OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | Will UK Investigate And Crack Down On Pak ‘Mirpuri’ Link To Grooming Gangs? | Farrukh Dhondy

“He said he missed her most of all

When autumn leaves began to fall…

Symbolic end to summer then?

With memories of springtime when

They had some fights but also fun

With lots of signs that two were one?

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of sweetness before stray thoughts made sour

Of what was once a solid thing

The bird of winter on the wing.

From Is Lamb A Bard: The Tale of the Singing Sheep

The world knows that some Americans, especially those who believe they own it, are audaciously arrogant.

This fellow (did I misspell felon?) Donald Trump tells the United Nations that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has imposed Sharia law on the city. I suppose when he and Melancholia Trump visited London, she carried her niqab with her?

Then there’s Elon the lone Musketeer who presumes that because he has stacks of dollars, made on the backs of and through the expertise of motor and spacecraft engineers and workers, he can make demands on the elected British government. Following this delusion, but absolutely in keeping with his anti-Muslim stance, he attacked Prime Minister Keir Starmer, saying that when Keir was chief of public prosecutions he did nothing about the criminals known as grooming gangs. Fake Musketeer news! Fact!

Under Keir Starmer’s watch as prosecutor, 61 men were convicted and jailed for their membership of grooming gangs. And now, as PM, he has initiated a national inquiry into such gangs. The inquiry, initiated in June, has not yet got going. It has become something of a national embarrassment -- a “political football” in the cliché, as it was designed to ensure that in the future innocent children, almost all white girls from broken homes, were not enticed into illegal sex by these gangs.

The nitty-gritty of the political “footballing” is that these gangs were almost all composed of Muslim men, most of them from Mirpur in Pakistani Kashmir.

It is this factor that has been, in several political ways, the obstacle to the progress of this inquiry.

The home secretary (home minister), Shabana Mahmood, and the minister for “safeguarding”, which includes the remit to see that grooming gangs which rape and exploit young women don’t operate or even exist, Jess Phillips, are in charge of the inquiry, the latter directly.

Since the inquiry was set up Ms Phillips is said to have wanted it extended from the predominantly Mirpuri gangsters to “other forms of sexual exploitation”. This has caused four of the victims of the grooming gangs to refuse to join or give evidence to the inquiry. In addition to these four, two prospective chairpersons of the inquiry have withdrawn their candidature on the same grounds. All of them have demanded that Ms Phillips stands down from overseeing it.

Though none of these six have stated the fact, it is likely that their objection to Jess Phillips defining the remit of the inquiry arises from the fact that she is the MP for the Birmingham Yardley constituency, which has a population of around 25 to 30 per cent Muslim, most of them of Pakistani, if not directly Mirpuri, origin. In the 2024 election Ms Phillips, though re-elected with a vote share of 31 per cent, lost several thousand votes to the Workers Party of Britain, which came second with a close 29 per cent of the vote. This party, whose chair is the rebel Labour expellee George Galloway, who now and then claims he is a Muslim, attracts the Muslim vote. In Yardley a large number of Muslim voters abandoned Jess at the 2024 ballot.

There is absolutely no question about the grooming gangs in several cities, including Rotherham, Bradford and perhaps eight others, being of predominantly Mirpuri origin. There is though insufficient data about the ethnicity of the perpetrators of sexual crimes against children in the whole of the UK.

Nevertheless, the Musketeer and now the -- let’s just call it the ultra-right nationalist and in some vote-catching ways “socialist” -- Reform Party’s spokespeople have used the stymied inquiry as a political point-scorer, again emphasising the religion of the grooming perpetrators. More shamefully, even the leadership of the Tory Party has jumped in to make the anti-Muslim point.

It should, in all common sense, be an anti-Mirpuri-immigrant-particular class-culture rather than an anti-Muslim or in the worst cases (Musketeer anyone?) anti-Islamic point. Nothing in Islam condones such criminality and everything in its ethic condemns it.

Millions of British Muslims are not to be tarred with the brush with which the 61 already prosecuted and jailed have been. But then the right and far-right in Britain, triggered and encouraged by the intervention of the racist lone Musketeer, see political advantage in anti-Muslim stances and pronouncements, never mentioning the fact that leading lawyers who prosecuted the 61 condemned, in several cases so far, are themselves Muslim.

The gangs began by Mirpuri taxi drivers picking up vulnerable girls and taking them to men who would pretend to be their boyfriends, protectors and partners and then trafficking them to others in their gang. It really indicates that these men thought of vulnerable, even destitute young white females, as not the same category of humans as themselves whom they could consequently abuse as they liked.

Presumably, the Mirpuri criminals of these gangs respect their own mothers, sisters and daughters. So where does this criminal discrimination originate?

Race? Or just exploitative opportunity?