BIRMINGHAM COUNCIL BURIED THE RAPE GANG EVIDENCE. NOW IT IS CHOOSING WHICH FILES PEOPLE CAN SEE.

FOR 35 YEARS BIRMINGHAM FAILED TO EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPENED TO ITS PAKISTANI RAPE GANG FILES. NOW THE COUNCIL UNDER INVESTIGATION IS CHOOSING WHAT TO REPUBLISH.

ROGER HARMER REFUSED TO ASK FOR THE BIRMINGHAM RAPE GANG INQUIRY. HIS COUNCIL IS CHOOSING WHICH FILES THE PUBLIC SEES.

Roger Harmer, the Liberal Democrat leader of Birmingham City Council, refused to ask for the rape gang inquiry to come to his city. He was asked to request it. He said no.

The inquiry is the national statutory inquiry into the rape gangs, chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield. It has the legal power to make Birmingham City Council and West Midlands Police hand over their files and to put the people who ran them under oath. For the girls this city failed, it is the chance to find out what was done to them and who covered it up. But it only investigates the towns and cities Longfield chooses, and the leader of Birmingham City Council would not ask her to choose his.

Reform UK, the largest party on the council, asked him to. On 30 September Reform's Birmingham leader, Cllr Jex Parkin, said, "We previously called on the Council Leader to formally request that Birmingham be included in future local investigations by the statutory Grooming Gangs Inquiry. He chose not to do so." Reform's group said Harmer had "confirmed that he did not intend to make that request."

A council leader is supposed to stand up for the children his council failed. Harmer was asked to put his city in front of the one inquiry that could finally get those children the truth. He would not do it. He is not the only politician to behave like this.

WE PUT BIRMINGHAM'S RECORD IN FRONT OF THE COUNTRY

We did not wait for Birmingham's politicians. In March 2026 we published the record Birmingham City Council had buried for thirty-five years.

In 1990 the council commissioned Dr Jill Jesson of Aston University to research girls in its own care who were being picked up by men and passed around. These were children aged thirteen to seventeen, and the council was legally responsible for every one of them. Jesson found Asian private hire drivers in the social workers' own case notes. She says the council's steering group, the group overseeing her research, ordered her to take that link out, and that copies of her report were to be destroyed. "The report was shelved, buried, it was never made public," she said in 2014.

When part of the report finally came before the council's social services committee in December 1995, councillors were asked to back a full enquiry into why it had been suppressed. They voted it down. The council was given the chance to find out who had buried the truth about the children in its care, and it chose not to look.

We also published what West Midlands Police knew and kept to itself. In 2010 the force profiled the sexual exploitation of children across the region and found that most suspects were Asian, with a large proportion of Pakistani heritage. It warned in writing that this could cause "significant community tensions." It issued no public warning, and its profiles only came out in 2015 after they were forced into the open. The police knew who the men were and what they were doing to children, and they were more worried about community tensions than about the children.

BIRMINGHAM WAS LEFT OFF THE LIST

Three months after we published that record, Longfield announced the first towns and cities her inquiry would investigate. On 24 June 2026 she named Oldham, Bradford and Keighley, and London. Oldham was on that list because its survivors and our campaign refused to stop until it was. Birmingham was left off, with a buried report, a suppressed enquiry and the police's own profiles all on the public record.

Some of Birmingham's politicians did act. The leader of the council's Conservative group, Robert Alden, wrote to Longfield in June asking for Birmingham to be investigated. A cross-party letter making the same request was put to every Birmingham MP and every leader of a party group on the council. It went to Longfield on 29 June, five days after she left Birmingham off.

Three people signed it. They were Alden, Sir Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield and a former Cabinet minister, and Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. As safeguarding minister, Phillips told Oldham it could not have an inquiry and should investigate itself. We disgraced her and she has since become a national laughing stock. With her reputation in tatters, she was left with no option but to sign the letter.

A former Cabinet minister and a former safeguarding minister had put their names to a letter asking for their own city to be investigated for the rape of its children, and it made no newspaper headline. Even GB News and TalkTV, the channels that have covered the rape gangs more than any others, did not report it, and the rest of the mainstream media ignored it too. We published it. It was as if those in power did not want Birmingham on the list.

