Things Don’t Add Up

Following on from yesterday’s post, Britain First turned up at mosques in Rotherham: presumably as part of what they call Operation Downes: to hand out leaflets.

It seems that Operation Downes has been in effect for a week or so, and the nocturnal visit by Paul Golding (lately resident at her majesty’s pleasure) (and Gandhi wannabe) sparked local MP Sarah Champion to issue her alarmist tweet. And indeed the next day she was on twitter again telling them to stay away.

In the meantime a meeting was held at the Town Hall to discuss the “safety” of the Muslim community. With the local radio on hand to cover it. And the Rotherham Advertiser also has a story of these “alarming reports.”

Apparently Mr Golding did a similar thing in Rochdale some days before, so it is perhaps useful to see what the reaction of Rochdale MP Tom Lloyd was… ummm… nothing.

Oh, and Julie Bindel, wants it to be known that she was the first to report on grooming gangs. For too long a man! Andrew Norfolk has taken the credit. So you’ve been told….

Not that I am suggesting a link between Ms Bindel and Mr Golding…. though I have noticed people trying to make a link between Mr Golding and Ella Hill….

Ella Hill has written a number of pieces for the Independent (if indeed it is her) about her experience at the hands of a grooming gang. But, in light of the research by Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, ‘Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, there are those who smell a rat: and a racist rat at that.

Ms Cockbain, of the Jill Dando Institute (yeah I laughed too), and Mr Tufail, of Leeds Beckett university have made rather a name for themselves in certain circles. And given that both have written for the Guardian; in 2012 Ms Cockbain wrote, “The truth about ‘Asian sex gangs’”, and in 2017 Mr Tufail wrote, “Prevent scheme ‘fosters fear and censorship at universities’”; a fair minded person might be forgiven, particularly in light of the title of their much cited opus, of questioning if… just if… they might have an agenda.

The observant among you will have noticed Ms Cockbain’s name before. For it was she who stepped in to support Lily Allen, when Ms Allen dismissed the 84% figure produced by Quillium.

But let’s see how Elaine Graham-Leigh (a name created with fridge magnets) decides to use the oft quoted Ms Cockbain’s work, in her piece for Counterfire, ‘The far right, grooming gangs and racist lies’…

“ Contrary to the picture presented by The Times, the Quilliam Foundation and others, the vast majority of sex offenders in the UK are white men.”

Can you guess where this is going?

“ Combining the findings of two large-scale government studies, carried out as a result of concern about grooming, gives a breakdown (where the race of the perpetrators is recorded, which is for just under half of the instances in the studies) of 43% white men and 33% Asian. This 33% is still higher than the proportion of Asians in the general population of the UK (7%), but as Ella Cockbain comments in her analyses of these studies, this still doesn’t mean that Asian men are disproportionately likely to commit these crimes. At least one, and possibly both, of the government studies took data only from specific geographical areas. If these areas were those with higher than average Asian populations (as they may well have been, given the panic about grooming in specific northern towns), then the percentage of Asian men in the general population covered in the studies may well have been much higher than 7%. It is also possible that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was more likely to be recorded if they were Asian than if they were white.”

To describe this as desperate would be an understatement. Especially when you add this…

“ It is also important to recognise that grooming in this context is not an objectively-defined crime. Even the two government reports defined it differently; one looking at ‘localised grooming’ and the other at ‘child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups.’ This means that it can be, and there is some evidence that it is being, created as a crime associated with a specific racial background.”

Well doh!

Perhaps if Ms Graham-Leigh were to read the review of Operation Augusta, it specifically states that the inquiry was into ‘Asians’. The reason for this has nothing to do with them being ‘Asian’ per se, but because a fifteen year old girl had died… Victoria Agoglia… here is her picture… yes her… a real person…. after being injected with heroin.

And, as a result, the police discovered that other children were being abused (a pattern emerged), and they further discovered that the abuse appeared connected to takeaways and restaurants. And further it was noticed that this matched a pattern in other inquiries, in other towns, that suggested a specific pattern of activity.

That Ms Graham-Leigh chooses to get conspiratorial, “there is some evidence that it is being, created as a crime associated with a specific racial background,”… shows her for the ‘know nothing’ she either is… or pretends to be…. because in terms of the issues being discussed it is.

Oh, and, because of the cultural and racial sensitivities of this set of circumstances, and for various external and internal reasons: and because of the far right and the far left ugly sisters: the police found themselves hindered in pursuing their inquiries.

Quite why anyone pays the slightest bit of attention to Ella Cockbain is beyond me. She, for whatever reason, has been seeking to disprove since 2012 (if not before) that ‘Asians’ are less likely to be involved in ‘Asian’ grooming gangs than ‘whites’?!?. And she is still doing so in 2020, even after the Jay report and the Casey report…. and all the journalists, social workers, councils, police forces, MPs, et al who all say that they were scared to investigate, or were warned off reporting, for fear of being accused of RACISM.

Either all of these people are lying, or Ella Cockbain and her chums are obfuscating…

Is it just me… and it usually is… but when was the last time Hate Not Hope and the SWP organised a counter demonstration to oppose demonstrators demanding to know why the police were not investigating allegations that ‘white’ gangs were abusing kids?

Oh yeah never…

And forgive me… being a mere graduate of the Nick Owen School of Arctic Studies… but there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why stories of ‘Asian’ gangs make the news: and ‘white’ (yes other colours and ethnicities are available) (for those not wishing to stir up racial grievance) offenders don’t make the headlines.

It’s because for years people were told that it wasn’t happening. That they were racist to even suggest it was. Therefore when it was found to be true, and the authorities had been covering it up, it made the news.

It’s ‘man bites dog’…

And it will continue being ‘man bites dog’ if you keep buggering about with statistics, and claiming it’s really rare… nothing to see here….