Silencing Daddy Before He Talks

The National Inquiry can compel Shabir Ahmed to give evidence under oath. Deport him first, and the one man who may know how the grooming gangs were protected is beyond its reach forever.

On Monday, Shabana Mahmood will stand up in the Commons and tell the country she has found a way to deport Shabir Ahmed. The papers already have the briefing. Loophole closed, child rapist out.

I have spent eight years watching how this game is played, so let me save you some time. Ahmed is going nowhere. The people announcing his deportation know he is going nowhere. Monday is for something else, and I will get to it.

UK government will change law so grooming gang ringleader can be deported

The home secretary is expected to set out on Monday how she plans to amend the 1971 Immigration Act.

BBC NewsJack Fenwick and Anna Lamche

Start with the timing.

Ahmed walked out of prison on 2 July. Fourteen years served of a 22 year sentence. Thirty counts of child rape. He is sitting in supervised accommodation right now with a tag on his ankle and an exclusion zone drawn around Rochdale.

Mahmood's big announcement lands on Monday. So does the second reading of her Immigration and Asylum Bill, the fifth immigration law Parliament has been handed in five years. That is not luck. Any MP with doubts about that Bill now gets to explain why they voted to keep a child rapist in Britain. The Home Office needed a battering ram for a difficult vote and Ahmed's release handed them one. His victims waited fourteen years for government to act, and when it finally stirred, the first thing it did was use them as cover.

Seven Home Secretaries Sat On This File

There is one question worth putting to the Home Secretary on Monday. When did her department first work out that section 7 of the 1971 Act blocked Ahmed's removal?

I will tell you when. Ahmed was stripped of his British citizenship years ago. In 2018 the Home Office went to the Court of Appeal to deport members of this gang and won. Government lawyers lived inside these men's files for years. The exemption Mahmood will unveil as some new discovery sits in a statute every Home Office lawyer knows by heart, and it sat in plain view through all of that litigation.

Theresa May, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly, then Yvette Cooper after Labour took office. Every one of them held this file while Ahmed sat in a cell with a release date printed on his paperwork. And then it landed on the desk of Shabana Mahmood herself, where it sat for the best part of a year while that date crept closer. The amendment she will announce to applause on Monday could have been passed in an afternoon by any of the seven of them, at any point in the last decade, including by her. Nobody bothered until the cameras arrived.

Which makes Chris Philp's week quite something. Philp is touring the studios demanding emergency legislation and telling anyone who will listen that the Conservatives led the calls for deportation. Philp was a Home Office minister in the government that left this exemption untouched for the entire length of Ahmed's sentence. His party had the file, the court ruling and the release date. The urgency turned up with the cameras, same as it always does.

Seven Of The Nine Are Still Here

You do not have to take my word for it that this law change removes nobody. The proof is walking around Rochdale today.

Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan were convicted alongside Ahmed in 2012. Rauf trafficked children. Khan got a 13 year old victim pregnant. Both lost their deportation appeals at the Court of Appeal in 2018, both were stripped of British citizenship, and both then renounced their Pakistani citizenship to make themselves unremovable. A third man tore up his passport before the ruling even landed.

That was eight years ago. In the time since, Parliament has churned out immigration law after immigration law, and Monday's Bill makes five in five years, every single one sold from a podium as the moment the foreign criminals finally go. Rauf and Khan have watched every one of them arrive from the town where they raped children. Their deportation orders are pieces of paper, because removal needs a country willing to open its door and no statute passed in Westminster can conjure one.

The law was never the problem. In 2018 the law said these men could go, a court confirmed it, and they are still here. The missing ingredient for eight years has been will, and nobody has worked out how to legislate that.

And Rauf and Khan are only part of the count. Nine men went down in that trial, 77 years between them. Mohammed Sajid and Hamid Safi are the only two who ever left the country, and Pakistani officials have since described taking them as a gesture of goodwill. Four of the nine had their citizenship stripped, the heaviest weapon the state owns. Ahmed, Abdul Aziz, Khan, Rauf. All four are still in Britain, because stripping a man's passport with nowhere to send him just leaves you a stateless resident sat here forever. The remaining three, Kabeer Hassan, Mohammed Amin and Abdul Qayyum, served their short sentences and went back to their lives with no deportation question ever raised. Hassan, the man handed a 15 year old girl as a birthday treat by Ahmed, was an Oldham man. There is no public record of removal action against any of the three, and nobody in Westminster has ever once said their names.

