| UPDATE at 9:30 a.m. EDT: The complicit beast, Kier Starmer, announced he will be stepping down. See here. | [IsraelTimes] Five hurt in series of assaults by armed man seen chasing an Asian man, trying to break into restaurant; Muslim groups blame ‘political rhetoric that demonizes entire communities’.
A quick internet search on the subject revealed an annoying lack of information on the progress of this story from yesterday, other than that some of the five injured were Moslem. Hopefully it is only because it was Sunday, and there will be more reported today. I have the impression, for instance, that the miscreant was somewhat under the influence of a great deal of whiskey, but that is not my area of expertise. To make this post worth the time of reading it, here is more about MP Lowe’s rape gang inquiry:
My Contributions to the Independent Rape Gang Inquiry
[ConnorTomlinsonSubstack] Evidence submissions for Rupert Lowe's Rape Gang Inquiry Report on the Biraderi clans, anti-white racism, and institutional capture responsible for the grooming gangs scandal.
The final report for Rupert Lowe’s independent crowdfunded Rape Gangs Inquiry has been published. You can read it here.
I participated in the Inquiry’s evidence-gathering process: spending an hour answering questions from presiding barrister Graham Smith and rape gang survivor Sammy Woodhouse about my reporting on the gangs, international Islamic smuggling networks targeting British women and girls, and the ideological capture of the Home Office by Islamic groups. (Given the latter is entrusted with supervising the Labour government’s series of forthcoming statutory local inquiries, as well as immigration and policing.)
I don’t know if the Inquiry team plans to release any more footage from the hearings, but if it becomes available, I will post it here in full.
I also supplied a 68-page report to assist the team. It provided an overview of some of the available data from previous inquiries, studies, and reports by organisations like the National Crime Agency. It also contained excerpts from trial reporting, statements from subject matter experts, and quotes from interviews with members of the Pakistani community, to provide insight into the motives of the abuse.
Some, like Open Justice campaigner Adam Wren, have made good-faith criticisms of the inquiry’s conclusions: questioning the projected figure of 250,000 victims, and contesting the emphasis placed on Islam as a motivator for the abuse rather than as a “social glue and vocabulary” shared by the perpetrators.
I would like to make clear that, in my contributions to the inquiry, clan morality, ethnic solidarity, and cousin marriage — all of which predate, and are consolidated by, Islam — featured heavily as an aggravating and explanatory factor in the abuse. I was not involved in writing, editing, or proofreading the final published report.
I have made my contributions and all the references available in the following post, in the hopes that others find it to be a useful resource. You can also download it as a PDF, if you find that easier to read.
The Rape Gangs Inquiry Witness Evidence Submission Connor Tomlinson
724KB ∙ PDF file
Download
While I hope my contributions helped the team form their conclusions, it appears much of what I submitted didn’t make it into the final report. That’s understandable, as the Inquiry wanted to focus on telling the story of survivors instead.
This submission is an incomplete record of all the previous available reporting on the rape gangs. I had limited preparation time, and prepared it in my own time, at my own expense, independent of the Inquiry team’s efforts. I have since done some more reporting on previous inquiries and the history of the rape gangs scandal, which is available here.
The opening paragraphs of the report: WEST YORKSHIRE CHILD SEXUAL GROOMING AND EXPLOITATION OFFENCES PERPETRATOR AND VICTIM DATA (2025)
• May 2025 – New data procured from West Yorkshire Police via Freedom of Information Access (FOI) request provided the ethnicity for victims and suspects of the 7,100 of 88A Sexual Grooming and child sexual exploitation offences, under Section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, recorded across its five districts: Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds, and Wakefield. These offences occurred between 1 January 2009 - 31 December 2024, and involved 7,121 victims and 5,508 named suspects.
Bradford district recorded the highest number of offences, at 2,419 — 34.1% of the total. Leeds followed with 1,601 (22.5%); Kirklees with 1,547 (21.8%); Wakefield with 803 (11.3%); and Calderdale with 730 (10.3%). 1,272 charges were filed, providing a 17.9% charge rate.
Asian Pakistani suspects were 21.48% (1,183) of all suspects, with a rate of 507.7 suspects per 100,000 people in West Yorkshire. Asian Bangladeshis had a lower rate, at 0.89% (49) of suspects, and a rate of 408.3 per 100,000. “Other” (Arab, Middle Eastern, Latin American, etc.) suspects were 0.96% (53) of
suspects, but had the highest per capita rate of the data set, at 530 suspects per 100,000. This is despite those identifying as Asian or Asian British making up only 16% of the population across West Yorkshire’s districts, and 10% of the overall population of England, according to 2021 Census data.
