The Council Bev Craig Led Hid Child Rape Evidence From Police. Now She Wants Your Vote.
Bev Craig Wants to Be Greater Manchester Mayor. First, She Must Answer for Manchester's Grooming Gang Record.
A year ago I exposed one of the most disturbing findings buried inside a report by His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services. That finding deserves more scrutiny now that the at time leader of Manchester City Council wants to become Greater Manchester Mayor.
Before she asks the public for that promotion, she owes them an answer. Her council was criticised for obstructing child sexual exploitation investigations.
The inspectorate found that Manchester City Council supplied police with intelligence so heavily redacted that some pages contained only a handful of words.
It concluded this contributed to significant delays in investigations involving 1,099 suspects and 714 victims. Read that figure again.
Officers investigating the organised rape and trafficking of children were handed documents with the information stripped out of them. This did not happen in the immediate aftermath of the scandal. It happened years later, after promise after promise of transparency and accountability.
The redactions have never been explained. Nobody has said on record who authorised them, what was removed, why it was removed, or what it cost the investigations into 714 children. Nobody has been held accountable.
For almost eight years I have argued that the greatest obstacle to justice was never a lack of evidence. It was institutions protecting themselves.
I put that accusation directly to Manchester City Council. I said publicly that it was suppressing evidence and prioritising its own reputation over the truth. The council's response was to block me on social media. It has never answered the substance of what I raised.
The inspectorate's findings have been buried under committee language ever since.
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Britain now has a National Inquiry with statutory powers.
That inquiry cannot confine itself to the crimes of the grooming gangs. It must examine the councils, the police forces, the government departments and the public bodies that delayed justice and denied victims the truth.
Manchester City Council's decisions belong under oath. Every official responsible for the redactions should be made to explain them, on the record, in public.
The era of managed reviews is over. Reports with no power to compel evidence are worthless. Institutions can no longer be trusted to mark their own homework.
If Bev Craig believes she is ready to lead Greater Manchester, she should welcome that scrutiny rather than hide from it. Leadership is not a slogan. It is accountability, tested in public, under oath. The girls who were raped deserve that much.
I am Raja Miah.
For almost eight years I have exposed how politicians, police leaders and public officials were involved in the cover up of the industrial scale gang rape of children. That work helped force the Government to establish a National Inquiry into the grooming gangs.
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Raja 🙏