The BBC's Disgraceful Rape Gang Response
The BBC has published a written response to complaints about its failure to cover the Rupert Lowe inquiry. Here is what it says, and here is what is wrong with it.
We have frequently covered the issue.
The complaints were not about grooming gangs generally. They were about this inquiry. The BBC changed the question and answered the one it preferred.
But take the claim at face value. Frequently covered means what? The BBC has reported convictions and sentences. What it has not done is investigate the councils that buried files or the police commanders who read the reports and closed cases anyway. Reporting that crimes happened is a long way from asking why the people responsible for stopping them kept their jobs.
If the coverage has been so thorough, there is a question the BBC needs to answer. Why did 20,000 people have to fund their own inquiry? Why did Rupert Lowe raise £700,000 in small donations from ordinary people while the BBC was filing this complaint under already covered?
That crowdfund exists because the coverage was not there. Twenty thousand people put their hands in their pockets because the BBC did not do its job.
The government's inquiry is more wide-ranging.
The government refused a statutory inquiry for years. Lowe launched his crowdfunder because every official door had been closed. That campaign forced enough public pressure onto the government that it eventually moved. The government announced a statutory inquiry because Lowe's campaign made refusing one politically impossible. The BBC is now pointing to that inquiry as a reason not to cover the campaign that forced it into existence.
Look at what the BBC chose not to mention about that statutory inquiry. Survivors on its own liaison panel resigned. They said they were being gaslit. The government tried to broaden its scope. Everyone paying attention understood that as an attempt to bury the specific question of organised gang networks. Lowe said he was desperately depressed by its progress. The BBC tells you about its legal powers and says nothing about any of this.
The BBC covered the Hillsborough Independent Panel in full, non-statutory and citizen-campaigned, running alongside active legal proceedings. It covered the Post Office Horizon scandal through independent journalism and privately commissioned reports years before any official inquiry existed. It covered the infected blood campaigners' own evidence gathering while the statutory inquiry was running. An official process has never been a reason to ignore independent scrutiny. The BBC has never treated it as one. It invented that principle here.
We have limited resources.
The BBC receives £3.5 billion a year in licence fee income. On 8 February 2026, four days into the inquiry hearings, its Pakistan correspondent filed a feature on a kite festival in Lahore.
That same day a BBC business reporter published a thousand-word piece on the rise of fried chicken shops in Britain.
The editorial machine was fully operational. Journalists were being deployed and stories were being filed. The resources existed.
The BBC's silence was selective. When a malicious complaint was made against the inquiry, the BBC reported it immediately. Lowe described the coverage as gleeful. The complaint was dropped the same day. The BBC was forced to issue a formal correction. It found the resources to cover a smear within hours of it being filed. It found nothing to cover what the inquiry actually heard.
Those were choices. Made by editors with names.
These decisions should not be taken as indicative of bias.
The BBC ends its response with a warning about what conclusions you are permitted to draw. It has spent four paragraphs defending decisions it refuses to explain, and it closes by telling you that questioning those decisions is impermissible.
This instruction comes from an institution whose Director General and Head of News resigned three months ago over an internal memo from its own editorial standards adviser, who told Parliament he kept seeing problems he thought were not being tackled properly and were getting worse. The BBC did not dispute that. It accepted it. It is now asking 20,000 people to trust its editorial judgement on the basis of a record it has already conceded is compromised.
These girls have been told their conclusions are not permitted before. By the police officer who closed the file. By the council that processed the complaint and took no further action. They know what it sounds like when an institution tells them to stop asking questions.
While Reform and Restore fight each other
The BBC issued this response knowing it would not be seriously challenged. Reform and Restore are too busy fighting each other to take a public broadcaster to task. The grooming gang inquiry, funded by 20,000 ordinary people, producing testimony that should have led every bulletin, has become a sideshow in a political pantomime. The BBC calculated that. That is why this response reads the way it does.
This is an organisation that has spent years managing this scandal rather than exposing it. This response is not a surprise. It is what you do when you have decided nobody is coming for you.
We are not where we are by accident. We will not get where we need to be if we leave it to those that were part of the cover up to deliver justice. Stand with me.
I’m Raja Miah. For seven years, I 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.
This work is free because the truth must circulate. But truth without numbers is easy to crush. The government does not fear facts. It fears scale.
The Rape Gang protecting Establishment fear thousands reading, sharing, and backing the same work because numbers mean witnesses, pressure, and consequences. That’s why this matters.
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– Raja Miah MBE