Maajid Nawaz Says The Pakistani Cartels Blackmail Politicians

In Oldham, The Politicians Were Not Blackmailed. Some Were Partners. Others Were Members

Last night Maajid Nawaz went on GB News and used two words I have been punished for using for eight years. The words were cartel and biraderi.

He was describing a newly published network map whose anonymous creators claim to have identified 99 rape gangs, 68 connected families and thousands of links between offenders, businesses and political figures. What the mapping shows, in his words, is "an organised cartel organised along familial ties" through the biraderi system in the British Pakistani community. He said that for years the Labour Party has called anyone who speaks out "racist and Islamophobic" while that cartel operated "right under our noses", acquiring kompromat on politicians "in order to blackmail them", and that the public are still being told it is a conspiracy theory.

I have questions about that map. I do not know who made it and I have already said so. His language matters whether or not every line on it survives, because for eight years that language got you investigated, sued, raided and blacklisted. Now it is broadcast. That is a win, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Nawaz is wrong on one point, and the point matters. The politicians are not being blackmailed. Blackmail describes a victim, someone holding a secret and forced to comply to keep it. What I have documented in Oldham is an exchange. The networks delivered votes, activists, councillors and control of a party machine. The politicians delivered access, jobs, respectability and protection. When somebody exposed the arrangement, the institutions the politicians controlled came for him.

Not every Pakistani family network is criminal. In Oldham, specific political networks became cartels when criminal, family, business, mosque and party interests were organised together, and when a Labour council and a Labour mayor exercising Police and Crime Commissioner powers came to depend on what those networks delivered at the ballot box.

HOW THE VOTES WERE DELIVERED, AND WHERE IT STOPPED

Here is what happened in Oldham. All became exclusively Asian elected councillors. Mostly Pakistani and a handful of Bangladeshi. Between them and a Biraderi controlled postal vote harvesting exchange, they controlled 8 of the 20 wards in the borough. Control of 11 would have meant they controlled the entire borough.

Werneth went. Coldhurst went. Medlock Vale, Alexandra and St Mary's fell. Hollinwood and Watehead joined them. Chadderton Central held two of the three. None of them fell by accident. An organised bloc operating at seventy to eighty per cent turnout across a few targeted streets, with postal votes gathered at the door by community intermediaries before they ever reach the returning officer, does not need to be a majority of a ward. It needs to be the largest organised block in the room, and against a split field it wins every time.

In May 2025, needing two more wards, the operation moved on Royton. Marie Bashforth, the sitting Labour councillor in Royton South, would not accommodate it and was deselected before voters could pass judgment on her. Her replacement met leaders of Royton's Muslim community within days of her selection and before she had knocked on a single door.

In Royton North, Labour brought back Clint Phythian, the man who had told the council chamber that a statutory inquiry into the rape of children would be a waste of money, after Royton's voters had already removed him. That is the trade. The bloc delivers the seat. The party delivers the candidate the bloc can work with, and drops the one it cannot.

Go ask any of the Reform councillors in Oldham who co-ordinated the fight back against the Pakistani Cartels and the Biraderi block vote

Under police bail, I led a fight back against the Cartel takeover. First Royton held and the expansion was stopped at the ward boundary. In Chadderton South we removed Arooj Shah from her seat. In Hollinwood and Waterhead, White councillors have been elected against the cartels and are fighting them now. The machine can be beaten by people who know what it is and refuse to look away, and that is the reason the machine spent so much effort trying to make sure nobody said what it is.

THE COUNCIL LEADER AND THE GETAWAY DRIVER

Arooj Shah led Oldham Council. Mohammed Imran Ali, known across the borough as Irish Imy, was repeatedly seen campaigning alongside her and has been described locally and in national reporting as her political adviser. In 2013 he was jailed for assisting Dale Cregan after the murder of David Short, driving him to a safe house in Leeds. Cregan went on to murder PCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes. Ali is a convicted heroin dealer. He was recalled to prison in January 2025. This year, with his conviction spent, he was reported to be standing for a council seat in Werneth.

Shah has never denied the relationship. Asked about it, she told the press she could not turn her back on people she had known since childhood. Extend that line of thought. If she cannot turn her back on a convicted heroin dealing getaway driver of a cop killer because she had known him since childhood, it begs the question, would she turn her back on one of her uncles if he was involved in gang raping little White girls?

Andy Burnham knew all of this. He handed Shah his equalities portfolio at the Combined Authority in 2021. Oldham's voters removed her from her seat in 2022. She got back in during 2023 and he gave the brief straight back and put out a statement welcoming her by name.

