The Rape Gang Scandal Shows Britain’s Social Contract is Broken

When I published my previous essay in the Daily Sceptic on the rape-gang scandal, I attempted to describe what a serious integrity mechanism would look like in a state that wished to root out corruption rather than narrate it. Drawing on the example of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), I set out, in practical terms, what such a body would require: independence from police and ministerial control, genuine investigative authority and a simple governing proposition: that no institution can be trusted to police itself when it is itself the problem.

My former colleague and sometime co-writer David Betz remarked on X that the piece read like a final appeal to reason – a last attempt to delineate what accountability might resemble if the contemporary administrative state in Britain still possessed the will to pursue it. We both agree that it does not have the will and have written several times to this effect.

That observation points to what the earlier essay left insufficiently examined. The pressing question is not what an integrity mechanism would look like. It is why such a mechanism has not appeared, and why, under the present dispensation, it cannot.

The answer lies deeper than procedure or technique. The absence of accountability, and the permissive environment in which the rape gangs operated, follow from the internal logic of hyper-liberal modernity.

That requires explanation.

A Hierarchy Laid Bare

The temptation, after any scandal, is to ask how procedures might be improved. Which reporting lines failed? Which guidance requires revision? Which oversight body requires reinforcement? These are legitimate administrative questions. They are also evasive when the fundamental cause lies within contemporary political culture.

As my last essay argued, the rape-gang scandal was not merely a failure of safeguarding procedures. It exposed the British state’s moral hierarchy. As we now know, organised rape gangs, coercion and trafficking of vulnerable girls persisted across multiple towns for decades. Many of the facts were known at the time. Victims and families repeatedly reported what was happening. The patterns were clear and observable. The problem was never a lack of information; it was a collapse of enforcement and, in the years since, an absence of accountability.

The official record, from the 2014 ‘Report into the Child Exploitation in Rotherham‘ and the 2022 ‘Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse‘, both led by Professor Alexis Jay, to the ‘National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse‘, led by Baroness Louise Casey in 2025, leaves little room for ambiguity. Paralysis was rooted in fear: the fear of being labelled racist; fear of unsettling “community cohesion”; fear of puncturing an approved narrative of multicultural harmony. In too many councils and police forces, that anxiety counted for more than the suffering of children. In Professor Jay’s words: “Politicians wanted to keep a lid on it.” This was a hierarchy of priorities, unmistakably revealed.

Those priorities have surfaced in public life with disturbing regularity. In 2017, the Labour MP Naz Shah shared a social-media post suggesting that abused girls should “shut their mouths for the good of diversity”. Her remark was dismissed as an error of judgement, but the sentiment it revealed was not an aberration: it reflected a deeper and recognisable mode of thinking in which the reputational management of multicultural harmony outranks the elementary duty to protect vulnerable girls. 

This continuity was further revealed by Lucy Powell, at the time Leader of the House of Commons and a senior Labour figure, now Deputy Leader of the Party, who gave voice to the same reflex on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? in May 2025. When Tim Montgomerie referred to the documented record of grooming gangs, Powell did not engage the substance or express sympathy for the victims. She implied ulterior motive: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we?” The implication was plain: that raising the scandal itself was a form of coded racism.

In both instances, the reflex betrayed something telling: organised predation did not summon unambiguous ethical gravity, still less sustained institutional contrition. Instead, what surfaced most quickly was anxiety about appearances: reputational fallout and the political cost of transgressing progressive orthodoxy. The idiom of ‘diversity’ and the ritual signals of ideological vigilance took precedence over basic claims of protection and justice. Victims were treated less as the moral centre of the story than as a difficulty to be managed while those who insisted on confronting the pattern, the crimes and the cover-ups risked being recast as disruptors of civic harmony.

A state that is more alert to reputational hazard than to predatory harm, and more protective of its moral self-image than of its children, has inverted the moral hierarchy.

This inversion is not confined to stray remarks by politicians. Its recurrence across councils, police forces and political discourse demonstrates that the distortion is structural. What has emerged is a governing consensus in which preserving an approved moral narrative carries greater urgency than punishing wickedness.

