Scarcely a day passes when I don’t receive a message from one of my American friends asking, “What the hell is going on over there?” By “over there,” of course, they mean “in the UK,” where I live.
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In recent weeks, I’ve been taking a lot of questions about the murder of Henry Nowak and the scandalous response by police, who handcuffed him and left him to bleed to death in the street because the man who had stabbed him—a Sikh called Vickrum Digwa—said he was the victim of a racist attack. That was a lie. A lie that the rest of Digwa’s family acquiesced in without a second thought. His brother phoned the police and told them “some white guy” had attacked his brother and knocked his turban off; his father, who was holding Nowak up when police arrived, told them he couldn’t stand on his own because he was drunk; before the police arrived, the mother had already taken the murder weapon, a ceremonial knife, and hid it in the family home.
The case is a perfect storm for Britain in 2026 and everything that’s wrong with it: demographic change as a result of mass immigration, the incommensurability of the “new Britons” with their host culture, and political correctness and “two-tier” policing that relegates native Brits to second-class citizens in their own country. I’ve written about the Nowak case in detail for American Greatness here.
More often than not, and again over the last couple of days, it’s the grooming gangs I’m asked about: organized gangs of South Asian Muslim men who target white British girls because they’re white and British and poor, subjecting them to horrifying abuse and sometimes even death. It’s been happening for decades—recorded instances of such behavior date to the arrival of the first Pakistanis in Britain, from the godforsaken Mirpur Valley, in the 1950s—and it’s still going on right now, as I type.
The sheer brutality, the scale of the abuse and the indifference of Britain’s elites, who’d rather pretend the abuse isn’t happening and indeed actively work to cover it up at the local and national level—“How can this be real?” my concerned Yankee friends ask.
It is real.
Two years ago, I wrote a piece for the Claremont Institute about the grooming gangs, with the aim of providing a sort of primer for an American audience. The occasion was a new government whitewash—sorry, report—about grooming gangs in the Northern town of Rochdale, near Manchester. The report was commissioned by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and focused on how Greater Manchester Police handled cases going right back to the early 2000s. It followed widespread outrage at a BBC documentary called The Betrayed Girls. The documentary featured testimony from victims and individuals involved with the police and social services and revealed wide-ranging failures by the police and child-protective services to take accusations seriously.
But the Rochdale report also dodged the foundational issue of race. The word “white” denoting race appeared in the 173-page report just twice, and one of those instances was a quotation from a newspaper that simply mentions the race of some victims. And the perpetrators themselves were referred to generically as “Asian . . . as if they might equally have been Theravada Buddhists from Thailand or Tengrists from Outer Mongolia and not all Muslim men from Pakistan,” I wrote. The victims just happened to be white; the perpetrators, “Asians.” A coincidence that kept repeating itself—again and again and again.
I called my piece “The Purpose of the System.” My conclusion, following the famous maxim of systems theorist Stafford Beer—“The purpose of a system is what it does”—was that the purpose of the British system (what might once have been called “the Establishment”) is to import foreign men to rape British children. Raped British children are the grease that keeps the parts of the mass-immigration machine moving.
It’s a bald, disconcerting thought that goes against everything we think we know about government and its duty to its own citizens. But if you look at what’s actually been happening, if you know what the system does, what else can you conclude?
The grooming gangs have been back in the public spotlight in a big way, largely thanks to the attention of the world’s richest man toward a British politician called Rupert Lowe, who was expelled from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and now leads his own almost entirely synonymous party, Restore Britain. Blink, and you’ll miss the difference. Lowe had raised the issue of the grooming gangs in Parliament while he was still a Reform MP, beginning in July 2024, but since his expulsion last year, he’s largely made the issue his own, which included launching a crowdfunded “public inquiry,” at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The results of that consultation have now been released as a 220-page report, little over a day before a crucial and bitterly fought by-election in Makerfield. Restore is fielding its first Parliamentary candidate there, against Nigel Farage, and many fear that clash could “split the vote” on the Right, leading to a victory for the left-wing Labour candidate Andy Burnham, mayor of Manchester. There’s an unfortunate irony here, since Burnham has, with good reason, been accused of covering up the grooming gangs himself, including the lukewarm Rochdale report I mentioned earlier. His ambitions don’t stop at Makerfield. If he’s elected, he’ll almost certainly launch a leadership challenge against the wildly unpopular Keir Starmer and could become prime minister. By the time this piece is published, the Makerfield result will be in.
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In the absence of the statutory powers possessed by a full public inquiry, which include the ability to compel witnesses to appear, Lowe should be commended for focusing on the testimony of some of the victims themselves who have never been allowed to speak. It makes for harrowing reading, and that’s saying something when we’ve already heard about a girl having her tongue nailed to a table; an aborted rape-baby being confiscated and “lost” by the police, and even a victim being murdered, then ground up and sold as kebab meat. Snippets of this new testimony are circulating widely on social media.
