What was being discussed arose from the conviction the previous day of seven men for raping, trafficking and torturing children in Oxford. The interviewee was Andrew Norfolk, who has just won the Orwell prize for journalism for his pioneering work for The Times exposing gangs of sexual predators in the north of England. In 2010, five men from Rotherham and nine from Derby were convicted; in 2012 it was nine from Rochdale and last week it was seven from Oxford.

The cause of my rage was the embarrassment being shown by the interviewer, Evan Davis, that yet again the perpetrators were all Muslim and mostly of Pakistani origin. "Have we got stats on the racial breakdown of this particular crime?" he asked. "Obviously there have been the Saviles and the Stuart Halls and we don't talk about their religion by and large." And he and Norfolk fell over themselves to agree that the majority of sex offenders were white males operating on their own.


As an Irish immigrant who was living in England while republicans were shooting and bombing its cities, of course I'm glad that the British are a tolerant bunch who don't scapegoat whole communities for the wicked deeds of a minority. But the British chattering classes have traditionally taken this to masochistic extremes. It was the elite's wholesale adoption of multiculturalism that made generations of public servants terrified of doing or saying anything that might be classed as racist. Instead of immigrants being told to adapt to British values, the British were told to adapt to those of the newcomers.

I was listening last Thursday morning to the BBC's flagship news programme, Today, when I lost my rag and began shouting at the radio about pusillanimity.
In the name of multiculturalism, most teachers, police and social workers turned a blind eye to such barbaric practices as forced marriages, female genital mutilation and honour killings.

Ann Cryer, then Labour MP for a Yorkshire constituency, was virtually alone among politicians in saying openly that some imported Pakistani cultural practices should be challenged, and she was regularly denounced for giving ammunition to racists and the far right.

Andrew Norfolk had listened to Ann Cryer 10 years ago, but it was not until 2010 that he got the backing to conduct an in-depth investigation in Rotherham and publish the horrifying results. What he discovered was a pattern of criminality that may have extended to dozens of English towns and cities. For these gangs to flourish, he found, you needed three factors: vulnerable girls, groups of men who viewed them with contempt and lust, and a system of child protection that shrugged its shoulders.