Back to the roots

Jo Phoenix wrote an article a week ago entitled Talking About Asian Grooming Gangs: A Bit of History and Some Realities.

On Sunday 4th August I accused Kellie-Jay Keen (KJK) of being a populist extremist bent on stirring up violence. She reposted a video she had made a few years earlier about Asian grooming gangs in a tweet that said: “the left would rather you were a rapist than be accused of racism. Women and girls don’t matter. #Rotherham”.

At the time she posted this tweet and video, a group of around 750 anti-immigration ‘protesters’ had surrounded a Rotherham Holiday Inn, which was housing asylum seekers. The ‘protest’ had already turned violent. The hotel was vandalised and rioters attempted to set fire to the hotel. I was shocked by what happened in Rotherham and by Kellie-Jay Keen’s tweet and video.

So that’s part of the background to this open letter that I’ve been chatting about before. It makes more sense.

To remind readers, the recent riots were started by disinformation about the identity of the boy in Southport who attacked a girls’ dance, stabbing many people and killing three little girls. The disinformation was that he was Muslim, a migrant, and on an MI5 watch list. Many of the populist extremist accounts spread this disinformation. To date, there has been at least one arrest for incitement to racial hatred and false communication.

I received a lot of criticism for my tweet, most of which boiled down to this: you can’t call us racists when we talk about Asian grooming gangs. Some of the responses shocked me almost as much as KJK’s original tweet – especially in relation to the very negative racial stereotyping (let’s call it what it is – racism) at play. Asian grooming gangs and ‘Muslim Pakistani’ men were treated as if they were to blame for the problem of child sexual exploitation in England and Wales, and the Rotherham tragedy was treated as an example of the problems of immigration.

So I tweeted a few of these comments and said I thought they were racist. Someone asked me how we should talk about Asian grooming gangs when mentioning them is considered racist. This blog is my attempt to answer that question. It’s long, but the length is necessary to counter the misinformation that extremists use to manipulate people’s discontent.

I recommend it, including the length.