Refreshing honesty from Kishwer Falkner, Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in today's Sunday Times – I’m afraid there is a Pakistani problem, and we must root it out:
For two weeks the government said no to calls for a public inquiry into the grooming scandal. Now it is trying to deflect criticism by setting out its “next steps”. They are not enough.
What Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is promising is better data, a limited general audit (the multitasked Baroness Casey of Blackstock has been asked to defer her social care review to prioritise this), five local inquiries (out of a possible 50), a review of “cold” cases plus a few other technical measures. All this, she tells us, will uncover the truth and provide justice where things have gone wrong.
Truth, Cooper implies, has been in short supply in the past two decades while children have been raped and abused, and “despite all the inquiries, no one listened and nothing was done”. She doesn’t seem very curious as to why, which is what a wider statutory inquiry should try to answer.
Maybe she would be more curious if she experienced my deep shame every time the “Asian” grooming scandals are mentioned. I’m a first-generation female migrant from Pakistan who naturalised as a British citizen. I’m a secular Muslim and I’ve grown up, lived and worked in Muslim-majority countries, so I am well versed in the cultural and religious mores of those countries.
It is obvious that there are regressive attitudes towards women, especially non-Muslim white girls, in parts of the south Asian diaspora in the UK. But why does it appear that Pakistanis, or a subset of Pakistani men, are so overrepresented in the gang rape outrages? Is it the clash between the respectability demanded by their community and the temptations of the night-time economy in a sexualised western culture? What about the role of sometimes dysfunctional marriages with spouses from Pakistan, still accounting for half of all male Pakistani marriages? Or the baradari clan system that encourages a closing of ranks? …
We need an understanding of the cultural patterns, as Cooper concedes, not to demonise a whole community but to hold the pathology of a subset up to the light and ensure it never happens again. It would also provide the platform for a proper repudiation of the crimes by the Pakistani community itself. For a community so concerned about “honour” and “shame”, it is dismaying to note that there does not seem to have been a loud, community-wide disavowal of these crimes, nor a shunning of those released from prison (some far too early).
And what of the collective failure of the public authorities? The anti-white racism shown towards the victims was mirrored by a kind of hands-off racism shown towards the offenders: “That’s what they do, don’t they? Everyone knows about it, so there’s nothing to see here.”
The “warped ideas of community relations”, as the prime minister describes it, the acceptance of parallel lives and community self-policing and the acquiescence in the weaponisation of racism and victimhood — that too is a cultural pathology, a bastard child of well-meaning anti-racism, that needs to be held up to the light and banished from our institutions.
Liberal, multiethnic societies are a permanent balancing act between accommodating difference and embracing common norms. What to do when some groups become too inward-looking and stray too far from the common norms? This too is, at least indirectly, unavoidable territory for a statutory inquiry and something that Labour has not been afraid to tackle in the past. Gordon Brown tried to define British values, Tony Blair looked at social cohesion through the lens of Muslim extremism and both brought weight to the national conversation. Labour needs to rediscover that burning concern for national integration even at the risk of further alienating its Muslim voter base.
One reason the government may struggle to do this is that it is trying to pass a legal definition of Islamophobia. Andrew Norfolk, the former Times reporter who uncovered many of the grooming crimes, points to accusations of Islamophobia often closing down proper investigation. Yet the preferred definition would further reinforce that obstacle to justice and is so catch-all that it is a blatant elevation of one religion for special protection over all others.
The new definition originated from a flawed report by parliamentarians in 2018, which I spoke against in the House of Lords. I explained that we already had legal protections against religious hatred, which adequately protected Muslims. The government needs to explain what the problem is that existing laws do not cover.
In a multiethnic country with little consent for the present high levels of immigration, the majority cannot live in fear of exposing minority wrongdoing. The grooming scandal and what it has revealed about the reflexes of public authorities provides the opportunity to shape a new national consensus about where to redraw that line between difference and common norms. We need to reimagine our goal of an open and diverse Britain, one that expects all of us to live well together, even if that involves giving up part of our previous lives. Mirpur has no place in Manchester.
Thank goodness for Kishwer Falkner. She's already faced off a campaign to oust her for standing up to the trans activists.
There is, surely, a straight line from the dress of many Muslim women here in the UK – wearing not only the hijab, but often enough a niqab face veil with a slit for the eyes – to the rape gang scandal. It's the same mentality that has women not fully covered as like meat left out for cats: irresistible to men. It's the women who are responsible for rape, not the men. The men can't be blamed for following their "natural" inclinations. As we know only too well, this is commonplace throughout the Islamic world, from Iran to the scarcely credible anti-women dictates of the Taliban in Afghanistan. So white girls walking around freely, in a liberalised Britain, are like meat left out for the cats: just asking for it.
We assumed, reasonably I suppose, that with assimilation this would improve. But the Muslim Pakistani immigrants, especially in the smaller northern and midlands towns and cities, tended not to mix. They weren't interested in assimilation. Even here in London the sight of women in veils is still common – and not just older women. Quite a few younger more stylish Muslim women wear the niqab. Only their husbands at home – their guardians – are allowed to see their faces. And we, out of politeness, out of "respect" for other cultures, don't say anything.
Still, with brave outspoken women like Kishwer Falkner, there's hope.
Mick Hartley 