More than 20 years ago, I watched the filming of a documentary that followed the work of Bradford Social Services.
Titled Edge Of The City, it was the first major TV report to graphically depict the scandal of the systematic grooming of young white girls by predominantly Asian men.
But ahead of its broadcast, the film was subject to a barrage of abuse, lobbying and allegations of racism.
Channel 4 axed the programme at short notice – only to screen it four months later.
Yet the fact is that every allegation in the documentary has since been vindicated – even though the liberal Left and Sir Keir Starmer still paint those who seek to spotlight this heinous issue as being ‘far-Right’ with a racist agenda.
Only a fraction of those abusers have been prosecuted, though that is still more than the number of people in positions of authority who have been held to account for failing to stop it.
How many lives could have been saved from ruin, suicide, rape and trauma had the first reports of this horrendous scandal been accepted as an awful truth that had to be tackled, rather than smeared as propaganda for the then British National Party (BNP)?
I have spent a lifetime being attacked, threatened and had to live in safe houses because of death threats after working undercover targeting far-Right extremists. I am no advocate for those on that end of the political spectrum, but this story must be told.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) during a visit to the City of London Police station) responded to questions over grooming gangs by warning against ‘amplifying the far right’
In 2019 nine men were jailed for abusing two teenage girls who were living in a children’s home, Bradford Crown Court heard (From top left, clockwise) Basharat Khaliq, Saeed Akhtar, Naveed Akhtar, Parvaze Ahmed, Zeeshan Ali, Fahim Iqbal, Izar Hussain, Mohammed Usman and Kieran Harris)
In early 2004, concerns over grooming gangs in Bradford and Keighley were highlighted by local BNP members who saw the issue as a lightning rod for white working-class dissent ahead of local elections. Meanwhile, the subject was not raised by social services chiefs or West Yorkshire Police.
A year earlier, a team of film-makers had secured access to Bradford Social Services and had been commissioned by Channel 4 to produce a fly-on-the-wall series.
The production team told me that one part of the film, about two teenage girls who had been groomed, was considered so combustible that it nearly didn’t make ‘the cut’ because social workers anticipated a public backlash.
When the storyline was trailed in publicity for the film – due for broadcast in May 2004 – the BNP drew attention to the content and treated the programme as its equivalent of a party political broadcast.
Predictably, Channel 4 was lobbied by interest groups, accused of providing ammunition to racists and of handing the far-Right a propaganda coup ahead of the local elections. Its programme became dubbed the ‘BNP Sex Row Film’.
For its part, West Yorkshire Police warned that the programme would ‘increase community tensions… and lead to public disorder’. Channel 4 duly pulled the documentary.
When the election was over, it was considered less inflammatory to broadcast Edge Of The City and it was screened in August. In view of what happened, it’s no wonder that other broadcasters were reluctant to cover the issue in the following years.
The Daily Mail’s Sue Reid was laudably the first British newspaper journalist to write about the scandal, with her breakthrough report in August 2010 headlined: ‘Predatory gangs, middle-class girls forced into the sex trade and a very troubling taboo’.
And the BBC eventually gave the issue a poignant airing in 2017 with Three Girls, a three-part drama about the Rochdale child sex abuse ring.
Without doubt, political correctness has caused these terrible crimes to go unchecked for far too long, and dropping the Channel 4 documentary set back the war against rape gangs by at least ten years, severely impacting the lives of thousands of victims.
This is why the facts must be allowed to speak for themselves – and why we need a proper examination of this decades-long outrage in the form of a national inquiry. For if we cannot understand how such a scandal was allowed to fester in plain sight of the police, social services and politicians, we cannot stop other tragedies unfolding in the same manner.
There is nothing ‘far-Right’ in seeking this truth, and society must not be cowed by those who wish to deflect legitimate horror about rape gangs by using token insult and denigration.
For more than 20 years, countless children have been let down, despite the chance being available in 2004 for justice to be done on their behalf.
Today, we must not be fooled again by the same tactics still being used by those who want to suppress debate of the problem.