Fourteen years on from the trial the whole country remembers, the score is seven of the nine still here. The two removals happened because Pakistan chose to do us a favour. The entire national row is about one man out of nine, the oldest, the tagged one in the supervised flat, and the law being announced on Monday touches nobody else on that list.

And here is the bit the coverage keeps skating past. Rauf and Khan are not even covered by the 1971 exemption. The loophole Mahmood is closing on Monday was never their loophole. What keeps them in Rochdale is that Pakistan refuses to take them, and Pakistan refuses to take Ahmed too. That is the actual wall, it sits in Islamabad, and no Home Secretary can amend it.

Her Own Department Gave The Game Away

Buried in the weekend briefing is a government source saying it plainly. The domestic fix is the easy bit, they said, and whether Ahmed stays comes down to FCDO negotiations with Pakistan.

So there it is, from their own mouths. The law change decides nothing.

Pakistan says its official records show Ahmed is not their citizen. Pakistan has spent years refusing to take Rauf and Khan. A senior Pakistani official called the British demands "arrogance and a colonial mindset", on the record, in the Telegraph. That is the wall Monday's announcement pretends does not exist.

Mahmood gets her headline. Ahmed stays in his taxpayer funded accommodation with his tag on. Everybody involved knows this before a word is said at the despatch box.

The Price Is Dissidents

This part is getting a fraction of the coverage, and it should frighten you far more than one pensioner rapist.

Pakistan has named its price. Islamabad wants Britain to hand over Pakistani political dissidents living here, people their state accuses of stirring hatred and unrest, in exchange for taking Ahmed.

The trade puts a 73 year old convicted child rapist on one side and, on the other, people who fled the Pakistani state for safety here, whose names Islamabad has already written down. Our government's counter-moves are visa restrictions or trimming the £50 million we hand Pakistan in aid every year. Trimming, as though the correct answer to blackmail is a slightly smaller cheque.

So let me state my own position plainly, because nobody should have to guess it. Cut every penny of the aid and stop every visa until Pakistan takes back all three of its convicted child rapists, Ahmed, Rauf and Khan. We hand Islamabad £50 million a year of taxpayers' money and tens of thousands of visas on top, and in return their officials call us colonial and dictate terms over a child rapist they claim was never theirs. A country that refuses to take back its own convicted criminals has no claim on a single pound of British aid or a single visa. None of this is complicated. It requires a government willing to say no and mean it, and we have not had one of those in my lifetime.

What it must never involve is dissidents. People who fled that state and sought safety here are not bargaining chips, and the moment a British official lets Islamabad believe otherwise, every refugee in this country learns their safety is negotiable. Any government that even sits in a room and entertains swapping dissidents for a sex offender has given up whatever the asylum system was supposed to stand for. Ask on Monday whether that demand has been rejected outright. Watch how long the answer takes.

He Has Been To Strasbourg Before

The lawyers will spend months on the 1971 drafting and on whether any carve-out can catch Ahmed without touching the Windrush generation. That fight matters, but it is the warm-up. The place this deportation goes to die is the human rights courts, and Ahmed has already shown everyone his hand.

In 2014, two years into his sentence, he took Britain to the European Court of Human Rights. His lawyers argued the jury was biased against him, that all twelve jurors were white, that the police were driven by anti-Muslim prejudice, that he was discriminated against on grounds of race and religion, and that the trial and the press coverage of it violated his Article 8 right to a private and family life. A man convicted of raping children told an international court that newspapers reporting his convictions had disrespected his family life. Strasbourg declared the lot inadmissible in 2016.

He will run it all again the moment a deportation order lands. This time it will be Article 8 on sixty years of residence and Article 3 on the treatment he says awaits him in Pakistan, and his own co-defendants have already written the playbook, because Rauf and Khan fought their removal on Article 8 and both are still in Rochdale. The government is briefing that the seriousness of his offences will sink an Article 8 claim, and it may be right, but the Rauf and Khan litigation ran for years either way. For a 73 year old man, running for years is winning.

