Ramification | Why British society should reconsider the tenets of multiculturalism

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has been rattled by the accusations of turning a blind eye to the grooming gang scandal that has politically divided the United Kingdom. The issue, though not new, was again brought to centre stage when Elon Musk tweeted criticising the government’s lackadaisical approach towards accepting the problem, let alone prosecuting the ‘grooming gangs’ accused of these horrific acts. He tweeted about the Rotherham grooming scandal, adding, “So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this.” He later added, “Vote Reform. It’s the only hope.”

Previously, a Conservative Party demand was rejected to launch a national inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’ consisting of hundreds of men that have been sexually exploiting British girls for over two decades. This is despite a Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, in a town where over 1,400 children were subjected to rape and other emotional and physical abuse, mostly by Pakistani men, saying that she is convinced of the urgency of a national investigation. Even the Labour MP for Rochdale, Paul Waugh, and Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, have suggested the need for a fresh inquiry; unfortunately, it has fallen on deaf ears.

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Stories of victims such as “Anna”, from Bradford, are numbing to read. She had made multiple reports of rape and coercion, but when she was brainwashed enough to marry her abuser in an Islamic ceremony, the social worker assigned to her attended the wedding celebrations. She was 14.

Apart from Rotherham, there are many such stories from Rochdale, Telford, and many more towns across the UK. However, if 1,400 victim testimonies from Rotherham are not enough to convince British authorities and political stakeholders, then the chances are no inquiry nor any amount of media coverage is going to change the narrative that these are random one-off cases. The truth of the extent of these horrific acts on the most vulnerable segments of a “first world country” may never be known.

The only way to understand this reluctance in accepting the widespread abuse of children is the fact that the perpetrators mostly belong to one community. There is an unbridled fear of being labelled Islamophobic mired with commitment to multiculturalism at the cost of others’ lives and the utter fear of being labelled racist.

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Even the terminology used for abuse, rape, trafficking, and coercion of young white girls—“grooming”—tells us of a society that is willing to sacrifice itself to unburden itself from its colonial guilt. The term “grooming” under any guise does not indicate a horrific situation. One grooms themselves to adapt, do better, and improve; it would be quite incredulous to imagine using the word “groom” being attached to sexual abuse.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pakistan, was keen to quickly negate and shame any reference to “Pakistani grooming gangs”. They immediately labelled any criticism as “Islamophobia” further stating that “many British Pakistanis hold high public office, and thousands serve their communities as members of parliament, mayors, councillors, and as members of local police and municipal services.”

While Pakistani men may hold high offices and positions of power in the United Kingdom, it holds no bearing on all the other men of Pakistani heritage involved in organised rape and crime. Yet, to obfuscate the truth while not acceptable is expected from the Pakistan government, and Islamophobia is the easiest whip of deterrence to the white man whose back is broken by the weight of his own idealism. What else can explain British authorities being complicit in this abhorrent scandal? It was Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch who told GB News that “the most shocking thing was how they (the victims) had gone to the authorities and multiple times to the police. In one particular case, the police actually handed a 12-year-old into the hands of abusers”.

Perhaps the fear of ethnic framing and the love of the “idea of liberalism” are rooted in European obsession with Islam. Europeans toyed with Wahhabism—the source of the extremist ideology of terror groups such as ISIS. It was none other than Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman who blamed the Western allies for pushing Saudi Arabia to invest in mosques and madrasas overseas in order to prevent Moscow from making a play for Muslim countries. But as it stands today, without the strength of a religion, against the zeal of radical Islam, any anxieties that burden white women will continue to be gaslighted.

Professor David Coleman, a supernumerary fellow in human sciences and professor of demography at the University of Oxford, has stated that uncontrolled immigration, especially from the Islamic world, will lead to Finis Brittaniae, which means the end of Britain as we know it. Elaborating on his dystopian prediction, he stated, “There are strong currents in Muslim society that wish to see Muslim approaches to diet, to marriage and would like to see Sharia Law incorporated formally into British Law or, in respect to some extremist groups, would like to see Sharia Law replace British Law.”

The British in the post-war period became somewhat confident that they had found the answer to a perfect multi-ethnic community. The combination of liberalism and multiculturalism. It was in 1968 that the Conservative British MP, Enoch Powell, gave a speech as a response to the proposed Race Relations Bill, which allowed unabated immigration through lax immigration policies. It became known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech because he quoted the following lines from Virgil’s Aeneid, “War, fierce war, I see: and the Tiber foaming with much blood.”

Powell said, “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time, the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.”

This speech ended Powell’s career. But his premonitory words should haunt all those who turned their faces away from grooming gang victims, who unashamedly indulged in dereliction of their duty not just in terms of their jobs but as decent human beings.

Multiculturalism indicates all stakeholders believing in the values of liberalism, but to expect multiculturalism to thrive while the commitment remains lopsided and therefore incumbent on the majority defies the idea in itself. Instead of using euphemisms like “grooming”, it might be time for not just Keir Starmer but also British society to deliberate on the boundaries of multiculturalism.

Rami Niranjan Desai is an anthropologist and a scholar of the northeast region of India. She is a columnist and author and presently Distinguished Fellow at India Foundation, New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.