Amid the applause and righteous anger, there has also been significant criticism of the report, and not just from the usual suspects who want the issue to disappear. Sympathizers point to errors of formatting, consistency, and basic terminology that undermine the professionalism and accuracy of the report. Some say the report is sloppy and rushed because it was issued now as a matter of political expediency, in a bid to win more votes in the Makerfield by-election.
Apart from the unique testimony of the girls themselves, the report doesn’t add anything to what we already know about the grooming gangs. In fact, the report misses many of the more interesting leads about the grooming gangs that have been turned up recently or were left unexamined in earlier documents like the Rochdale report. This includes the relationship between grooming and other kinds of crime, especially drug trafficking via Pakistan. Across the Midlands and the North of England, Pakistani gangs control large segments of a drug trade worth billions of pounds. A constant refrain in testimony is that white British girls were exchanged among Pakistani men to settle drug debts, and they were also often hooked on drugs and even, in the case of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, killed with a lethal dose of heroin. Girls were moved between safe houses and in vehicles that were used to transport drugs. As early as 1981, a white girl from Manchester and a Pakistani student were arrested at Islamabad airport on drug charges. The girl claimed she’d been lured into a “love trap” and forced to become a heroin drug mule by her “boyfriend.” This is just one specific example, but my hunch is that grooming is part of a broader nexus of crime that’s organized along extended kinship lines, just like the Italian mafia in America.
This is something that’s also totally missed by the report’s focus on Islam as the main driving force behind the grooming: Pakistani Muslim men raping white British girls because they aren’t Muslim. In many cases, the Muslim identity of the men appears to be incidental to the grooming, and the kinship networks like the Kashmiri birādarī system that structure it predate conversion to Islam by centuries. Yes, some groomers do refer to the girls as kuffār—non-believers—and the justification is that of the wretched Quran verse “What the right hand possesses,” which says Muslim men can take sex slaves from among kuffar women, but it seems to be kinship, rather than religion, that gives these crimes their systematic and persistent character. Ultimately, though, this remains to be explored properly.
My great fear, and the fear of others like Adam Wren who have done patient, courageous work on the grooming gangs, is that some of the evidence presented as factual within Lowe’s report could do more harm than good. In particular, the claim that there are at least 250,000 victims, which the report states is a “conservative estimate” for the total number of victims. This number, which dates back to at least 2019, is now doing the rounds on X and has been reposted by Elon Musk. The number was first produced by Lord Rannoch in the House of Lords. He reached that figure by extrapolating from the estimate of 1,400 victims in Rotherham to form a national estimate. There are at least two problems here. First of all, the report that produced that figure of 1,400 victims was focused on all forms of “child sexual exploitation” and not just grooming gangs—and it was an estimate. Second, Rotherham is not a typical town and may very well be the worst of all, a ground zero of grooming. Pakistani settlement also varies significantly by region. The North of England and the Midlands are not the same as other regions like the Southwest.
Even larger estimates have been suggested. In 2015, Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, said she believed there could be up to a million victims of grooming gangs nationwide. There are roughly 22.5 million white British women in the UK.
In no way do I want to minimize the scale of the abuse. I said two years ago that I believe it’s in the “many tens of thousands,” and it could conceivably be hundreds of thousands. But that remains to be proved—and I think it can be proved, or at least we can get a much more accurate sense of the scale of abuse from a properly constituted investigation with full legal powers and the political will to leave no stone unturned. The danger is a pragmatic one. It’s taken decades for it to be possible to talk about the grooming gangs without being dismissed as a far-right conspiracy theorist or a jackbooted thug or, indeed, a white-trash “piece of meat” who was “asking for it” if you were one of the unfortunate victims. The appearance of Rupert Lowe’s report, funded by an increasingly furious British public, is a clear sign the landscape of acceptable discourse has shifted and will continue to.
So why give your opponents such an easy way to pick apart your claims and do what they’ve always done, which is pretending the problem is either vastly inflated or doesn’t exist?
You only need to look at some of the more retarded sections of the online Right in Britain to see that danger manifesting itself in real time. Some are seizing on the figure of 250,000 as evidence of “our Holocaust,” a foundational atrocity that can be used as justification for removing every single person of foreign origin or ancestry from the UK when the time comes. If anything, I’ve seen one person say the figures should be inflated to the most monstrous proportions imaginable so that anything can be excused in the name of saving Britain.
I don’t know what to say.
Actually, I do. The grooming gangs are a unique evil in the history of my beautiful, proud nation, which has achieved so much and still could. The incomprehension of my American friends is not misplaced. This is a stain on the national character that will require exceptional measures to wipe clean. But shoddy numbers, let alone fabrications, will not do. Those poor girls have suffered enough untruth already.