Birmingham was named despite the legacy media's indifference and in spite of its council leader's refusal. Harmer was one of the group leaders that letter went to, and his name is not on it. On 30 September Longfield named Birmingham anyway.

Harmer had two chances to stand with the children of his city, and he took neither. Birmingham got its inquiry because survivors, campaigners and three politicians forced it onto the list.

THE NEXT DAY HARMER PUT HIS COUNCIL IN CHARGE OF THE FILES

On 1 October Harmer put out a statement welcoming the inquiry he had refused to request. He said the council "will not wait to be told to act." He had been asked by Reform and sent the cross-party letter to sign, and he had done neither. When the inquiry came anyway, he took the credit for welcoming it.

In the same statement Harmer announced that his council would republish its 1991 report "and any other historic reports that can be located."

Ignore the hypocrisy. That's nothing new with politicians. Focus on the dangerous. The council that buried the truth about the children in its care has put itself in charge of finding its own files. Harmer has not said what the council still holds, what has been lost, or who will decide what the public gets to see.

HARMER RUNS BIRMINGHAM WITH TWELVE COUNCILLORS

Harmer did not come to lead Birmingham City Council by winning the city. Labour ran the council from 2012 until May 2026, through 2023, when it declared itself effectively bankrupt, and the government commissioners sent in to take control of it. In May the voters threw Labour out, and its councillors fell from 65 to 17. Reform won 23 seats and became the largest party, and every other party refused to work with it.

Harmer's Liberal Democrats came sixth, with 12 of the council's 101 seats. He became leader in June at the head of a minority coalition with the Greens, the Birmingham Independents and the Better Birmingham Independents. Better Birmingham is a bloc of seven independent Muslim councillors led by Harris Khaliq, the councillor for Ward End, who sits in Harmer's cabinet. Harmer runs the city from sixth place, and his administration depends on that bloc to govern.

NOBODY WHO RAN BIRMINGHAM IN 1991 HAS ANSWERED FOR THE JESSON REPORT

The people who ran Birmingham City Council when Jesson's report was buried went on to some of the most senior jobs in British public life. Roger Taylor was the council's chief executive, its most senior officer, from 1988 to 1994, and went on to run other councils. Yve Buckland was assistant director of social services, responsible for the children's services those girls depended on. She went on to run the Legal Services Commission and to become deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the body that oversaw complaints against the police.

Sir Michael Lyons was chief executive when councillors voted down the enquiry in 1995. He was knighted in 2000 and went on to chair the BBC Trust. Not one of them has been asked publicly what they knew about Jesson's report. Their careers went on for decades, and the girls in her files have had no answer.

Birmingham protected the people in charge when the report was buried and abandoned the girls in it.

This is the record Harmer has promised to republish, and it is not his to republish. Jesson says she wrote a full report and was made to strip it, and only part of it ever reached a committee. The full report, the names of the steering group that oversaw it and the minutes of the 1995 vote belong in front of Longfield's inquiry, untouched. A version chosen by the council that buried them is no substitute.

HARMER'S COUNCIL LEFT THE ETHNICITY OF THE MEN OUT OF ITS OWN REPORT

Harmer wants the public to believe this is about the past. His own council's figures show children being sexually exploited in Birmingham in 2026, and gangs under police investigation in the city.

On 30 September, the day Longfield named Birmingham, a report went to the council's scrutiny committee for children, the councillors who check how the city protects them. It was prepared with Birmingham Children's Trust, which runs the city's children's services for the council. It showed police investigating 98 cases of children being sexually exploited in Birmingham, six of them into gangs. It showed 143 children known to be at risk or already being exploited.

These are not girls in a file from 1991. They are children in Birmingham in 2026.

The same report recorded that in May two Birmingham private hire drivers had their licences taken away after police passed on information about potential sexual offences against children. Jesson found private hire drivers in the council's case notes in 1991 and says she was told to take them out. Thirty-five years later the same trade is back in the council's own report.

The latest report told councillors the age of the offenders and their sex. It did not tell them their ethnicity or their nationality. The council knows enough about these men to count them and describe them, and it left that out.