So a man jailed for helping a police killer escape stayed exactly where he was in Oldham Labour, at the side of the leader of the council, while the leader of the council advised the Mayor of Greater Manchester on equalities, and the Mayor sat on the inequalities board she chaired. That is the partnership, and it is all on the record.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I EXPOSED IT

In August 2019 Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council set up a joint Gold Command operation. They called it Operation Hexagon. Its name appears twice in the terms of reference of the Oldham Assurance Review, the review Oldham Council asked Burnham and the Greater Manchester safeguarding board chair to conduct, and which Burnham presented to the country as his answer to the rape gang allegations.

On 22 July 2020 Sean Fielding, then Leader of Oldham Council, wrote an email naming Operation Hexagon, stating that my social media was being monitored, and confirming I had been interviewed under caution. The public did not know the operation existed. The politician I was investigating knew its name, its target and the state of its interviews, and was using that knowledge in private correspondence to go after people who shared my work.

On 9 December 2020 GMP's Assistant Chief Constable Nick Bailey confirmed that the referrals Hexagon had sent to the Crown Prosecution Service contained no child sexual exploitation offences.

While that operation was monitoring me, in July 2021, eight officers from Burnham's force raided my home following complaints from Shah. Before the raid there had been an attempt to connect me to a fire that destroyed her car. GMP have charged nobody for that fire to this day. I published the CCTV footage after it was leaked to me to protect me from being framed. People can judge it for themselves.

The case against me collapsed when Shah decided not to attend court to give evidence. Her allegations were never tested under cross-examination. Afterwards it was made clear to me, by police officers and by men from within the community, what would happen if I carried on speaking out against the Pakistani Cartels and the Biraderi.

I carried on.

So a Gold Command operation, named in the official response to a child rape scandal, produced no child rape charge. What the people running it did produce, in the same period, was a dawn raid on a man exposing the political protection around that scandal.

THE MAN WHO PRESIDED OVER IT

Burnham held the powers of Police and Crime Commissioner throughout. Hexagon ran inside his force. It is named in the terms of reference of his review.

Information about Hexagon, its name, its monitoring of me and the status of my interview, reached Sean Fielding, then leader of Oldham Council and a member of the Combined Authority, while the operation remained unknown to the public. Burnham has never said who authorised Hexagon, who funded it, who was briefed, or how a live police operation ended up in the private email of a Labour politician. He has been asked. He walked to Downing Street without answering.

I do not claim he ordered the raid. I claim something the paperwork supports. This happened inside a policing and political system he presided over, through an operation embedded in his own response to the grooming gangs, and he has never once accounted for what it became.

WHY THE BLACKMAIL STORY IS TOO KIND

Nawaz's intervention matters because the argument has crossed into the mainstream. The blackmail explanation still lets Labour off. There was no criminal organisation outside the party squeezing frightened councillors. Kompromat needs a politician who wants to hide the association, and Arooj Shah was asked about hers in public and said she would not walk away from it.

The Biraderi was useful. It won seats. In return the Labour Party gave it a council leader, a place at her side on the campaign trail, a portfolio at the Combined Authority and a police operation that turned on its critics.

For eight years they called the language a conspiracy theory because the language described them accurately. Now the words are on national television, and the next line of defence will be that the politicians were frightened victims of the clans and that they were being blackmailed.

Nobody in Oldham Labour was frightened. Not one politician was being blackmailed. They drew power from the arrangement, and when somebody laid that out in public, and mobilised the town to fight back, it was not the cartels who had eight officers at their front door. It was me.

I will testify at the National Inquiry. And the National Inquiry will be forced to follow the evidence, even if it leads all the way to No 10.

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.

Now the harder fight begins.

Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.

As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.

Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.

Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.

At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.

The pressure to protect a serving Prime Minister will be immense. The institutions that failed these girls will have every incentive to avoid putting the country's most powerful politician under oath. Much of the media will once again find reasons to look the other way.

That is why this campaign cannot slow down now.

For too long this has been a one man operation. It needs to become something much bigger. We need the resources to build a genuinely independent investigative organisation with:

• A professional website capable of reaching far larger audiences.
• Video production that takes our investigations to millions more people.
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• The resources to investigate, travel and expose institutional failure wherever it is found.

Over the last six weeks we have secured over 800 paid supporters towards our target of 2,000. That is an incredible achievement. Every new supporter strengthens this campaign, increases our voice and makes it harder for those in power to ignore the evidence.

If you believe the truth should be followed wherever it leads, please stand with us.

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Should we succeed, politicians will go to prison. Even if there is only the smallest chance of this happening, isn't it worth your support?

Raja Miah MBE