White British suspects were underrepresented at 44.54% (2,454) of suspects, despite being 74.4% of the population of England and Wales. (West Yorkshire authorities do not provide a breakdown of the total White population by ethnicity, save Bradford district, which was 56.7% White British as of the
2021 Census.) White British suspects also had the lowest per capita offending rate at 155.3 suspects per 100,000 people. Black African and Caribbean suspects were 1.83% (101) of all suspects, but had the third highest per capita offending rate of 459.1 per 100,000.
In total, non-White British suspects account for 55.46% of suspects, despite making up only 26% of the national population. This yields an offending-rate twice that per-capita than their White British counterparts. However, 6.4% suspects (355) had their ethnicity marked as “Not Stated”, and 13% suspects (715) as “Not Recorded”. This comprises almost a fifth of suspects. This takes the maximum total potential share of Asian offenders to 42.73% — a rate 2-to-4 times their share of the national population.
Among victims, White British account for 55.6% (3,960), making up the largest ethnic group in absolute terms. However, they are outnumbered on a per-capita basis (at 250.6 victims per 100,000) by Black African and Other Black victims, who comprised 0.88% (63) of victims, but had a per-capita rate of 1,260 per 100,000. Those of Mixed ethnic backgrounds comprised 1.75% (124) of victims, at a per-capita rate of 425.4 per 100,000. Despite being the largest ethnic group among perpetrators, Asian Pakistanis comprised only 2.96% (211) of victims, at a per capita rate of 90.6 per 100,000 people. The data indicates that the majority of these crimes occur across, rather than within, ethnic groups.
19.2% (1,366) of victims also had their ethnicity recorded as “Not Stated”, and 15.4% (1,095) as “Not Recorded”.1 This comprises a third of victims. Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development,Neil O’Brien MP and documented the proportion of child sexual abuse offences where the ethnicity of the perpetrator is not recorded has increased from 11.6% in 2010 to 28.7% in 2024, despite the age and sex of the perpetrator being recorded in the majority of cases.
• Pakistanis represent the second largest immigrant-origin ethnic group in Britain. More than 679,000 ethnic Pakistanis live in Britain, as of the last Census.
Another recent report on the same theme: Manchester Labour's Grooming Gang Connections
[PimlicoJournal] Burnham's Labour has long failed the victims of the Grooming Gangs
Sammy Woodhouse was fourteen years old when she says she was handed over to the police by the man who was abusing her. The scene, as later reported, is almost too farcical to put to paper. A child had gone missing from her home with Arshid Hussain, one of the men who would later become infamous as part of the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal. According to the allegations reported in court and by the press, Hussain was contacted and told to bring her back. He drove her to a petrol station where the police were waiting. Hussain knew there was an agreement that he would not be arrested.
This is the sort of episode that ought to have erupted into a national scandal inside any functioning public system. Instead, a child was handed over to police by way of a backroom deal with her abuser, on the condition of no arrest. All details were kept secret. There were no records. No institutional memory or bravery to force the truth into the open.
In the reporting of this story, one man’s name appears and reappears: Jahangir Akhtar. Akhtar was the former deputy leader of Rotherham Council, a local Labour power broker, community relations figure, and a distant relative of the Hussain family. The victim of this incident directly alleged that a town councillor — by the surname Akhtar — had also raped her. Another victim alleged it was this councillor who had been involved with the brokering of the no-prosecution deal.
Akhtar denied any wrongdoing. The police, in fact, said he had no case to answer. The official record did not establish that he committed a criminal offence. But what is certainly established when reading the record is that he was far from peripheral to Rotherham’s world.
By his own account, Akhtar entered public life through community tension. He approached his councillor, Nazir Ahmed — made a life peer in 1998 — and was encouraged to gather support to address community cohesion at a higher level. A brief word on Lord Ahmed is warranted. Ahmed is a rather curious character: a property developer and Labour councillor who has been involved in various charities, has connections to Sayeeda Warsi (the daughter of a close friend, and for whom he allegedly campaigned in Dewsbury in 2005, despite Warsi standing as a Conservative), has continually lobbied on behalf of Pakistan over Kashmir (as well as maintaining a more general involvement in Pakistani politics), and was convicted for dangerous driving in 2009 — a conviction which he blamed on ‘the Jews’ in an interview on Pakistani television in 2013, leading to his long overdue resignation from the Labour Party. But perhaps most pertinently of all, Ahmed was also convicted in 2022 of historic sex offences which took place between 1971 and 1974 when he was still a teenager living in Rotherham: two charges of attempted rape, and one charge of indecent assault. In 2020, a House of Lords committee also recommended Ahmed’s expulsion from the House of Lords after a separate complaint that he had sexually exploited a woman who had approached him in his capacity as a member of the House, though he resigned before he could be expelled.