In such an order, wrongdoing is domesticated through process and rendered administratively manageable, while those who name it openly are regarded as the real transgressors.

When the Scales No Longer Balance

If this essay’s central contention is correct, namely, that reactions to the rape-gang scandal on the part of the state’s representatives reveals a moral hierarchy, then that hierarchy should be visible not only in rhetoric but in law and prosecutorial culture. 

And, indeed, it is.

The rape-gang cases expose that hierarchy in its most explicit form. Many victims were white working-class girls. Most of the perpetrators were drawn from minority Pakistani ethnic or religious backgrounds. To articulate that reality, however, carried risk of ideological reprisal, as the Casey audit repeatedly observed. The result was evasion, denial, euphemism, hesitation and displacement of responsibility.

The difficulty of naming the reality of group-based crimes and hostility, and the subsequent moral evasion that follows when politically sensitive identities are involved, is not merely cultural but interacts with the statutory framework governing racially aggravated crime.

In a recent New Culture Forum broadcast, Laurie Wastell drew attention to the way racially aggravated offences attach when hostility is directed toward ethnic or religious minorities, yet do not operate in equivalent fashion when comparable hostility is directed toward white victims. The distinction is embedded in formal legal distinctions, sentencing guidelines and Home Office scrutiny panels. Certain categories of victimhood are formally recognised within the structure of criminal statute; others fall outside that designation. That asymmetry shapes prosecutorial behaviour, institutional reflex and public perception alike.

Rape-gang prosecutions have therefore unfolded within a legal order that confers explicit statutory weight upon certain forms of group-based hostility while leaving others without comparable recognition. Despite extensive evidence that racialised contempt for white girls formed part of the perpetrators’ vocabulary and self-justification, such cases have almost never been framed or charged as racially aggravated offences.

Instead, the crimes were prosecuted as grave sexual offences — rightly so — yet the racial animus frequently present received no distinct juridical acknowledgement. Thus, where hostility toward minority victims attracts enhanced denunciation within the criminal code, hostility toward white victims is absorbed into the general category of sexual offending. 

The signal, whether intended or not, is evident, namely, that some forms of racial hostility merit greater legal consideration, while others do not. In practice that does more than classify offences: it conditions officials in advance in what the law expects them to recognise. Where racial aggravation is institutionally normalised when minorities are affected, it becomes institutionally awkward, and therefore easier to discount, when the targets are white working-class girls. In this setting, naming racial animosity is readily treated as ‘political’, inflammatory or beside the point, rather than as evidentially relevant to motive. Cases proceed as serious sexual crime, while the racial hostility that often animated them remains without separate legal recognition. Justice falters here because it operates within a structure that grades victimhood. And justice that grades victimhood cannot credibly claim impartiality.

The British legal tradition has historically rested on the proposition that the law stands above identity, that justice is blind, and that everyone is subject to the same rules. Equality before the law forms the basis upon which authority has long been justified. When enforcement tracks identity and political sensitivity, that basis is broken. The law fragments into differentiated standards of protection. Citizens are administered as categories rather than governed as equals. In that condition the state weakens the very authority it claims to exercise, because its legitimacy depends upon the uniform application of law.

For that reason, the scandal cannot be dismissed as a discrete safeguarding breakdown. It reveals a structural distortion in the moral grammar of the state itself.

Blairism and the Moral Unravelling

That distortion, of course, did not appear spontaneously but is rooted in a broader ideological evolution. In the wake of the revelations concerning Jeffrey Epstein’s connections with Lord Mandelson, Lord Maurice Glasman’s stated in a Sky News interview that “the Government and the party have to repent and reject New Labour as an alien body that took over the Labour Party. And this is where it leads: perversion and paedophilia.”

The remark was not rhetorical theatre but an acute moral and intellectual diagnosis. Followed to its logical conclusion, it directs attention beyond individual failings to the underlying premises of Blairite liberalism itself and to the types of institutional blindness and elite impunity it reliably produces. 

