The Establishment's Man in the North

Burnham and the Pakistani Rape Gang Cover Up

Part 7

Burnham Now Backs the Inquiry He Spent Years Blocking

Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, commissioned an Assurance Review into the gang rape of children in Oldham. It was a sham. Maggie Oliver described it as 'nothing short of a cover up'. He used its findings to argue that no further inquiry was necessary. He stood by that position for years while survivors and campaigners documented its failures. He resisted the national inquiry and argued against it, presenting himself as the man who had done what needed to be done.

He could not sustain this position indefinitely. The national inquiry was forced onto the agenda by people he could not suppress, the people of Oldham, Maggie Oliver, the survivors who refused to stay silent, and eventually an audience online that the metropolitan elite in the mainstream media could not reach to manage. The political ground shifted under him.

When blocking stopped working, he moved to set the ceiling. In January 2025 he told BBC Radio Manchester he backed a limited national inquiry, one that would draw on the reviews he had commissioned and compel people to give evidence.

The power to compel evidence was the single thing his reviews could never do. He knew this from the start yet he had spent years presenting those reviews as enough. In one sentence he conceded their fatal flaw and proposed that the new inquiry be built on the discredited work rather than sent to examine it.

Limited meant using Burnham's reviews as the foundation and never the subject. A limited inquiry draws out national themes and leaves local culpability where it lies. He was defining the inquiry small before anyone with authority could define it large. The man who had blocked it for years had stepped forward to bound it.

He then rebuked critics of the inquiry's chair in public and told them to stop reading politics into it. The instruction came from the politician with the most direct personal interest in what the inquiry is allowed to find. His entire approach to the rape gangs has been to manage the politics of accountability rather than deliver it.

Throughout the Makerfield campaign he has leaned on the Hillsborough families, presenting himself to those voters as the man who fights the establishment for the truth. He is the establishment. The national inquiry did not happen seven years earlier because of him, at a point when he could have demanded it from a position of genuine authority and forced a government to comply. Instead he spent those years producing processes he knew could not work. When their conclusions were weaponised he defended them. Anyone who said otherwise he attacked and his allies condemned as conspiracy theorists.

When Makerfield positioned him for a Labour leadership run, the message changed. Accountability started to matter. The national inquiry he had spent years resisting turned into a cause he supported, and institutional failure was suddenly something he wanted to be seen confronting. The ambition stayed the same throughout. The message adjusted around it.

This is repositioning. The women whose childhoods were destroyed in Oldham and across Greater Manchester can tell the difference between a politician who changed his mind and one who changed his audience.

Central to the Cover-Up

Despite their best efforts to present alternative findings, the review vindicated every substantive allegation I had made before it began. Each case study it examined confirmed the gang rape of little girls. Every structural failure it identified was one I had already documented and published. The institutions named faced no consequences. The men who ran them stayed in post. The politicians who had built the conditions for the cover-up stayed in theirs.

I want to be precise about the mainstream media. The silence is deliberate. The journalists exist who could sit Burnham down with this evidence and demand a response. None has done it with his record in any sustained or systematic way, because doing so would expose how far the establishment, across politics, policing and the press, knew what was happening to Working-class White girls in towns like Oldham and chose silence as the cheapest response.

Burnham is the establishment's preferred candidate for the Labour leadership. He is the face they want on the next version of the party. That is why the protection exists and why the questions do not get asked. Asking them would damage more than Burnham. It would damage the entire apparatus that managed the cover-up and now manages the narrative around the inquiry.

The response to my work, when it has come at all, amounts to one thing. Someone once asked Burnham directly which part of what I had said was untrue. His answer was about Shaun Fielding's girlfriend getting a job at his office. I had apparently said he arranged it, and that specific detail was contested. That was his answer. That is the full extent of the factual challenge he has been able to mount against eight years of documented investigative work of the cover up of the gang rape of little girls.

The would be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom commissioned a review that could not compel the truth. The morning his review appeared, his party used it to call the people telling the truth liars, and he watched that happen in silence. Maggie Oliver's resignation letter reached him in January 2025 and he said nothing. He created the conditions for the IOPC to close the Augusta investigation without accountability, then called the outcome inadequate. Victoria Agoglia's grandmother was promised a second inquest. It was not delivered.

The cover-up of the industrial-scale grooming and gang rape of working-class White girls is the biggest institutional cover-up this country has ever seen. Andy Burnham's chapter in it is central. He had the power and the knowledge to demand the tools that could have extracted the truth, and the political understanding to know exactly what he was choosing instead. He dug the deepest grave the truth has ever had and called it an investigation.

The national inquiry is now underway. Oldham is one of its first areas of examination. Whatever it finds, it will be finding it despite Andy Burnham, not because of him.

He will not meet me. He threatens and then goes silent. He runs from doorstep cameras. To the simple question he has no answer. Show me which words of mine is untrue Andy. I dare you.

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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