It left it out after being told to record it. The council's own scrutiny inquiry said in 2014 that Birmingham needed to know who the offenders were, including their ethnicity.

Baroness Casey's audit, the report that led to this inquiry, found authorities across the country had "shied away from" the ethnicity of offenders for years and said it must be recorded in every case.

At the same meeting on 30 September it emerged that West Midlands Police had only started routinely recording the ethnicity of these offenders within the previous twelve months. In 2010 the force had already written down that most suspects were Asian, many of them Pakistani, and it went on for years without routinely recording it.

The next day Harmer's statement talked about "historic reports" and "historical survivors". He issued it the day after his own council counted 143 children at risk or being exploited in his city and six grooming gangs under investigation. He did not say a word about the men.

BIRMINGHAM HAS CLEARED ITSELF BEFORE

Each time these failures surfaced, Birmingham reviewed itself and moved on. In 2013 the Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board, the body that by law brings the council, police and health services together to protect the city's children, said the city was failing to protect children from sexual exploitation. It called the absence of prosecutions startling.

In 2015, after the Jesson report came to light, the council's strategic director for people, Peter Hay, was given the job of examining what had happened to it. He told councillors the council had missed "a huge opportunity to improve the safety of children in care," and in the same report declared "I am assured that there was no cover-up." He did not name the steering group or the councillors who voted down the enquiry, and he cleared the council anyway.

The children in Jesson's files got an admission that an opportunity had been missed, and nobody was held to account for missing it. Harmer is asking the public to trust the same institution to decide which of its records are released.

Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of the road where I can continue working this way.

The paid subscriptions have stalled. Worse, tens of thousands of people are now reading these articles without even joining the free mailing list. The audience is growing, but the number of people actually standing behind the work is not growing with it.

This is becoming impossible to sustain.

You know what we are up against. The mainstream media will not touch my work. Institutions I investigate do not volunteer their records. Politicians do not suddenly decide to hold themselves to account.

And yet, despite all of that, we forced the national inquiry. We did that because enough ordinary people refused to go away.

But getting the inquiry was never the end of this campaign. In many ways it was only the beginning. Now we have to watch where it goes, what it investigates, which places it avoids, which witnesses it calls, which records it obtains and whether the same institutions that failed these children are allowed to control the story again.

Nobody else is going to do that work for us. And I cannot do it indefinitely working on my own. That is why I keep talking about 50,000 committed subscribers.

It is not a vanity number. I did not pluck it out of the air. With fifty thousand people with me means when we uncover something important, it does not depend on a newspaper editor, a television producer or an algorithm deciding whether you are allowed to see it.

It gives us reach they cannot easily shut down.

But there is another reason. I need to build a proper backroom operation around this work. At the moment I am investigating, researching, writing, publishing, producing the videos, running the newsletter, dealing with the technology and then starting again. It is unsustainable.

I need people behind me who can take care of the technical and production work so that I can spend my time doing the thing I do best. That is why we have been pushing so hard for new paid subscribers.

If you read my work and want it to continue, I need your help. If you are yet to do so, and can afford the £3 a month or £30 for the year, please become a paid subscriber.

We forced the inquiry. Now we need the numbers to make sure they cannot control what happens next.

Raja Miah MBE

HARMER'S STATEMENT USES THE SAME FEAR OF DIVISION

Harmer's statement used the same language Birmingham's MP Ayoub Khan had used two days earlier. Khan is the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. He was a Liberal Democrat councillor in Birmingham, in Harmer's party, until he left it in 2024 and won his seat backed by The Muslim Vote, a campaign set up to mobilise Muslim voters against Labour over Gaza.

On 29 September Khan wrote to the council, the police, the Children's Trust and the inquiry warning against narratives that "inflame division." He said the focus should be on victims and survivors "rather than the identities of perpetrators."

Two days later Harmer's statement promised to "never allow child sexual exploitation to be used to divide communities." That is the same fear West Midlands Police wrote down in its own profiles in 2010, and it is the fear that left children with the men while the people who should have protected them worried about the reaction.

Politicians who depended on communal votes treated scrutiny of the men as an attack on the communities they relied on, and children paid the price. Harmer's statement says "this is not about protecting institutions or reputations," yet not one of its commitments names a perpetrator, an official or a decision from Birmingham's past.

