Brexit pioneer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage launched a new initiative to ginger up the left-wing government’s faltering grooming gang inquiry on Monday. Speaking alongside a survivor who had walked away from the process, calling it corrupt and controlling, Mr Farage also touched upon Britain’s most multicultural city and the growing talk that the wall of silence around alleged child rape gangs in London could be on the verge of crashing down.
Speaking of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who critics say becomes tetchy and defensive when the notion of London grooming gangs is raised with him, Mr Farage remarked: “Yes, he’s been denying that there’s grooming going on in London. The police have been denying that there’s grooming going on in London. I can tell you that today, somebody that is in this room has spoken to social services in London, that has openly said there’s grooming gangs in London.”
The sheer scale of London’s nine-million population may make investigations more difficult, Farage noted, while expressing optimism that the truth will be revealed. He said: “And of course it’s more difficult to spot a particular type of grooming gang in central London than it is in Rotherham, just down to the sheer size of the city, the different communities that live in this city.
“Yes, maybe — [former police detective and grooming gang whistle-blower] Maggie Oliver made this point — maybe London is the last great grooming scandal to be uncovered, and it looks like we’re very, very close to that.”
While London’s unusual status as the odd-one-out of England’s post-mass-migration impacted cities not to have had a “Pakistani grooming gangs” scandal has long been discussed and the subject of rumours, attention has intensified in recent weeks. Claims of a cover-up have been made this month, and now The Times of London, the national newspaper of record, which became the first mainstream media outlet to lift the lid on child rape grooming gangs in 2011, has splashed on the London mystery.
In a major article this week, the establishment-coded paper cited a former Metropolitan Police vice squad detective, Jon Wedger, now in retirement freelancing as an investigator, who is trying to get to the bottom of group child prostitution cases he claims to have been told to drop by his superiors 20 years ago.
Wedger is something of a critic of the London Mayor and was cited as noting Khan’s apparent habit of retreating to word games and obfuscation when confronted on the issue, as he has been previously by politicians, including Conservative London Assembly leader Susan Hall and former UKIP Assembly Member David Kurten. Wedger is reported to have said: “Sadiq Khan is making a mockery out of semantics, when the real issue should be vulnerable kids at risk, at mortal risk… Instead, he is having this puerile argument on semantics.”
Susan Hall, one of those politicians who had questioned Khan on these issues, reflected: “Every time I asked I got the same stupid answer back — ‘We don’t have [grooming gangs], it’s county lines’ — and I thought, no, there is a difference… The truth is it has existed for years. It’s a cover-up. Why can’t they come out with the truth?”.
David Kurten, who also quizzed Khan and who later founded the Heritage Party, told Breitbart News of his time on the London Assembly: “When I asked Sadiq Khan about the existence of grooming gangs in London, he was dismissive and deflective; since then, five years have gone by with little to no action.”
The Times notes a spokesman for the mayor wished to emphasise that far from denying that grooming gangs operate in London — as his detractors state he’s said — Khan was merely attempting to assert that the way crime works in London is different to the rest of the country. Indeed, the paper pointed out that London’s Metropolitan Police have been very focused on another kind of child exploitation called ‘county lines’, where children are enslaved to become drug mules by gangs, and that viewing cases through the lens of this operation may have blinded them to other forms of exploitation going on.
Also cited by The Times is campaigner Chris Wild, a survivor of child sex abuse who came up through the care system, from which many of the children who are groomed into the rape gangs are initially recruited by the abusers. In adult life, Wild returned to run care homes and spoke out about the horrors of young girls snatched for sex he witnessed within the care system.
He told the paper that as recently as 2021, the police would simply turn a blind eye to cases of children being raped:
It’s not as bad as it is in Rotherham, it’s worse. We’ve got a problem in every area of London… [children’s homes he’d known] were losing 50 to 75 per cent of their children every single week to prostitution… One [home] had six kids, and lost five to prostitution every single week.
They were coming back dishevelled, having had drugs, [been] sold off to sex rings and raped by paedophiles. The police won’t get back to you for five or six days then they say, ‘Oh, she won’t give a statement’. If these girls were known to them, they’d say all sorts, ‘She’s the instigator’, ‘She’s promiscuous’.
Wild also made perhaps the most forthright criticism of Mayor Khan of any mainstream public figure yet, tacitly implying at least that the Mayor has ulterior motives for obfuscating the grooming gang issue. The Times report quotes him as saying: “Someone in his position could put an end to it tomorrow, but they just don’t want to upset people.”
Breitbart News previously reported that whistle-blower Wild had described the children’s home he was placed in aged 11 after his father died as “run by paedophiles”, which motivated him to campaign to protect children in what is called the care system. Previously speaking of the abuses going on in London, he said the grooming of children in the city is “more catastrophic” than the rest of the country and stated he had seen “children being groomed, children going missing, forced into county lines [drug gangs]” and forced into child prostitution.
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