity for fresh and hard-hitting insights on grooming-gang activity. It had the potential to be a serious and illuminating piece of work. Unfortunately, as someone who wanted this to be the case, the report has proven a profound disappointment.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.

Which Andy Burnham walks into Westminster? The Blairite centrist? The European Remainer? The man cheered on by uber-liberal luvvies like Hugh Grant and Carol Vorderman? The Guardian’s coverage of the Makerfield by-election, and of its new great white liberal hope, has been saccharine sweet. It is probably just as well the people of Makerfield do not read it – I am not sure what they would make of the praise.

Will Burnham do what so many Labour MPs have done before: use working-class votes to get to Westminster and never look back? Or will he be true to his acceptance speech in the early hours of 20 June, when he promised Makerfield would not be a ‘stepping stone’ but a ‘touchstone’? His ‘Makerfield test’, he said, would mean fairness for the places Westminster has neglected.

During the by-election, Burnham carefully courted Makerfield – a large, predominantly white, working-class area on the edge of Greater Manchester. Its people work in supermarkets, care homes and warehouses. This is the Red Wall: old Labour country, hollowed out by the closure of coal mines, engineering works and textile factories. Makerfield represents the English working class left out of the national conversation about who and what this country is for.

I know places like Makerfield because I know Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, where I was born and raised. It has the same story: deindustrialised, struggling to get by, and overwhelmingly Leave-voting in 2016. Ashfield voted Labour because it was working class, until people realised Labour was no longer for them. Like so many Red Wall constituencies, they learned that the party used their votes to send its favourites to Westminster, only to ignore them as soon as they took their seats in parliament.

Ashfield stopped voting Labour in 2019, backing local man Lee Anderson, who moved from Labour to the Tories and then to Reform UK in 2024. It now has a Reform MP and Reform councillors, alongside some independents. The message is clear: Ashfield has left Labour behind. Just over a month ago, when Reform replaced every Labour member on the Wigan council, Makerfield looked to be heading the same way.

So what does the ‘Makerfield test’ actually mean inside a Labour Party now dominated by liberal, middle-class, wealthy voters, who would not give the people of Makerfield the steam off their piss? Can it survive when the interests of the deindustrialised Red Wall working class are so often the opposite of Labour’s new electoral base?

The British Electoral study says Labour’s voter core has shifted towards higher-income, middle-class and highly educated voters. Its study, analysed by The Economist, showed a profound political realignment: the old pattern of the working-class voting Labour and the middle-class voting Conservative has been turned on its head. Labour’s support has collapsed among voters whose household income is under £30,000.

This is not just about income or education. It is about priorities. If Burnham becomes prime minister – and it is all but certain he will – whose priorities will the Makerfield test serve?

On the cost of living, Burnham has room to manoeuvre. Most people agree housing is too expensive and food inflation needs tackling. But energy is different. Apply the Makerfield test to Ed Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry and the commonsense outlook of the deindustrialised working class would tell him that the promise of well-paid ‘green jobs’ is a fantasy. As it turns out, there are no ‘green jobs’ for the people who kept Britain’s lights on for generations – only crippling energy prices and creeping poverty.

Then there is the small-boats crisis. In Red Wall communities, illegal immigration represents a deep unfairness: more than 40,000 undocumented men have arrived so far this year, a figure that will inevitably explode over the summer months, when illegal immigration is at its highest. They will live off the taxpayer, while working people struggle to get by – no amount of middle-class Labour voters shouting ‘racist’ changes that. To these communities, it isn’t only unfair – it represents the visible loss of control, and the blatant disregard of the one wish they have expressed in election after election.

Burnham claims to have a story about Britain – who we are and who we can be. But if that story asks the Red Wall working class to swallow the priorities of the urban, city-dwelling middle class, then he isn’t selling a story, just another stitch-up.

The Makerfield test will not be passed by slogans, selfies and least of all applause from the Guardian. It will be passed only if Andy Burnham is prepared to choose the people who sent him to Westminster over the people waiting there to claim him.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.

There is usually a very singular and overarching explanation from much of the British establishment when working-class communities express anger over such issues as immigration, crime or economic decline: they must have been manipulated into thinking that way. And when, after years of not having their voices heard, this anger bubbles up into rioting – never a good idea, never to be encouraged, but often understandable in its sentiment – the same explanation comes out again.

We’ve seen this over the past month or so, just as we’ve seen it repeatedly in recent years. When residents protested outside migrant hotels last year – in places as disparate as Epping, Rotherham, Falkirk and Norwich – there was plenty of commentary looking to explain away their concerns as the product of far-right agitation. Few people, it seems, want to ask why ordinary people were turning up in the first place – or, at least, they might have been asking why, but they certainly didn’t seem prepared to hear the answers.

