A former MP has claimed that he was told by top Labour Party officials not to raise the issue of “ethnicity or religion” of grooming gang child rapists in his constituency over concerns of losing votes.
Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who represented the grooming hotspot city of Rochdale from 2010 until 2017, told GB News this week that he was “warned off by a couple of significant members of the Labour Party” not to mention the ethnic or religious backgrounds of the mostly Pakistani Muslim child rape gangs which operated in the northern English town after the scandal emerged in 2012.
“The most senior figure at the time was Tony Lloyd, who was chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and I wrote to the National Inquiry in 2017 saying that he’d warned me off it and he was concerned about votes,” Danczuk said.
“They thought it would upset the voting of Pakistani communities and they didn’t want to lose the vote, it was quite clear about that,” he added.
Sir Tony Lloyd was one of the longest serving Parliamentarians, representing three Manchester constituencies including Rochdale, the same seat Danczuk had held. He had also held other positions including being the Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester from 2012 to 2017 and at the time of his death in 2024 was memorialised as “Labour’s Conscience”.
Danczuk said that, nevertheless, he was undeterred in saying that “ethnicity and religion were a key factor in the abuse.”
“The perpetrators had a very low opinion of the victims because they were Christian, because they were white, because they were working class, and they used that as an opportunity to to groom them and to rape them,” Danczuk said.
The ex-parliamentarian went on to claim that the “cover-ups” from local officials, police, and social services had “emboldened” the grooming gangs to “continue to commit these types of crimes, there’s no doubt about that.”
The claims from the former Rochdale MP come in the wake of a review on grooming gangs from Baroness Casey, which found that rather than examining the role of ethnicity or cultural factors involved in grooming gang activity many officials avoided the topic “for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems.”
In an interview following the release of her review, Casey said that in the file of a child victim, the word “Pakistani” had been manually blotted out.
The review sparked a major u-turn from Prime Minsiter Sir Keir Starmer, who had previously shot down conducting a national inquiry on the scandal and had accused those demanding a full investigation of jumping on the “bandwagon of the far-right”.
The decision to conduct a national inquiry may put members of his own party in the crosshairs, given that many of the most prominent grooming gangs operated in Labour Party-controlled areas of the country. Some have even questioned Starmer’s role, in light of the fact that he served at the helm of the Crown Prosecution Service when many of the allegations of widespread abuse and politically correct cover-ups began to emerge.
Allegations that local officials and police had failed to safeguard often young working-class white girls from Pakistani and other South Asian grooming gangs for fear of appearing racist have long been detailed in previous local reports.
Indeed, a 2020 report from the Greater Manchester Police found that officers were told to focus on “other ethnicities” while a gang of around 100 groomers were left free to sexually exploit and abuse young girls in Rotherham. An officer was recorded as telling the father of a missing girl that the town would “erupt” if the public found out that young white girls were being preyed upon by Muslim men.
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