Burnham's Ministry of Truth
Part Three: "No Evidence of a Cover-Up" Is Not a Finding
When Andy Burnham's Oldham Assurance Review was published, his expert investigator, Malcolm Newsam, stood up and said they had been "presented with no evidence" of a cover-up. Not that there was no cover-up. That they had been presented with no evidence of one. Those are not the same statement. They are not even close to the same statement.
"No evidence of a cover-up" is a finding. "We were presented with no evidence of a cover-up" is a statement about what was handed to them by the organisations responsible for the cover-up.
The police handed them the evidence they wanted. The council handed them the evidence they needed. The politicians handed them nothing but words that could not be checked for accuracy. Nobody volunteered the evidence of their own wrongdoing. The process had no power to compel them to do so. Worse, Andy Burnham's Assurance Review was never tasked with looking for a cover-up.
Investigating cover-up was explicitly outside the terms of reference. Burnham's experts did not even define what a cover-up would constitute. If you were going to look for something and report that it did not exist, the minimum you would do is define what it was you were looking for. They did not do that.
You cannot find evidence of something you were never commissioned to look for, using a methodology that guaranteed those responsible for the cover-up would never be presented with evidence of their own wrongdoing, then declare that there is no cover-up.
That is not an investigation. That is the Ministry of Truth.
Newsam stood at the front, having published the review with a disclaimer stating the authors took no responsibility for the accuracy of what they had been told, and said it was an amazing piece of work.
Within hours, Jim McMahon, Debbie Abrahams, and Angela Rayner, the Oldham MPs, one of whom would go on to become Deputy Prime Minister, issued a joint statement on parliamentary letterheaded paper.
They called Burnham's Assurance Review "one of the most comprehensive safeguarding reviews undertaken." They declared it had "addressed head-on the false and often politically motivated conspiracy theories that claimed grooming gangs were operating under the protection of senior politicians." They stated they were "pleased that the report draws a line under this."
Consider what I have described about how that review was constructed. The terms of reference written by the organisations under scrutiny. The excluded schools, excluded organised crime, excluded mosques, excluded postal vote fraud. The interviewees who amended their own records. The disclaimer stating the authors took no responsibility for the accuracy of what they were told. Ask yourself whether any of that is accurately describable as one of the most comprehensive safeguarding reviews ever undertaken.
The town's Labour MPs then held an adjournment debate in Parliament. I was named in Parliament, under the protection of parliamentary privilege which means they cannot be sued for it, as a far-right activist with links to child abuse. Jim McMahon and Debbie Abrahams stood in the House of Commons and did that, using the review Burnham commissioned as their authority.
Burnham commissioned the review that made all of this possible. He knew what was happening around him. He watched the MPs for his territory deploy his review against me in Parliament. He never corrected the misrepresentation. Not once. Not publicly. Not at the time.
If they had succeeded, if the review had held and the conspiracy theorist label had stuck, there would be no national inquiry. None of the national scrutiny that has followed would have taken place. It is only because a small group of campaigners in Oldham refused to accept the line being drawn that the line did not hold. Andy Burnham's Assurance Review was the instrument of suppression. It very nearly worked.
The passive non-finding, we were presented with no evidence, was converted in writing on the day of publication into a positive declaration that the people telling the truth were liars. The man who built the instrument that made it possible said nothing. He now wants to be Prime Minister.
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Three years later, in January 2025, forced by everything that had happened and the weight of accumulated evidence that the Manchester Evening News could not reach or manage, Burnham finally admitted his review had limitations.
"There's a difference at a local level and a statutory public inquiry. There will always be limitations with what you can do with a local review. The review team could not compel someone to speak to them...That is something I couldn't do at my level." - Andy Burnham
BBC News
Three years. Three years in which he allowed that characterisation to stand. That there had been no cover up. Three years in which I was on bail, charged, summoned to court, had my home ransacked by police officers, was threatened by Pakistani gangsters. Three years in which he said nothing to correct the record his party had built on the back of his review.
Those three years count. Those three years is evidence of Andy Burnham's role in what took place. There is no running away from this. No matter how powerful he becomes.
Part 4 to follow
I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town EXPOSED ANDY BURNHAM and helped force the national inquiry.
You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back.
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Raja Miah MBE