The recent unrest in Belfast – or the outright unconscionable violence in Belfast, to be fair – and demonstrations a few days before that in Southampton have been repeatedly viewed by the left through the same lens: as outbreaks of manipulation, misinformation or extremism.

This explanation often feels both suspiciously convenient and spectacularly patronising. It allows politicians and commentators to focus on who is supposedly influencing people, rather than on the grievances those people are expressing. The possibility that thousands of citizens might have arrived at similar views independently through their own experiences and observations – or, at least, that they might have parsed the media’s output and come to similar conclusions – seems to escape them. Or so they say.

Modern Britain is full of people who speak reverently about the importance of lived experience. We are constantly being told that people understand their own lives better than distant observers ever could. Fair enough, I suppose. Yet this principle seems not to apply when working-class people reach conclusions that the chattering classes dislike. Suddenly, lived experience becomes ignorance. First-hand observation becomes prejudice. Political disagreement becomes evidence of manipulation – a manipulation their own supporters would never fall prey to, to hear the Zack Polanskis of the world tell it. They are presumably too well-educated and / or virtuous for all of that. Some people are just better – you could see it as a modern Calvinism by the back door.

In this way, working-class members of the British electorate are treated more like patients than citizens, suffering from a condition that requires diagnosis and correction, both readily offered.

Of course, politicians, journalists and campaigners influence public opinion. They always have. So they should. Yes, Nigel Farage calling for ‘pure, cold rage’ after Henry Nowak’s murder trial would have been a red flag to many a bull. And yes, the political temperature has been climbing for some time now. But it is absurd to suggest that millions of people have arrived at similar conclusions purely because they have been whipped into a frenzy by demagogues.

They live in their communities, see things they don’t like, consistently vote against those things, and have their views ignored – just as they have been ignored for decades. So it doesn’t take much to mobilise them into the only action that will get them noticed.

People do not need a tabloid headline to tell them that their wages have stagnated, that they or their children cannot find jobs, that it’s taking two people’s full-time wages to fund a household that used to enjoy greater purchasing power on one. They do not need a populist politician to inform them that housing has become harder to access. They do not need a social-media influencer to notice that public services are under strain, that their town centre has deteriorated or that the character of their neighbourhood has changed dramatically over the course of a generation.

These are observations drawn from daily life. All the commentariat can do is gaslight them (as most are doing) or tell them that yes, they’re on to something (these are the ones usually accused of whipping people up, obviously).

Immigration provides perhaps the clearest example. It’s certainly the most tangible one at the moment – it’s in the air. For decades, opinion polls have consistently shown substantial public concern about immigration levels. Election after election, voters have backed parties promising tougher controls. In 2016, immigration was one of the central issues driving support for Brexit. Yet throughout this period immigration levels continued to rise to historically revolutionary levels – all across the country. Not since the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians argued over ancient Britannia have we seen such radical change.

People have noticed, and most people are unhappy about it – they just happen not to be the ones in power.

One need not oppose immigration to recognise the democratic significance of this fact. Millions of voters have repeatedly expressed a preference. Governments of various political colours have repeatedly failed to act upon it. To suggest that concern about immigration persists only because newspapers keep inflaming the issue is to ignore the obvious. People are concerned because they remain unconvinced that their views are being heard.

The same pattern applies to a host of other issues. Whether the subject is crime, anti-social behaviour, deindustrialisation or economic insecurity, ordinary people are often told that the problem lies not with the conditions they describe but with the information they consume. The diagnosis is always the same. The public is wrong. The public has been misled. The public requires re-education. This reveals a profound distrust of democracy itself.

In a healthy democracy – which, I am told, we used to be – citizens are free to reach conclusions disliked by their elected representatives. Disliked by anyone, really. They are free to hold and espouse views that academics, journalists and politicians consider mistaken or morally questionable. The answer is to listen to them and either argue the toss or (preferably) switch course, not to simply shout them down as stupid bigots.

Yet, increasingly, sections of the British commentariat appear unable to accept that voters may have arrived at their opinions honestly. They search endlessly for malign influences, foreign actors and populist agitators – of which, admittedly, there are and always have been plenty. But they are not scapegoats and their existence doesn’t delegitimise a whole body of people and their opinions.

There is a long tradition on the left of criticising the upper classes for assuming they know what is best for ordinary people. Yet much contemporary commentary reproduces exactly this attitude. It assumes that working-class voters are incapable of understanding their own interests and must therefore be guided towards the correct conclusions by enlightened professionals. It’s class prejudice of the worst kind, and it’s bloody hypocritical to boot.

James Dixon is a Glasgow-based novelist, poet and playwright.