Harmer depends on that Muslim bloc to run Birmingham, and he refused to ask for the inquiry that will examine the role of ethnicity, religion and culture in the abuse.

Every group leader on the council backed Harmer's statement. That included Reform's Jex Parkin, who on 30 September had attacked Harmer for refusing to ask for the inquiry and attacked the council's report for leaving out the offenders' ethnicity. You will have to ask Parkin to explain why his group backed Harmer's statement the next day.

The National Inquiry is entering the phase that will decide not just where it goes, but what it is prepared to confront once it gets there.

Birmingham proves why that matters.

We fought to get the city onto the list. Now, before the first witnesses have even been heard, a Pakistani politician is already trying to decide which questions should be pushed out of focus.

That is why the pressure cannot stop at getting places named.

Red Wall and the Rabble is now more than 15,000 strong. In the last three months, more than 1,000 people have committed to a paid subscription, and 250,000 people have read one of my investigations so far this year.

We forced Oldham onto the list. We showed the way in Bradford. We campaigned relentlessly in Birmingham and across Wales, and both were named.

None of it was handed to us.

And now the next fight begins. Making sure the Inquiry actually asks the questions politicians and institutions spent decades avoiding.

No political party funds this work. No institution stands behind me. Everything I publish remains free because the evidence needs to reach as many people as possible.

The people who pay are the people who give me the independence to keep investigating, keep applying pressure and keep forcing these questions into the open.

We set out to reach 2,000 paid subscribers. We still need another 1,000 more.

If you want this Inquiry to go where the evidence leads, regardless of who it embarrasses, who it exposes or which political interests it threatens, become one of the next 1,000.

LONGFIELD MUST TAKE THE FILES. WE WILL MAKE SURE SHE DOES.

Anne Longfield does not need Roger Harmer's permission. Her inquiry can compel production of every relevant file held by Birmingham City Council, West Midlands Police and Birmingham Children's Trust. She must do it before Harmer's council decides what the public sees. That means the full Jesson report, the names of the steering group that had it stripped, the minutes of the 1995 vote, the police profiles from 2010 onwards, and the ethnicity of the men in the 98 cases open in Birmingham in 2026.

She must put Roger Taylor, Yve Buckland, Sir Michael Lyons and Peter Hay under oath and make them say what happened to the Jesson report. Taylor ran the council when the report was buried, Lyons ran it when councillors refused to look, and Hay cleared it in 2015. None of them has ever been questioned under oath about what happened to it, and every one of them must be.

Who decided what was kept, Councillor Harmer?

Harmer's council has no business searching its own files or deciding what to republish. That job belongs to the inquiry. If his council has nothing to hide, it will stop, hand everything to Longfield untouched, and leave her inquiry to decide what the public sees. If he will not, he is protecting the council and not the children.

Birmingham was named because ordinary people refused to let it go while the legacy media looked away. We published what the council buried, we published the letter nobody else would touch, and we kept going until Birmingham was on the list. We will be watching every page Harmer's council republishes and every document it says it cannot find.

Some of the girls in Jesson's files were thirteen when, on her account, this council decided the men raping them did not belong in its report. The youngest of them are in their late forties in 2026, and 143 children in Birmingham are at risk or being exploited in the same year. Roger Harmer would not ask for the inquiry that could name the men who abused them, and he does not get to decide what it sees.

Raja Miah MBE

My name is Raja Miah MBE. For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.

Children gang raped, communities betrayed, politicians and police officers involved protected, and you expected to shake your head and carry on as if nothing more can be done because lessons have been learned.

For eight years, I have refused. The police repeatedly dawn raided my home and falsified evidence to try and silence me. The newspapers smeared me. And Pakistani gangsters, under the protection of Labour politicians, followed me home. Islamists openly incited my murder.

Blacklisted by the mainstream media, only your support makes it possible for me to keep exposing the truth those in power want buried.

They sold children for votes and sacrificed entire towns and cities at their altar of multiculturalism. I help you make sense of it. And I help you fight back.

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We’re up against a machine, politicians, police, officials, and media, working together to shrink, sanitise, and bury the truth. This work survives because of you.

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Raja Miah MBE