Silence, Smears, and Spin

Why McMahon Must Answer Under Oath

Jim McMahon wants you to believe he’s a truth-teller on grooming gangs. I lived the other side of his story. While he led Oldham Council, institutions minimised and buried what was happening to hundreds of little White girls in this town. When we finally forced the truth into daylight, Andy Burnham's political machine swapped denial for a managed “assurance” exercise and a glossy police operation that still can’t point to courtroom results.

I’m going to set out the record. Dates, decisions, and what they refuse to say out loud.

1) 2011–2015: What Happened on McMahon’s Watch

McMahon became Leader of Oldham Council in May 2011 and stayed in post until January 2016. Those years sit squarely inside the period later acknowledged in official paperwork as containing serious safeguarding failings across agencies. That matters, because it tells you the system was failing while he was in charge. However loudly the press releases praised “strong leadership”, during McMahon's watch, hundreds of little White girls were being dragged off the streets of our town and were being gang raped by Pakistani men. McMahon knew. His council knew. They actively hid what was happening from parents. Parents, who if they knew, could have protected their children,

The choice to hide the pattern

Oldham’s Messenger programme, the borough’s response to child sexual exploitation, was presented as best practice. But it deliberately avoided naming ethnicity in public-facing strategy and communications. The intention was clear. Do not name the pattern of groups of predominantly Pakistani heritage men preying on White working-class girls.

You can’t map risk you refuse to describe. You can’t fix what you won’t say out loud. Contemporary reporting later confirmed that, under McMahon’s leadership, the taskforce decided against revealing offender ethnicity. This was a political choice with severe safeguarding consequences. Internally, council material recognised most offenders as British Asian; publicly, ethnicity was downplayed or erased.

At that time there was no grassroots campaign here forcing an inquiry. Survivors weren’t believed. Whistleblowers were sidelined. The town stayed quiet because the cover-up held - until it didn’t.

2) 2019: When We Spoke, McMahon Smeared

When I began exposing what had been hidden, McMahon didn’t engage with evidence, he attacked the messenger. In 2019 he painted me as “racist” and “far-right,” and waved off criticism of his tenure as “defamation.” That wasn’t accountability; it was reputation management.

In Westminster, the line hardened. In the 30 June 2022 debate, once the Assurance Review had been published, McMahon took refuge in a convenient truth that “CSE happens in every community". He used this to blur this town’s specific reality. He also dismissed the idea of an institutional cover-up as “disinformation.” That’s not leadership; that’s misdirection from someone who sat at the top table while the silence held.

3) 2019-2022 The “Assurance Review”

Andy Burnham’s Oldham Assurance Review was published on 20 June 2022 and was sold as a serious reckoning. It wasn’t. It was a managed, non-statutory exercise commissioned by the very tier of government under scrutiny, built with a narrow scope, heavy on “lessons learned,” and light on who did what and when. Survivors called it a whitewash because that’s what it looked like. McMahon treated it as closure.

If you won’t compel documents, won’t compel testimony, and won’t name accountable people, you don’t get truth. you continue the cover up.

The review itself acknowledges historic failings, which overlap McMahon’s leadership window. It validated years of campaigning in one sense, that there were serious failures, but it studiously avoided a statutory route that could have tested officials under oath. It also avoided taking the testimony of a single survivor. Why?

4) 2022-2025 The National Inquiry McMahon Ran From

Once the “assurance” fig leaf was in place, the machine dug in against a full, statutory inquiry with teeth.

• Oldham Council (2020–2024): motions for an independent inquiry were repeatedly blocked while Labour held overall control. Only after Labour lost that control in July 2024 did the council grudgingly agree to a non-statutory local inquiry. It had taken campaigners 6 years to get to this point through voting out and removing 3 consecutive Labour Party leaders and removing Labour from power.
• Government (October 2024): Jess Phillips, the Safeguarding Minister for Girls, rejected calls for a government-led inquiry for Oldham, pushing responsibility back to the council. No one said anything. No one until Elon Musk blew the lid off the entire affair.
• Parliament (January 2025): MPs voted down a Conservative amendment for a new national grooming-gangs inquiry. Andy Burnham switched sides and publicly favoured a limited national inquiry. His original review had been published in June 2022. For 2 1/2 years, Burnham had remained silent over the failings of his investigation.

