On Defiance
On Thursday morning, a week after record numbers of the White working class turned out to vote and Labour got smashed in the elections in Oldham, and just hours before Andy Burnham announced his intention to run for MP, I received this email from the Manchester Evening News.
Below is my response. Before you read it, you need to understand something, for 8 years, these people from the legacy media, in partnership with their political masters, have attempted everything they can to smear and silence me. That I am still alive has only been possible because good people have stood alongside me.
And for those that have asked, I am still waiting for GMP to contact me and confirm what exactly they want to interview me for. It has been 2 weeks since I received their phone call informing me I was a suspect of a crime.
And separate to the direct harassment and intimidation from the press and the police, the politicians in the Labour Party continue their efforts to demonise me.
This is the reality of my life. It is not something I ever wanted and it is not something I would wish on anyone else.
Never mind Welcome to Oldham, Welcome to My World.
FAO: M.E.N. Newsdesk
Re: Right of Reply - Oldham Investigation
This letter is a formal warning. You are invited to consider its contents carefully before publication.
Each allegation you have put to me is false. Several are defamatory on their face. You have provided no named sources, no documentary evidence, and no indication of who has made these claims or on what basis. That is not journalism. It is the transmission of smears under cover of a right-of-reply process.
Before addressing your specific allegations, I will state the following plainly.
I spent the better part of a decade reporting on the organised sexual exploitation of children in towns across northern England, including Oldham. The people of this town stood with me. Together, we fought to be heard by institutions that had every incentive to silence us. The Prime Minister announced a national inquiry in June 2025, formally established in April 2026. That inquiry exists in part because of this work. Oldham has been named as one of the first areas to face a formal local investigation.
The inquiry is now investigating what I exposed years before any mainstream outlet would touch it. The documented correlation between networks of Pakistani men and the industrial-scale rape of White girls in Labour Party controlled towns reliant on a bloc Muslim vote is no longer a fringe allegation. It is the subject of a statutory national inquiry. The nation now knows what Oldham knew first.
It is also worth stating what else has happened recently. Reform UK has destroyed the Labour Party in Oldham at the ballot box. Andy Burnham is manoeuvring toward a return to parliament. My campaigning is a direct threat to both projects. A smear piece in the MEN, timed to this precise political moment, built on anonymous allegations with no documentary foundation, is not a coincidence. Your editorial team should reflect on how that sequence will look if this matter proceeds to litigation.
On allegation one: I produce investigative content about institutional failures and political corruption. I share all of my content freely. That this content generates income is neither improper nor unusual. Journalists are paid for their work. The framing of income as evidence of wrongdoing will require you to apply the same standard to your own newsroom.
On allegation two: I hold an MBE. My record as an anti-racist campaigner is not a matter of assertion that is documented across decades of public life. I have spoken out against Nazis and white supremacists consistently and at personal cost. I have sat in rooms with multiple Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State. My expertise has been at the forefront of designing and implementing interventions to safeguard communities from extremism. I have worked in counter-extremism, facing down Islamists and jihadists who sought to cause mass casualties on British soil. Fighting to protect children from racially motivated gang rape is the continuation of that same record, not a departure from it.
The suggestion that this man, with a 30 year career as an anti racist, now peddles racial hatred is not merely false, it is the inversion of everything my public record demonstrates. Any journalist conducting basic due diligence before publication would know this. The question of whether your editorial team has done so is one I intend to pursue.
On allegations three, four, and five: These are serious allegations for which you have provided nothing. No name. No date. No document. No survivor has made any such complaint to me. If you hold evidence that I have identified a survivor of child sexual abuse without their consent, you have a legal obligation to report it to the police, not to a journalist's inbox with a 2pm Monday deadline. The fact that you have not done so tells me everything I need to know about the quality of your source.
On allegation six: I hold politicians accountable for decisions that have caused demonstrable harm to children and communities. Accountability is not incitement. If you intend to argue otherwise in print, you will need to identify specifically what I said, when I said it, and the causal chain between my words and any act of harassment. Vague attribution is not a defence to a defamation claim.
I have been arrested. I have been charged. I have been blacklisted, de-platformed, and subjected to sustained harassment by people who believed that sufficient pressure, applied consistently enough, would eventually produce my silence. It did not. Every attempt to stop this work has failed. This attempt will fail too.
You should understand what you are dealing with. I am a man from Oldham who refused to look the other way to this town's children being gang raped while its institutions looked away. I stood up when doing so cost me everything. I stood up when no one in mainstream media would touch these stories. I stood up when the political class closed ranks against me. I am still standing.
Concealing the name of whoever commissioned this communication will not protect you. I know this town. I know how its power operates. I know who benefits from my silence and I know what they are prepared to do to secure it. This letter will not secure it. You will not silence me.
I will continue to speak for the people of Oldham and now beyond. I will continue to expose those who failed its children. I will continue to fight for what remains of this country's democracy. That is not a declaration. It is a statement of what I have already demonstrated across eight years of this work, against opposition that would have broken most people.
Do what you intend to do. I will do the same.
You should be aware that I am currently conducting High Court proceedings in the King's Bench Division, Media and Communications List. I have experienced solicitors engaged in active litigation. Any publication that repeats these allegations without evidence will be treated as a further actionable wrong.
One further matter. I am a public figure operating in an environment where allegations of this kind carry physical consequences beyond reputational harm. Oldham is not an abstract location. It is a town with a documented history of communal tension where my name and my work are widely known.
Publishing a piece that frames me as a racist and an exploiter of abuse survivors does not merely damage my reputation. In that environment, it creates physical risk. Should this publication proceed and result in any threat or act of violence against me or my family, the question of whether your editorial team acted recklessly in publishing unsubstantiated material of this nature will be a matter for the courts to consider. I am putting you on notice of that risk now.
Seek legal advice before you publish this. That is not a threat. It is the only genuinely helpful thing I can offer you at this stage.
I am providing this response on the record. You may publish it in full or not at all.
Raja Miah MBE
I ordinarily finish my articles with a short bio and a plea to support me. I'm not going to bother today. Instead, here are the links. I leave it to you to consider why they are attacking me, whether you would risk what I have, and if I am worth supporting.
Buy me a coffee using one of these links here;
http://BuyMeACoffee.com/recusantnine
And finally, this is the link to my crowdfunder where I am pursuing a case against one of the most powerful men in the country. We are creeping towards £75,000.
Every day I survive this is a blessing. Every day that passes I remind myself that the world is a better place because ordinary people decided they could not look away from evil and risked their all to face it.
My name is Raja Miah. My legacy will not be defined by what the powerful who seek to silence me write about me. It will be defined by those I stood alongside in the fight against tyranny.
Raja Miah MBE