The British Parliament should convene a special court within its own walls for a “laser focus” to discover the deep truth behind “one of the most shameful stories in the history of our islands”, the “Pakistani grooming gangs”, says Nigel Farage.
The long-hope-for inquiry into the industrial-scale grooming and rape of children across the United Kingdom is already on the verge of collapse, with a survivor telling the public on Monday that from the inside it is obviously “corrupt” and designed to fail. Responding to this emerging situation, Nigel Farage has called on the national Parliament to take up the mantle and establish a commission, becoming a court in its own right, to “discover under oath the truth”.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday afternoon alongside grooming gang survivor Ellie Reynolds, Mr Farage spoke of the longstanding child rape gang scandal in some of the most robust language heard from a mainstream British political leader yet.
Mr Farage decried the “abject cowardice and wilful and deliberate neglect” by all levels of government from social workers, through the police and local government, all the way up to central government, that had for years allowed the “Pakistani grooming gangs” to operate. He stated for avoidance of doubt about the decades of attacks on mainly working class white girls: “there is a huge racial and ethnic dimension to it, a very large part of these crimes could be attributed to racism in its absolutely worst possible form”.
This is a shame on Britain that the rest of the world looks upon with uncomprehending horror, he said, stating that the “mass, industrial, racially motivated, sexual assault and rape, on a scale that even now we’re struggling to even believe” is “one of the worst things that has ever happened.”
Noting that one of the ways the official inquiry — that the UK’s Labour government very clearly did not want to call, but was eventually forced into by intense domestic and international attention — has been apparently designed to fail is by widening its scope too far, Mr Farage called for “laser focus”.
Revealing her perspective as a grooming gang victim and survivor who had joined the inquiry but later walked away after realising it was “absolutely rigged”, Ellie Reynolds shared Farage’s podium and vowed not to be silenced.
“The way we were spoken to was very degrading. It was very controlling”, Reynolds said, describing the government’s inquiry as “it was a very controlling atmosphere, very gaslighty, very manipulative”.
Widening the scope of the inquiry beyond the core purpose was deliberately done, she said, so the government could avoid the difficult conversation over race. But she said she, and the other women who walked away from it, wouldn’t be silenced to maintain the comfort of the “higher ups”.
Describing how the whole process was under a cloud of secrecy and tightly controlled, Reynolds described: “we were told what to ask, when to ask it. It was all very controlled… to top it all off we had Jess Philips calling us liars in the House of Commons… to be called a liar by somebody so high up, we’re used to it now. We’ve been called it all our lives. It’s so awful… I will speak and I will raise awareness and I will say what’s corrupt. And that inquiry, that was corrupt.”
Observing the failure of the inquiry, Mr Farage said he would be approaching the speaker of the House of Commons to establish a commission in Parliament itself, so an investigation into who in government had failed the victims could proceed at the highest level, with legal powers, and at pace.
This is necessary, he said, because as presently constituted the official inquiry will take so long to report its findings won’t be known until well after the next general election, an exercise in what he called can-kicking. Calling a Parliamentary commission “better, quicker, more open and more transparent “, Mr Farage explained:
I don’t think we realise just how much power Parliament has if it chooses to use it. Select committees have the power to summon anybody. They can summon a former social worker, they can summon a former police officer, they can summon a former councillor. They can summon a former Member of Parliament. And I find it hard to believe that MPs in all of these constituencies would not have had emails or letters or pointers as to what was going on…
…Parliament also has the ability to sanction those if anybody refuses to appear. It also has the power to require that people swear an oath, and the important thing about swearing an oath is that if what you say under that forum is deliberately misleading or untrue, then of course you can face prosecution for perjury. These are the extraordinary powers that Parliament has if it choses to use it…
…it can be done incredibly quickly… it will take place in what we still know as the mother of Parliaments… and it will happen in the full glare of media and it won’t take years to conclude. It will take many weeks, it could take months, but so be it. And it will have the power to put in the Palace of Westminster those who are suspected in colluding in the coverup in one of the most shameful stories in the history of our islands.
Amid the discussions of the specifics of how to successfully discover the truth on the grooming gang coverup, Monday’s press conference was also host to an extraordinary moment when survivor Reynolds spoke out against legacy media attitudes. At a questions and answers session after the set speeches, journalists had an opportunity to ask Reynolds and Farage about their plans, but most instead chose to ask about other political stories, including about comments by a Reform Member of Parliament about racial balance on television over the weekend.
Expressing her frustration at the speed with which journalists piled onto a white female Member of Parliament for those comments while showing extreme reticence on the mass rape of young white girls by “Pakistani grooming gangs”, Reynolds said she found it “overwhelming”.
The survivor told the press present that while “every single one of these [media outlets]” had questions on remarks on live radio about race, “yet it has taken media decades to recognise grooming gangs that are coming over and raping our children because they’re white. That is also racially motivated and it is racist”.
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