Throughout this entire period, McMahon continued his campaign of hate. He falsely claimed that I had been responsible for safeguarding failures, attempted to have the National Crime Agency investigate me and even resorted to trying to use the blowing up of the council leader's car to have me arrested.

The arson attack on Arooj Shah's car was an inside job. Leaked CCTV footage shows exactly what happened with the car being left unlocked and the window smashed after the door was open. The police refuse to confirm whether Shah and McMahon were interviewed nor issue any update on their investigation.

Did senior Labour Party politicians set up an arson attack on Arooj Shah's car to falsely claim 'far right' to try and shut down a campaign to expose the industrial scale gang rape of working class White girls by bloc vote supplying Pakistani men?

5) Operation Sherwood: headlines, not justice

Operation Sherwood was launched in June 2022 “to investigate non-recent cases” tied to Oldham and to the Assurance Review. GMP’s explainer page confirms a narrow remit. It will start with ten cases from the review, and “explore further lines of enquiry.” It also leans hard on inputs, money and headcount, instead of outcomes. We’re told the CSE unit will be 106 strong and that more than £2.3m has been invested. What we aren’t told is how many arrests became charges and convictions.

Three years on, GMP is still feeding the press arrests while refusing to publish a scoreboard of justice. Their latest update (24 September 2025) says: “To date, 21 suspects have been arrested as part [of Sherwood].” It lists charges under other operations (Exmoor, Green Jacket) in the same breath, but for Sherwood it offers arrests only. If Sherwood has produced charges or convictions, GMP’s own material does not show them.

Here’s what their public material still won’t tell you:

• Charges and convictions: How many Sherwood arrests progressed to charge, how many to trial, how many to conviction? Their Sherwood page and arrest update don’t say. They trumpet arrests but won’t publish results.
• Case attrition: Of the original ten “legacy” cases, how many collapsed because survivors refused to re-engage with the same institutions that failed them? How many were screened out as “non-viable,” and for what reasons? Silence.
• Scale and scope: How many Oldham survivors have engaged with Sherwood? How many suspected perpetrators have been identified beyond the initial ten cases? What criteria are used to pursue one line and park another? Silence.
• Borrowed glory: The Sherwood explainer pads its credibility by name-dropping other operations where charges have been secured. That’s choreography, blending successes elsewhere into a page about Sherwood to imply momentum Sherwood hasn’t itself demonstrated.

“Non-recent” is the giveaway phrase. It sanitises the timeline and softens public memory of live institutional failure. The point of Sherwood, if it has a point, should be to convert truth into prosecutions. Right now it reads like an operations brand pushing headlines without outcomes.

6) What Accountability Really Looks Like

Accountability isn’t a press release. It’s something the public can see with their own eyes, measure in hard numbers, and watch play out in court. In Oldham that means three things working together:

1. we tell the truth
2. we prosecute offenders
3. we change practice so it cannot happen again.

To achieve this, we need to start with radical transparency. GMP must put a live Sherwood scoreboard on the public record and keep it there. I’m talking about real outcomes, not glossy inputs:

• how many survivors have engaged
• how many suspects have been identified
• how many arrests became charges
• how many charges made it to trial
• how many trials ended in convictions.

When cases are dropped, we need to be provided with a short, plain-English reason. Oldham has to be separated from the rest of Greater Manchester so our numbers aren’t buried in regional totals. Updates need to be published every quarter and have an independent statistician sign it off before it goes live. No spin. Just results.

If GMP can’t publish charges and convictions, that tells you they don’t have them, or they don’t want you to know.

Truth-finding has to be statutory. The “assurance” era failed because it had no teeth. We need to freeze the records now. Preserve emails, chat logs, minutes, briefings, absolutely everything.