Blairism represented the high-water mark of end-of-history liberal modernity. It fused market individualism with moral exhibitionism. It celebrated emancipation from inherited constraint – tradition, custom, established norms and institutions – while baptising that emancipation in the language of progress. Once emancipation was moralised in this way, by extension the liberation of the self became synonymous with virtue. Discipline came to resemble repression. Moral judgement was recast as intolerance. 

Consequently, once emancipation becomes the organising principle of political life, limits cease to command respect. Restraint appears archaic. Boundaries are treated as negotiable or abolished entirely. Those at the apex of the system operate with diminishing friction, sustained by the conviction that they embody progress. Under such conditions, impunity ceases to register as corruption; it feels like freedom. 

The Epstein-Mandelson associations symbolised that atmosphere: proximity between political power and predation, buffered by insulation and moral self-confidence. Public discourse instinctively narrows such episodes to personalities – Mandelson, Prince Andrew, the individual scandal – because personalising corruption contains it. It allows the system to present decadence as a personal deviation rather than as the logical expression of the system itself. Yet the significance of the affair lies not merely in who knew whom, but in what the associations reveal about elite networks, their insulation from scrutiny, confidence in moral immunity and their willingness to cross lines that, in normal society, would have ended any career. The significance of the Epstein revelations is not really about people. It is about a wider political culture. 

The rape-gang scandal unfolded within the same ideological milieu. A governing class persuaded of its own enlightenment placed narrative coherence above moral discernment, particularly when doing so meant challenging multicultural orthodoxy. The anxiety of appearing illiberal eclipsed the obligation to uphold standards in public life. Reputational safety outweighed justice. In both contexts, the performance of virtue supplanted the exercise of moral authority, and the public – poor white girls in particular – bore the cost of elite self-congratulation.

Glasman’s provocative comments therefore identify something important. A political order that emancipates itself from inherited constraint while proclaiming moral superiority emancipates itself from accountability as well. 

Spiritual Aesthetic, Moral Vacancy

The debased moral order just described does not remain confined to Westminster. It diffuses outward. What begins as political emancipation from inherited constraint develops into a wider cultural sensibility – one that treats judgement as suspect and discipline as regressive. The seepage of that ethos into the wider social realm is now undeniable.

I owe this observation to the spiritual YouTube channel Richard the Fourth, which noted the Western predilection for appropriating images of the Buddha as a form of aesthetic virtue-signalling. Middle-class homes display Buddha statues and iconography as emblems of serenity, tolerance and non-judgement. Yet classical Buddhist traditions emphasise discipline, renunciation and moral accountability. Western liberalism absorbs the aesthetic and discards the discipline.

The same dynamic characterises contemporary governance. The state speaks in therapeutic tones: inclusion, well-being, safeguarding, harm reduction. It cultivates the image of enlightened tolerance. Yet the willingness to judge and enforce, the harder edge of justice, atrophies. Instead, the adage ‘I don’t judge’ becomes a badge of virtue.

The irony is that liberal modernity judges incessantly: racism, patriarchy, populism, climate scepticism, social conservatism. It functions, to borrow Eric Voegelin’s insight, as a political religion, distributing sin and redemption with evangelical energy. What it resists is judgement directed at its own orthodoxies or protected narratives.

Within such a framework, confronting organised rape where perpetrators belong to minority communities threatens the sacred storyline. Silence is safer. Deflection is safer. Recasting scrutiny as a “dog whistle” is safer.

The scandal thus exposes not only institutional paralysis but a refusal to call evil by its proper name.

Alignment Over Conviction

When a culture grows wary of judgement, its institutions cannot sustain authority. Structures built to enforce standards are gradually reoriented towards managing perception. Moral confidence drains away while procedural performance expands.

Modern liberal ideology displaces traditional sources of moral authority. Institutions once anchored in inherited doctrine are hollowed out. Into the vacant space steps a new civil religion, less concerned with transcendence than alignment with power. The Church of England is a case in point. As doctrinal seriousness recedes, managerial activism advances. Sermons give way to strategy documents; catechesis to compliance language. The centre of gravity shifts from conviction to positioning, and what once rested on belief now rests on performance.

