We still haven't learnt the correct lessons from the grooming gangs scandal
Muhbeen Hussain, according to The Sunday Times, called on Muslims in Rotherham to boycott the police in October 2015, just months after Baroness Casey's report on the failings of the authorities there. The group he founded, British Muslim Youth, reportedly warned other Muslim organisations that failure to boycott the police would lead to them being boycotted in return.
As the shadow home secretary Chris Philp recently pointed out on X, Hussain was on the Victoria Derbyshire programme in October 2015 and he said that 'first and foremost, the police pushed a pernicious lie' by saying they didn't make arrests of grooming gang abusers due to 'fears of being called racist'.
In a recent statement he has called the criticism of him a 'deliberate attempt to defame me' and has claimed he has always had a 'consistent, public, and unequivocal' record on the grooming gangs by leading a protest against them and condemning them in public.
He also said that the 'boycott had absolutely nothing to do with grooming gangs' and was instead about the supposed failure of the police to protect Muslims in the town from the far-Right.
Despite his protests, he doesn't seem to spend much time on the issue of grooming gangs any more, and doesn't seem to have tweeted about the recent release of Baroness Casey's audit on the issue at all.
This isn't the only controversial thing he has said. Back in 2017, he questioned whether Muslim youth were being properly heard, citing the case of Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber. He questioned whether Abedi's Libyan heritage led to his radicalisation, blaming the 'failed British intervention' against Gaddafi there.
But Abedi's family were anti-Gadaffi asylum seekers and he himself had participated in the civil war, before being evacuated by the Royal Navy. He even used benefits money which his mother was still collecting, despite having moved back to Libya, to buy components for the bombs. Far from being unheard, Abedi had benefited from incredible generosity from Britain, which he chose to repay with murderous violence.
Muhbeen Hussain works with the APPG on British Muslims and was co-creator of a report on a definition of Islamophobia, which think tank Policy Exchange warned risked being used to shut down discussion of grooming gangs.
The same Policy Exchange paper pointed out that Muhbeen's uncle, Mahroof Hussain, was a Labour cabinet member and councillor in Rotherham, responsible for community cohesion. He stepped down in February 2015, after Baroness Casey's inspection of the Council, which said he had 'suppressed discussion' of grooming gangs in the town 'for fear of upsetting community relations'.
Mahroof also has an MBE and in 2023, it was revealed by GB News that he was employed as the National Diversity, Inclusion & Participation Manager by Health Education England, a major NHS body. There he developed and implemented diversity and inclusion programmes.
As inquiries in Rotherham found, the authorities have a big problem with institutional political correctness. It was fear of looking racist that played a major role in the grooming gangs not being exposed, until Andrew Norfolk of The Times went where others wouldn't.
Ever since, there has been a concerted effort to brand the subject as racist, deploying language around tropes and stereotypes in an effort to make it taboo, while ignoring the anti-white racism that was often directed at the victims.
Instead of giving out gongs for cohesion, we should accept that it was ideas like that which underpinned the scandal. The focus on community relations and fear of racial prejudice is what has underpinned the development of our two-tier legal system, which earlier this year nearly had different sentencing handed out depending on someone's skin colour.
As the American journalist Helen Andrews recently pointed out, Australia had a similar issue in the early 2000s as Britain. Sydney was rocked by a series of gang-rapes, perpetrated by men of Lebanese and Pakistani heritage, targeting white Australian girls. The crimes were often explicitly racist. Instead of trying to preserve cohesion or prioritise community relations, Australia prosecuted the criminals and created a new offence that directly targeted gang rapists; this ensured that they spent decades in prison.
By confronting the problem directly and being honest about the dangerous cultural attitudes of some immigrant groups, Australia was able to stop the problem in its tracks. Unlike here, the number of victims was in the tens, not the tens of thousands.
It isn't too late in Britain. Baroness Casey's audit this year called for a national inquiry. One priority should be to reaffirm the need for colour-blind justice and re-examine the way in which people in the authorities failed the victims of the grooming gangs.
Those like Mahroof Hussain, who have already been found to have failed in official reports, should be stripped of honours like his MBE. Those who are found to have played a serious role in the covering-up of abuse and failure to act should expect to be stripped of their pensions or sent to jail.
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