Now we have forced the statutory inquiry with the power to compel documents and force testimony under oath from council leaders, senior officers, police and partner agencies, hearings should be open by default, evidence published unless the law says otherwise, and the inquiry should set both an interim and a final reporting date so there is no drift.

Survivors must have legal standing, the right to make submissions, and trauma-informed procedures.

The outcome isn’t “lessons learned.” The outcome is who knew, who signed off, and who obstructed. Name them.

At the same time, fix the route to court. Survivors should not be forced back through the same doors that failed them. A clean line should exist into the CPS that does not re-traumatise and does not stall. Take one properly conducted, trauma-informed evidential interview, record it to court standard, and stop making victims repeat themselves to a parade of badges. Give every survivor a named, independent advocate who can escalate directly to the CPS and who guarantees regular updates.

When prosecutors say “no further action,” they should have to give a written reason; survivors should have a simple way to ask for an internal review and, on complex historic cases, a second independent charging view.

In court, special measures should be standard, trial dates should be timetabled, and the practical help that keeps victims engaged, travel, childcare, counselling, should be built in, not begged for. We need to track why cases drop out, fear, delay, poor contact, evidential gaps, and fix those problems in public.

Finally, stop hiding the pattern. Risk cannot be managed if you refuse to describe it. Where it is relevant to prevention and safeguarding, publish offender and victim profiles. Yes, that includes ethnicity, alongside age bands, locations, and grooming methods. Do it lawfully, do it precisely, publish the methodology and the caveats, and add an annual equality-impact note that shows how the data is used to prevent harm, not to inflame tensions. You can be honest about a disproportionate pattern in group-based exploitation and still say abuse exists across all communities. Both are true. Only honesty helps prevention.

We need to set deadlines and mean them. Within 30 days, stand up the survivor-to-CPS pathway, appoint advocates, and switch on the single-interview protocol. Within 60 days, publish the statutory inquiry’s terms of reference, confirm evidence-preservation orders, and issue the first witness list. Within 90 days, the Sherwood scoreboard goes live with audited numbers. If a deadline is missed, publish who blocked it, why, and the new date—on the same page. If someone keeps blocking it, name them.

That’s accountability: visible, legal, survivor-led, and measurable. Anything less is theatre.

Totally. Here’s the add-on, in my voice, that plugs straight into the article after the accountability section and pulls the focus back to McMahon:

7) Why is Jim McMahon Not Calling For Any of This?

Because every step I’ve set out would blow apart the story he’s selling.

A live, quarterly scoreboard would end the theatre. It would show, in black and white, what Sherwood has actually delivered after more than three years: how many arrests became charges, how many charges became convictions, and how many cases quietly died. That transparency would puncture the headlines he trades on. It would also expose the cost of the years when leaders told the town everything was fine.

A statutory inquiry would put him under oath about the years he ran Oldham Council. It would pull the Messenger paperwork, the briefings, the emails, the WhatsApps, the media lines - who knew, who signed off, who told comms to strip out ethnicity, who decided risk could be managed by keeping the public calm. It would call the senior officers he worked with and the councillors who parroted the lines. It would test his “no cover-up” claim against the record. He can’t control that process, and he knows it.

A clean survivor-to-CPS route would surface the thing politicians hate most: feedback you can’t spin. If survivors are walking away because they were failed, because they were smeared by the town’s top politician, because they don’t trust the same police force now asking for statements, the data will show it. It will show where cases stall, who didn’t call back, who missed deadlines, and how often “no further action” is a paperwork habit rather than an evidential wall. That isn’t a communications problem; it’s accountability with names and dates.

Naming the pattern closes the last escape hatch. For years, McMahon blurred Oldham’s reality with the line that “it happens in every community.” Publishing offender and victim profiles - lawfully, precisely, where relevant to prevention - would confirm what he refused to say while he was in charge: there was a disproportionate pattern in group-based exploitation here. Admitting that now isn’t a tweak; it’s an admission he was wrong then.