Philp says openly that Ahmed's claims will have a good chance of success, and he is demanding the legislation anyway, because his real destination is leaving the Convention altogether and Ahmed has just handed him the poster. Labour will not leave, Philp knows it, and so the two parties get to fight about human rights law across the despatch box for months while the man himself sits in his supervised flat, going nowhere, which suits everybody involved except his victims.

And since the words human rights will be everywhere on Monday, here is what fourteen years of them looks like from that town. Article 3 of the Convention prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment. The girls Ahmed raped lived through years of it while the state looked away, and their names have never been read out in Strasbourg. The Convention has been a busy instrument in Shabir Ahmed's hands. His victims never got a day in front of it.

The Only People Who Got Removed Were The Victims

Put Monday to one side for a minute.

Charlotte Tetley was one of the Rochdale gang's victims. In 2023 she left Rochdale for Macclesfield, because one of the men who abused her had come back to the town. Eleven years after the trial it was the survivor packing her bags while the man who raped her settled back in. She spent her last year begging for help. She told doctors she wanted to die. Hospital staff reported her missing and police refused to send anyone, citing a policy that says officers only attend where there is immediate risk of serious harm. NHS staff took her off the mental health bed list before anyone had reviewed her.

In September 2024 she sat down on the railway tracks at Macclesfield and a train killed her. She was 33. The coroner was troubled enough by what she found to issue a formal warning that more people will die the same way unless something changes.

Then there is Ruby, abused by the same network. Nobody told her one of her abusers had been let out of prison. She found out when she turned the end of a supermarket aisle and he was standing there. She locked herself in a changing room and phoned Maggie Oliver in what Oliver describes as a "complete and utter meltdown". The protection Ruby has now, an urgent response marker and an app on her phone, exists because a retired detective rang Greater Manchester Police herself and shamed them into it.

A state that cannot deport these men could at least have managed a phone call to the girls they raped before opening the gates. It could not manage that either. And there is more of this coming, because early release is emptying the prisons, and survivors in Rotherham have already been warned their abusers may walk out ahead of time. Every one of those releases will play out the same way, in supermarket aisles and coroner's courts, while Westminster congratulates itself on immigration law number five.

The One Witness Who Knows The Names

Here is the argument I have been making since the day this man walked through the prison gates, and I will keep making it until somebody at that inquiry acts on it.

The National Inquiry exists. Longfield chairs it. Oldham is one of the first areas named, and I spent years getting arrested and smeared to help force that inquiry into existence, so forgive me for caring what it can actually reach.

There is no witness in England who knows more about how these networks ran, who covered for them and who took the calls, than the man his victims were made to call Daddy.

And that matters because Longfield's inquiry is statutory. It carries the power to summon any witness on British soil, and refusing the summons is a criminal offence. Ahmed is on British soil, in a flat the state pays for, at an address the state knows. Serving him would be the easiest job that inquiry ever does. Put him on a plane and the power dies at the border, because no British summons reaches Islamabad.

So what is the entire political class doing? Racing each other to get him out of the country before a summons gets anywhere near him, and calling it justice. Once he lands in Islamabad that file shuts forever, and every name in his head goes with it.

Jim McMahon, the MP for Oldham West, has welcomed all this and told the press the 1971 Act "was not designed to give a free pass to a child rapist". True enough. It was also never designed to fly the Crown's best witness out of reach of a statutory inquiry into crimes committed on his own patch, and yet that is where every road in this story leads.

Seven Home Secretaries sat on this law, the current one included, and now it gets amended in a week to drag a struggling Bill over the line. Five immigration laws in five years, and the men those laws were sold on still walk past their victims in the street. Pakistan wants dissidents as its price. And if the whole charade somehow works, the one living man who could stand before the National Inquiry and name names is gone for good.

That is what Monday buys. His unavailability, bought just before the one inquiry with the power to make him talk, with your applause thrown in for free.

Now ask yourself this question. Why is not a single politician making the argument to make Daddy talk first?

I’m Raja Miah. For over seven years, I have led a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs. Before that, I spent over a decade trying to stop violent extremists exploiting abandoned communities.

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