A GB News investigation has found Britain’s grooming gangs were overwhelmingly represented in areas where Labour holds big majorities.
The bombshell revelation comes as the party voted down a proposed national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal on Wednesday.
Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch tabled the amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill earlier in the day, calling for a full inquiry into the raping and trafficking of young white girls in towns and cities by predominantly Pakistani Muslim men.
The demand for a national inquiry had grown louder in recent days, driven in part by X owner Elon Musk, who has shone a light on the injustice.
Politicians have faced mounting criticism for not pursuing further inquiries after previous investigations, including the 2022 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, were slammed as inadequate.
Our national reporter, Charlie Peters has heavily criticised the IICSA report, noting that it did not widen its focus to the national prevalence of grooming gangs, focusing instead on six case study areas where there were no significant reports of grooming gangs.
Labour voted down a proposed national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal on Wednesday
GB News
Grooming gangs were “lumped” in with other abuse networks, while other subjects like online abuse, the Catholic Church, and care homes got their own investigation, Peters says.
Indeed, none of the Northern towns, which have featured prominently in the scandal, were chosen.
The only place the IICSA report looked at which had a grooming gangs scandal was Bristol, where girls were targeted by a Somali abuse and rape network over many years.
Peters sought to redress this imbalance, sifting through court records and local media reports and gathering first-hand accounts from several victims.
His analysis shows that Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford are the tip of the iceberg, with grooming gangs operating in more than 50 towns and cities across Britain.
GB News has now investigated how many of these scandals occurred in Labour-held seats.
The pattern was consistent: grooming gangs were overwhelmingly represented in areas with Labour majorities.
Take the big three areas: Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford. Official reports suggest these areas are home to more than 2,500 child victims collectively (although the real number is likely to be far higher due to unreported cases or those identified after the most recent reports).
Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford are all held by Labour, with majority votes of 2,345, 10,789 and 8,456, respectively.
How about Oldham? It has been at the centre of the grooming gang scandal after it emerged that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips rejected a Government-led inquiry into child victim abuses in the area.
Labour holds a clear majority of 14,321 votes in Oldham.
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In the safe Labour seat of Huddersfield, 20 men, mainly of Pakistani origin, were convicted of over 120 offences
National Crime Agency
Or how about the Labour stronghold Huddersfield? The constituency is home to some of the worst grooming gang scandals to date.
In 2018, 20 men, mainly of Pakistani origin but with the ringleader being Sikh, were convicted of over 120 offences, including rape and sexual abuse, in three separate trials in 2018.
By August 2021, the total number of perpetrators convicted in this series of cases jumped to 41.
Other Labour seats rocked by grooming gang scandals include:
In contrast, we identified only a handful of Conservative seats where grooming gangs operated. Most notably, Banbury, a safe Tory seat that flipped to Labour for the first time in the last General Election.
In 2015, a group of six men, including five men and one teenager, were convicted of a string of sexual offences against underage girls in this Oxfordshire town.
A serious case review that same year by the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board suggested that as many as 373 children could have been targeted for sex over 16 years, including 50 boys.
Additional cases related to historic sexual abuse were brought in 2013.
In the safe Tory seat of Chelmsford, three men were sentenced to 29.5 years for exploiting a young girl for sex in return for drugs in 2017.
Speaking to GB News after the vote, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accused Labour of being “out of touch” and in “total denial” over the public interest in an inquiry, adding: “This is the biggest conversation that is going on in family homes, in pubs, in clubs all over the country. People are outraged.
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