The grooming gang scandal isn't just about race, it's also about class

Telegraph

5 hours ago

Public outrage over the grooming gang scandal has so far revolved almost entirely around its racial dimension.
There can be absolutely no doubt that the suppression of crucial facts because they might have incited prejudice against an ethnic minority was unforgivable, and that the ramifications of what we now know must be ruthlessly examined. There are serious questions about the possibility (or impossibility) of successful multiculturalism that can no longer be avoided.
All this is clear and it will be discussed, with its huge implications, exhaustively – because race and the coexistence of different ethnicities within a democratic country are the great topics of the day.
What is receiving far less attention – perhaps because it is so much a part of the fabric of British social attitudes as to be nearly invisible – is the question of how the victims of this systematic abuse could have been treated by official authorities with such callous indifference.
Let's put it plainly: the fact that huge numbers of white working-class girls could be trafficked, tortured and horrifically abused with the conscious complicity of agencies of the state is not entirely due to sensitivities about the ethnicity of the perpetrators. There is another factor here that is much older and more deeply embedded in British attitudes than the fashionable concern with racial politics.
Most of these girls, now being described as 'vulnerable', are of a class and a social type that this country was accustomed to treating with contempt long before Pakistani men were said to have regarded them as whores because they appeared 'uncovered' in public.
This supposed explanation, which is presented as a kind of apologia – it was all just a form of cultural misunderstanding – is ridiculous of course. The men knew perfectly well that what they were doing was criminal and relied on local networks of corruption to protect them.
But what about the other matter? What about the police and the local authorities and the social care agencies who just preferred to ignore what was happening – or even, in some outrageous instances, to join in the persecution of the victims?
Was that entirely due to the fear of raising racial tensions? Or could it be that Britain still has some pretty ugly class prejudices which permit those in charge to dismiss the complaints and protests of the kind of people who are considered beneath contempt?
There is something about the hardhearted dismissiveness with which the girls' pleas for help were treated that is almost Dickensian. Many of those who heard them and saw what was happening were presumably quite normal and respectable, perhaps with families (maybe daughters) of their own.
What made it possible for them to discount a category of helpless young girls as – what? Not fit for sympathy? Incapable of leading decent lives, anyway? In effect, less than human? Yes, there had to be more to this than the fear of arousing racial tensions or alienating a minority ethnic group. You cannot write off a whole tranche of victims whose safety is your legal (and moral) responsibility unless you believe that they are, somehow, not worth protecting.
Did they tell themselves that the girls had 'asked for it', joined in with the drug taking, made themselves available, become the 'whores' that the men assumed them to be? That is the sort of thing that has been said for generations about poor girls who found themselves left to the streets, whom the Victorian reformers and the Evangelical Christian Church once set out to save in the face of traditional smug complacency.
This is such a well documented phenomenon in English social history that it is scarcely credible that it could survive intact into the 21st century. But here it is, in a new incarnation. It is not preposterous to suggest that the race issue was just another pretext for the old snobbery that has always condemned girls of this kind to be social outcasts. Ironically, they were being disowned by people who probably regarded themselves as Left-wing.
There is something peculiarly resilient about class attitudes in Britain. It remains the undercurrent for most social transactions (and almost all comedy), political behaviour and professional advancement.
Of course every sophisticated society has some kind of hierarchical social order and codes of behaviour that are dictated by it. In many of the old European countries – even ones that have dispensed with their aristocracies – it is based on inherited family position. Sometimes (as in Italy) it is connected to regions.
In the United States, race took the place of class as the great social barrier but within the white population it was primarily wealth that provided status, not breeding and, until very recently, the wealth that was most admirable was self-made. The Calvinist ideal of success by one's individual effort was the admired model, not the noblesse oblige of an inherited fortune.
For the longest time, Americans did not openly acknowledge the existence of what we would call a 'class system'. There were just the 'poor' who needed to work harder so that they could fulfil the American dream, and those who had fulfilled the dream and become richer. It was a ruthless, puritanical assumption that largely ignored the variations in advantages that are (supposedly) taken into account by an older, more established hierarchy.
Many would argue that the resilience of class divides in British life should not be blamed entirely on middle-class prejudice: that it is as much a function of working-class solidarity. The reassurance of community ties and common values may make the abandonment of your old roots a frightening and painful thing. There can be little doubt that the existential anxiety that permeates American life with its relentless pressure for social mobility is not enviable. So yes, there is something to be said for loyalty to family, roots and neighbourhood – a refusal to budge from the attitudes in which you were raised. That can seem like a justifiable moral stand and a safe harbour for life.
But where does it end? With a road to nowhere and such incurable hopelessness that huge numbers of working-class girls (and boys) can be discarded without a qualm.