Trevor Phillips on his Sky News political talk show (screenshot)
Award-winning broadcaster, writer, and former politician Sir Trevor Phillips has slammed the government for collapsing the National Inquiry into the Muslim grooming gangs scandal, saying that the predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs have targeted “tens of thousands” of White children across Britain, describing the abuse as “industrial” in scale and protected by political fear.
Speaking to Times Radio, Phillips said the stalled grooming gangs inquiry has been hindered by authorities’ reluctance to confront the link between race and sexual predation.
Watch Trevor Phillips speaking on X
While immigrants / asylum seekers and sex crime are inexorably linked the groming gangs are something different. “What’s coming together here is a really horrid combination that nobody really ever wants to talk about — the intersection of race and sexual predation,” he said. “Let’s be honest, a lot of this is bringing those two things together in an unpleasant way,” he said.
Drawing on decades of experience reporting on child abuse, he added that the victims were deliberately chosen “because they are White and because they are outside the community of the groomers.”
Phillips, who won a Royal Television Society award for a 1988 documentary on pedophiles, said the form of abuse perpetrated by the gangs stood apart due to its vast scale and the complicity of public institutions including the police. “These people [Pakistani Muslims] know that they are protected,” he said. “They’re protected politically, by social workers, by local police, because everybody says we don’t want to ramp up inter racial tensions in the community.”
Sir Trevor, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said Labour’s response to the grooming gangs scandal was “utterly shameful” because it was “so obviously political” aiming at all costs to avoid offending a particular demographic of voters.
The broadcaster, who has previously sought selection as a Labour candidate for London mayor, said the move risked providing an “open goal” to Right-wing critics of the party’s policies on immigration. The grooming gang scandal is not the only instance of crimes, mostly of a violent or sexual nature which are undeniably linked to mass immigration.
Phillips accused successive governments and local Labour councils of failing to act for fear of inflaming community tensions. “The government clearly never wanted these two things to be put together,” he said. “Much of this took place in areas run by local Labour councils, and the authorities who ought to be watching over this — stopping it, monitoring it — did nothing.”
He said that, unlike other forms of child abuse, these crimes were not hidden. “The difference with this grooming gangs thing is that everybody knows. It happens in public. The girls are first attracted by young men from within those communities — flash cars, cigarettes, drugs — and then they’re passed around amongst older men,” Phillips said.
Drawing on decades of reporting on child abuse, he added that the victims were deliberately chosen “because they are White and because they are outside the community of the groomers.”
The remarks come as the government’s stalled inquiry into grooming gangs faces criticism for being too limited in scope. The investigation follows revelations such as the 2014 Jay Report, which found that more than 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, often by groups of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage.
Similar networks were later uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, and dozens of other towns, primarily across England.
It is well known that these crimes were brought to public notice by ex - police detective Maggie Oliver while Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions, but the justics department chose not to act against the criminals 'to avoid raising inter - racial tensions'.
Phillips warned against attempts to downplay the racial and cultural dimensions of the scandal, calling it “completely different” from other forms of child exploitation. “This could not be more different,” he said. “That’s the scandal here.”
In recent months, the government’s inquiry into grooming gangs, which was only set up earlier this year after years of growing public pressure, has faced renewed controversy after several victims of the gangs' abuse resigned from its advisory panel, saying their voices were being ignored and that the investigation had become “toothless.” Former participants accused officials of narrowing the inquiry’s scope to avoid confronting the ethnic and religious factors of the abuse.
At a press conference with Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage on Monday, one rape gang survivor, Ellie Reynolds, told journalists, “It’s taken the media decades to recognize grooming gangs that are coming over and raping our children because they are White.”
In a joint letter addressed to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood last week, four survivors who resigned from the Victims and Survivors Liaison Panel said they had been “dismissed, silenced, and called liars” by government officials, including Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, whom they accused of publicly contradicting their accounts.
They said they would only consider rejoining the inquiry if the government minister responsible, also named Phillips, resigned, if survivors were consulted on the appointment of an independent chair, and if the inquiry’s focus remained strictly on grooming gangs and group-based child sexual exploitation.
It is beyond belief that Labour are even trying to defend their latest efforts to stall a National Inquiry into the Pakistani rape gangs. It is so obviously a crude and blatant attempt to protect the perpetrators and their own backs, at the expense of justice for thousands of young English girls - it is beyond contempt. It is yet more evidence that they are totally unfit to govern, and should hang their heads in shame.
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