After months of turmoil, the chair and the terms of reference of the government’s national grooming gangs inquiry have at last been announced. The inquiry will be led by Baroness Anne Longfield, a Labour peer and former children’s commissioner. She will investigate the ‘systemic, institutional and individual’ failures to deal with these gangs and to protect their victims. It is unclear still what shape the inquiry will take, and whether or not it will be a whitewash. Some survivors have already criticised the decision to make the inquiry chair a Labour peer.  

The failure to treat these offences as racially aggravated points to a systemic problem in our institutions

But perhaps the key question will be how seriously it will take the central political controversy of these crimes and how the state has failed to deal with them: race and religion. We are told it will ‘examine how ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in responses at a local and national level, as well as other issues of denial.’ In particular, it will ‘consider the background (including ethnicity, religion and culture)’ of the perpetrators. This is referring to gangs of predominantly Pakistani-Muslim men and their victims, largely vulnerable white girls.

This is quite right. But if the inquiry is aiming to look at systemic and institutional failures around these issues, there is one problem its terms of reference do not mention that has long been staring the justice system in the face. Given these offences are widely understood to be the worst set of race-hate crimes Britain has ever seen, why have they never been treated by the justice system as racially or religiously aggravated? The British state today has a bewildering array of offences aimed at punishing ‘racism’ and ‘hate’. So why has there been no official reckoning with these decades of violent, heinous largely anti-white hate crimes? Indeed, it is difficult to find a single example of the British courts treating these appalling crimes in this way.

When I asked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for an example of a case where this had happened, the state prosecutor was unable to provide any. A spokesperson said:

‘We prosecute the right person for the right offence, regardless of nationality,  and bring offenders of these heinous crimes to justice – this year our specialist unit which prosecutes organised child sexual abuse has seen 41 defendants jailed for a total of over 600 years.

The lawprovides that certain offences can be charged as racially-aggravated crimes – this does not include rape – however our prosecutors can still seek tougher sentences if there is evidence a crime is motivated by hostility based on race.’

So the CPS ‘can’ seek these tougher sentences – but has it?

On the question of sentences being uplifted by the courts for being hate crimes, the spokesperson added:

‘Any case where there is verbal abuse of the victim(s) or similar demonstration of hostility based on their race, colour, nationality or ethnicity at the time of the offence or immediately before or after would make the offence a racial hate crime and trigger the statutory uplift which allows the judge to increase the length of sentence given to the perpetrator.’

So racial abuse during the offending ‘would’ make an offence a hate crime and automatically ‘trigger the statutory uplift’ of a sentence by the court.

Anyone familiar with the details of these crimes can see that practically all of the

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