There’s a party reason, too. His leadership position sits inside a national machine that rejected a statutory Oldham inquiry and voted down a broader national one. The “assurance + Sherwood + soundbites” model suits that machine. It creates the appearance of motion without the risk of discovery. It gives ministers and MPs ready-made lines “ongoing investigations… survivor support… lessons learned…” that never have to collide with a sworn witness and a hard document.

And there’s the personal calculation. His brand is built on being the responsible grown-up who steadied Oldham. Backing a real inquiry with teeth is an admission that the steadiness was a façade and that while he was leader, the system he fronted failed in ways he didn’t tell the public, and then he attacked the people who did. The moment he supports the plan I’ve set out, he validates the case against his own record.

That’s why he won’t call for it. It’s safer to praise “brave victims,” point at arrests, and talk about “every community” than to publish the scoreboard, sit under oath, and let survivors take a straight path to the CPS. It’s safer to manage outrage than to dismantle the machine that produced it.

So here is the challenge, put plainly. If Jim McMahon believes his own press release, he should back the four steps now:

1. demand GMP publish the Sherwood numbers quarterly
2. confirm there were serious failings in Oldham during his tenure and demand the statutory inquiry commences with no further delays
3. stand up and support an independent survivor-to-CPS route that bypasses the police force involved in failing the victims first time around
4. commit to honest pattern reporting to drive prevention. No more slogans. No more curated “assurance.” The nation has a right to question the corellation between Pakistanis and the gang rape of White girls without being branded far right or racist.

If McMahon won’t do that, he’s not leading Oldham out of this, he’s still standing between the town and the truth.

8) The McMahon Record

Strip away the press releases and you’re left with a straight line:

• 2011–2015: He led while the system failed. The Messenger posture avoided naming the racial pattern in public. The town stayed quiet because the cover-up held.
• 2019: When challenged, he smeared. He dismissed critics and hid behind accusations rather than evidence.
• 2022: In Parliament he blurred the racial dynamic with the “every community” line and waved away cover-up claims as “disinformation.” Meanwhile a managed, non-statutory review was packaged as closure.
• 2020–2025: His party blocked, deflected, and narrowed every attempt at a real inquiry. First locally, then at Westminster. Only when political control slipped did Oldham agree to a non-statutory local inquiry; a Government-led probe was rejected; and a national inquiry amendment fell.
• 2022–2025: He hid behind an operation whose headline metric is arrests, not convictions. If Sherwood has produced charges or convictions, GMP hasn’t shown them. After more than three years, their own update lists 21 arrests under Sherwood and points to charges secured under other ops. That tells its own story.

That isn’t leadership. It’s reputation management.

9) The Campaign Continues

Oldham’s girls were failed twice. First by predators and the institutions that looked away and then by politicians and police who tried to manage the outrage instead of owning the truth. Jim McMahon wants to rewrite history. We will not let him.

McMahon should be examined, properly, by a national, statutory inquiry into CSE cover-ups, alongside every official who signed off the decisions that kept this town in the dark. And GMP should stop selling arrests as justice and start publishing the only numbers that matter: charges and convictions.

Until then, save the slogans. Bring the receipts. Bring the charges. Bring the truth.

They silenced victims. They erased evidence. They persecuted whistleblowers, discredited survivors, buried official reports, and protected predators. They thought no one would fight back and that they had got away with what they did. They were wrong

I’m not Maggie Oliver. I’m not Tommy Robinson. I’m a political campaigner. My mission is clear: to expose the cover-up, explain the mechanics of corruption, educate the nation, and show people how to fight back.

That’s why they tried to imprison me. They know how dangerous my voice is. This is why they spent 3 years fabricating evidence and trying to falsely prosecute me. And when they failed, the Labour Party tried and failed to sue me.

Holding those responsible to account, including those who traded children for votes, won’t happen unless many more of you stand with me. Every day I can continue to campaign, more people learn the truth. I can’t do this alone.

If my words have ever helped you make sense of a broken system, if they’ve ever made you feel seen, heard, or hopeful, please don’t scroll past.

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We are now so close. This is now desperation from the Pakistani Rape Clan protecting Labour party. With your help, we can finish this.

- Raja 🙏