The Day Andy Burnham Drew a Line Under the Oldham Rape Gang Scandal

Burnham and the Pakistani Rape Gang Cover Up

Part 5

One month after the Oldham rape gang Assurance Review was published, Andy Burnham wrote an open letter to the people of the town. It appeared in the Oldham Times, the Manchester Evening News and was also published directly on the GMCA website. It was framed as moral leadership. Read it alongside everything I have set out above and it is something else entirely.

The letter opens by thanking Malcolm Newsam and Gary Ridgway for "the thorough way in which they undertook their work." The thorough way. The review that could not compel a single witness, placed no one under oath, sent questions to interviewees in advance, permitted them to amend their own records, excluded organised crime, schools, mosques and postal vote fraud from its terms of reference, and published a disclaimer stating the authors took no responsibility for the accuracy of what they were told. That one. Thorough.

He states the purpose of the letter is to make sure people in Oldham know what is being done "to follow up on the findings of the report and secure justice for those victims who, to date, have been let down." Victims who have been let down. Not victims who were let down by the organisations his letter goes on to champion. Not victims who were failed by GMP, not victims let down by Oldham Council, which helped write the terms of reference of the review examining its own conduct. Not even how many victims. That's right, Burnham's Assurance Review dodged publishing the number of how many children in the town had been gang raped.

Instead, we get how victims who have been let down, by no one in particular, with no named institution responsible and no individual to answer for what took place.

That construction is not an accident. It is the architecture of managed accountability. Wrong was done. No one did it.

The body of the letter is devoted almost entirely to Operation Sherwood, which at the time of writing had made no arrests and achieved no convictions. He describes a dedicated team, contact numbers, email addresses, a webpage. He quotes Chief Constable Stephen Watson's public commitment that "any identified perpetrator, regardless of the passage of time, will be pursued relentlessly." He presents this as the concrete response to the review's findings.

What Burnham does not present is any explanation of why it took the public exposure of the cover-up to produce that response.

Operation Sherwood was not the first instinct of Greater Manchester Police. While the cover-up was being managed, GMP's focus was Operation Hexagon, a police operation targeting those of us who had been exposing the abuse.

The first concrete step GMP took in relation to Operation Sherwood was to visit a survivor who had leaked information of how she had been failed. The police threatened her.

None of this appears in the letter. The letter presents Sherwood as a natural outgrowth of the review's findings, as if the review produced the investigation rather than the investigation being produced by the political necessity of having something to point to.

He then lists contact details for support services. A safeguarding hub, a sexual assault referral centre, a victim support helpline, and the Maggie Oliver Foundation. The Maggie Oliver Foundation. The organisation run by the woman who later described the Oldham strand of his review as little more than a cover-up. The woman who resigned from his own Stakeholder Panel in January 2025 after GMP blocked Burnham's own experts from accessing evidence and GMCA replaced them with an internal ratings body that consulted not one survivor. Her foundation is listed as a resource.

The letter closes with figures designed to convey scale and seriousness. A £2.3 million investment in GMP's CSE Unit. One hundred and six dedicated officers. prosecutions from Operation Lytton, eight individuals charged with 82 offences. Operation Green Jacket, 21 individuals arrested.

Notice what those numbers are. They are Rochdale figures and Greater Manchester figures. They are not Oldham figures. Operation Lytton is Rochdale. Operation Green Jacket covers Manchester. The letter is addressed to the residents of Oldham, in response to a review into Oldham's past child safeguarding failures, and the evidence of action it cites is predominantly from other boroughs.

This is the same statistical sleight of hand that runs through his public statements on Sherwood to this day, the bundling of Greater Manchester-wide outcomes into what sounds like Oldham-specific accountability. Presented to a local audience as if the numbers are theirs. They are not.

At the time I write this, Operation Sherwood, the Oldham specific GMP investigation, has failed to convict a single member of the Pakistani Rape Gangs.

Burnham states Operation Sherwood "represents one crucial concrete step in facing up to the findings of the Oldham review." Facing up. That phrase is doing significant work. It implies that the letter, the review, the launch of Sherwood, constitute an act of confronting something difficult. They do not. They constitute an act of managing something dangerous. There is a difference between facing up to the truth and producing a structure designed to make the truth harder to reach while appearing to pursue it.

The word cover-up does not appear in the letter. The word Hexagon does not appear. The fact that not one survivor of the Oldham rape gangs was interviewed by the review is not mentioned. The fact that the organisations being examined helped write the terms of reference is not mentioned. The fact that interviewees amended their own records is not mentioned.

What is mentioned is pathways. Resources. Contact numbers. Commitments. This is the language of a line being drawn rather than the language of accountability. His letter describes the process as thorough and its authors as independent, thanks the organisations responsible for the failures it examined, and offers phone numbers to those that were gang raped. Aided with the statement issued by Labour Party MPs Jim McMahon, Debbie Abrahams and Angela Raynor, the intention was to put an end to the matter. Move on people, there was no cover up. They would have succeeded if not for us.

Burnham published this letter on the 22nd July 2022. He did not acknowledge his review had any limitations until January 2025. The time between the two is nearly 2 1/2 years. I've lost count of the number of hours I spent locked up in police cells and the number of court rooms I faced prosecution in during this period. All because I continued to campaign to expose the truth of what had taken place.

Now tell me the would be Prime Minister was not involved in a cover up. Go on, defend him.

I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town EXPOSED ANDY BURNHAM and helped force the national inquiry.

You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back.

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Raja Miah MBE