Under such circumstances, institutions do not remain neutral. The moral priorities of the state become the ambient expectations of the wider establishment. The Church, the civil service, the legal profession, academia: each begins, in different ways, to mirror the governing ethos. Survival depends upon alignment. Legitimacy is measured less by fidelity to inherited purpose than by conformity to prevailing moral signals.

The result is procedural expansion. Guidelines proliferate. Frameworks multiply. Consultations abound. Earnestness is demonstrated through documentation. Yet the capacity for accountability contracts precisely where accountability carries reputational or ideological cost. When action threatens the governing orthodoxy, hesitation replaces resolve. Where moral truth collides with that orthodoxy, it is sacrificed.

If moral clarity is sacrificed to ideological self-preservation, then an integrity mechanism – whose very function is to uncover wrongdoing and render judgement – cannot arise from within that order. This is why the institutional model sketched in my previous essay cannot emerge under the present dispensation. An ICAC-style body would require genuine independence from ministerial interference, coercive authority and insulation from ideological pressure. Its purpose would be to investigate without regard to narrative convenience, to compel disclosure and to establish facts even where those facts unsettle the regime’s self-image.

An integrity mechanism of that kind would not merely investigate misconduct; it would call the governing settlement itself to account. That is a demand the present order cannot meet. A political culture that sacralises its own virtue cannot submit itself to judgement. Reform of this magnitude fails at the level of first principles. The regime no longer recognises the legitimacy of being judged.

The Sanction of Wickedness

Once those in authority know that grave wrongdoing is occurring yet decline to act because intervention would disturb their ideological commitments, the question ceases to be procedural. Harm is understood and allowed to continue. The consequences are therefore not accidental. They are permitted.

A state does not need to approve wrongdoing in order to enable it. Knowledge combined with refusal is enough. When authorities understand what is happening and choose not to intervene, they signal that the abuse will be absorbed rather than confronted. That signal functions as protection for perpetrators and abandonment for victims.

The record of accumulated moral and political failings over course of the rape-gang era illustrates this condition. Reports accumulated. The evidential picture was understood. Meaningful intervention was absent. The decisive calculation, whether to preserve the governing narrative or protect the girls, was resolved in favour of the narrative.

This exceeds incompetence. It marks a corruption of public responsibility.

And once moral inversion becomes habitual, the reflexes of senior politicians – dismissing scrutiny as a “dog whistle”, recasting the protestations of victims and their families as obstacles to social cohesion – follow logically. They are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a disordered moral hierarchy. A deeply wicked one.

From the Predatory to the Pathological

In my earlier essay I warned that Britain risked becoming a predatory state. The evidence now suggests that the danger is no longer hypothetical.

A state that subordinates judgement to ideology and declines to confront organised abuse for fear of reputational damage forfeits its claim to moral authority. It polices speech with vigour while equivocating over heinous crimes. It multiplies process while diminishing consequence. It shields narrative before it shields the vulnerable.

The implications do not end with one scandal. When enforcement appears selective, social trust recedes. Public authority is discredited. Citizens come to suspect that the law is no longer an impartial standard but a variable instrument.

Britain’s organising principle was once the rule of law sustained by a broadly shared moral framework. As that framework gives way to ideological signalling, legitimacy weakens. A state that cannot or will not protect impartially imperils its own survival.

No Protection, No Obligation

If hope remains, it lies in returning to first principles. Thomas Hobbes grounded political authority in protection. Authority holds only so long as it secures the safety of those subject to it. The British state demands obedience, taxation and trust. In return, it promises security under impartial law.

The rape-gang scandal reveals a prolonged breach of that covenant.

Narrative management cannot compensate for a state’s failure to protect. Inquiries cannot substitute for enforcement. 

My earlier essay attempted to outline what institutional seriousness might require. This reflection has sought to show why such seriousness cannot arise within a regime that diffuses responsibility and emancipates itself from judgement.

When emancipation severs itself from inherited constraint, decadence follows. When decadence entwines with power, pathology emerges.

Hobbes’s warning remains as cold as ever:

The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.

I write this as an Anglo-Australian observing events from 10,000 miles away. Distance may distort but it may also clarify. From what I can see of my homeland, protection has already failed for many. And when protection fails, obligation dissolves.

Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.