Much has been said of the biraderi (or baraderi), clan dimension to South Asian local politics recently, and it is impossible to understand the political dynamics that led to the rise of figures like Ahmed and Akhtar without understanding biraderi. While this has become a more salient factor in political discourse by virtue of the breakaway of certain heavily Muslim constituencies to the so-called ‘Gaza Independents’ since 2024, in reality, it has been a known and relevant fact of local party politics for many decades. Academic interest in the phenomenon began to pick up in the 2010s as the surprise victory of George Galloway in the Bradford West by-election revealed that minority votes were not exclusively determined by individual loyalties to the Labour Party. In fact, it turned out that ‘elders’ and ‘community leaders’ were incentivised by established local politicians to make ethnicity-based and religion-based claims for their communities, and these ‘elders’ and ‘community leaders’ could return them with bloc votes — from which the victory of Galloway’s Respect and the more recent Muslim First parties are an aberration. This patronage system made such constituencies effectively unpollable, each a black box with dynamics comprehensible only to those with local knowledge.
We should be clear that Akhtar has not been convicted of any crimes — besides his 2002 conviction for violent affray — and, unlike Ahmed, has never achieved national prominence. Perhaps because awareness of biraderi has grown, the Labour Party has seemingly become somewhat embarrassed, rather than proud, of this type of local ‘community figure’, and is therefore increasingly averse to drawing any more attention to their existence than is strictly necessary. Nonetheless, Akhtar and Ahmed do share some uncanny similarities in their life stories. Both sit at the intersection of politics, the police, minority community organisations, local youth, and public money. It is rather fitting that Akhtar’s involvement with Ahmed directly led to the Rotherham Civil Rights Group, which brought together the council, police and young people, and seems to have been the first step in propelling Akhtar to serious positions of power in Rotherham. Akhtar later described the campaign for what became the Unity Centre as one of his proudest early achievements.
It cannot be emphasised enough that Akhtar was not an ordinary councillor. In a town anxious about racial tensions, a man like Akhtar became useful. The Casey Report, published in 2015, notes that he was relied upon by the council for ‘difficult issues’. For example, he was able to prevent ‘Asian’ men from coming out onto the streets when the English Defence League (EDL) marched in the town. He records himself as having attended a Hope Not Hate dinner at the 2009 Labour Party Conference, and having delivered over 800 leaflets for the organisation in May that year.
It was at the altar of ‘community relations’ that, in Rotherham alone, over a thousand mostly white working-class girls were sacrificed. It is worth noting that one of the ringleaders of the Rochdale grooming gang, Shabir Ahmed, was employed by Oldham Council as a welfare rights officer concurrent with his criminal activities. Akhtar’s charity connections are also particularly interesting — the Unity Centre and the Rotherham Ethnic Minority Alliance (which he directed with fellow councillor Shaukat Ali) sat firmly within the web of community relations infrastructure. The Unity Centre itself was incubated with Council money and support, and REMA rented space in the Centre for its purposes. The incestuous relationship between the Council and the charities it funded raises many questions.
Akhtar seems to have been everywhere. A career taxi driver, by 2008, he was, among other things, in charge of taxi licensing in the town. In 2012, he inexplicably secured a position as vice-chairman of the Police & Crime panel, which was tasked with scrutinising the local force. Numerous reports describe Akhtar as having had ‘influence over the police’. A strange position indeed for a man convicted of violent affray in 2002. Interestingly, it is noted in a Guardian piece that he was able to avoid a prison sentence not only for his community relations work, but because he had ‘been given glowing references, including an accolade from a former police commander in Rotherham’. A small WordPress news blog local to Rotherham, meanwhile, alleged that Akhtar had continually threatened them with legal action and coordinated harassment by taxi drivers in a bid to silence their reporting of the facts of his conviction and conduct as a Labour councillor. Despite the conviction, the Casey report noted there was no serious debate about whether Akhtar was a fit and proper person to be on the council. His influence seems only to have grown from there.
By the time of the Casey Report in 2015, it was noted that many officials spoke of him ‘with fear’. They were worried that the evidence they gave for the report would get back to him and that they would face repercussions. It was noted that whenever issues affecting those of Pakistani heritage were brought up, he and fellow councillor Mahroof Hussain would suppress much discussion, for ‘fear of upsetting community relations’. It came to the point that when the relationship between taxi drivers (who in Rotherham were overwhelmingly of Pakistani origin) and Child Sexual Exploitation was raised in meetings, the issue was suppressed in light of this fear. This should be astonishing to anyone putting the facts of the Rotherham story together.
The story of Rotherham and the grooming gangs is partly one of state failure. Too many looked the other way. No single politician, council worker, or policeman was prosecuted for their role in the scandal, either in Rotherham or elsewhere. In Telford, where authorities repeatedly turned a blind eye and emboldened offenders, and Oldham, where ‘fears of the far right’ led to accusations of deliberate cover-up, the people in charge failed, if not outright facilitated, the abuse of thousands of children. This issue persists across the country.
# StarringRoles($srow->id) ?>
|