The Mayor and His Whitewash

How Burnham, McMahon & the Labour Party Weaponised A Worthless Review

The Oldham Independent Assurance Review was published in June 2022. Andy Burnham and senior Labour politicians immediately declared victory. The review had addressed allegations of institutional cover-up "head on", they said. Questions about child protection failures could now be put to rest.

There was one problem. The review was never designed to investigate cover-up. It admits this in its own terms of reference.

Politicians have spent years pointing to this document as both proof of their vindication and as reason why no national inquiry was needed. But read the review itself and you find something different. You find an exercise that deliberately avoided the very questions it was supposed to answer. You find a whitewash.

What the Review Actually Was

The review was commissioned as an "assurance exercise" on defined safeguarding issues. Not an investigation into cover-up. Not a statutory inquiry with powers to compel evidence. An assurance exercise.

• The review did not define what constituted a cover-up.
• It did not investigate concealment or political decision-making.
• It did not examine senior awareness or intent.
• It was not designed to determine whether information had been suppressed or delayed.

How can you investigate cover-up without defining it? How can you find evidence of concealment without examining political decisions?

The answer is that you cannot. The review was structured to avoid these questions.

The Failures It Did Document

Even within these limited parameters, the review recorded serious safeguarding failures. Children known to be sexually exploited attended shisha establishments for several years. Sexual activity involving children occurred in shisha bars. A rape charge arose from contact initiated in a shisha bar. Children in residential care were exposed to child sexual exploitation.

Every allegation I made of failures to protect working class White girls from Pakistani Rape Gangs was proven. They even had to admit that the leader of the Rochdale Rape Gang, Shabir Ahmed, worked for Oldham Council, had access to children, and that multiple attempts to stop him raping children were missed.

The review found "missed opportunities to record crimes and take safeguarding action." The leader of the Rochdale Grooming Gang, exposed as a council employee in a welfare role, was arrested and charged in relation to child sexual offences without crimes being recorded or safeguarding action taken. A response sent to an MP was described as "unacceptable" and showing "poor professional judgement." Police responses to parliamentary scrutiny were "less than candid."

All ten serious case studies examined involved child sexual exploitation. None of the children received adequate protection. All were gang raped and trafficked. All were failed.

The Evidence Gap

The review admits it did not verify the accuracy or completeness of information provided to it. It relied on material supplied by the institutions under review. It lacked access to police source data, which it says "impacted its conclusions."

The review accepted redacted documents without analysing what had been removed. It withheld key evidence in confidential appendices that remain unpublished. It excluded survivor testimony from its core evidence base.

None of the ten children whose cases formed the most serious evidence were interviewed.

The single survivor interview occurred only after initial findings were drafted, and only after the survivor challenged the process. The review records that it initially did not approach the survivor "following council advice."

The institutions under review advised against interviewing the primary victim.

A central contradiction runs through the assurance review. While it repeatedly reassures the reader that it found “no evidence” of cover-up or deliberate concealment, it simultaneously confirms the factual basis of every substantive allegation of safeguarding failure within its scope.

Political Use of a Flawed Process

Despite these admitted limitations, Andy Burnham and other Labour politicians used the review to declare that allegations had been addressed. They said it proved there was no cover-up. They used it to argue that continued scrutiny was unnecessary.

Despite the claims made by its authors, the actual evidence in the review makes no such claims about cover-up. It could not make such claims given its admitted limitations.

Throughout the report, the assurance review relies on a recurring formulation when addressing allegations of concealment or deliberate wrongdoing by senior figures:

“We have been provided with no evidence to suggest…”

This wording is not incidental. It is the linguistic expression of the review’s evidential posture: it evaluates only what is placed before it, rather than actively testing for what may have been withheld, suppressed, or never formally recorded.

The review never claims to have searched for evidence of cover-up. It claims only that none was provided.

This is how modern institutional accountability works. You commission a review that acknowledges some failures while being structurally unable to examine the most serious allegations. You then use that flawed review to claim vindication and shut down further scrutiny.

The Response to Scrutiny

As I finalise this article, Andy Burnham has issued a public statement accusing me of "regularly making misleading allegations" about his response to child sexual exploitation. He directs people to an official timeline of actions taken.This response confirms the pattern. When campaigners such as myself examine the adequacy of institutional reviews, the response is not to engage with the evidence. The response is to attack me and point to more institutional documentation.

Burnham is not defending the Oldham review on its merits. He is not explaining how a review that admits it did not investigate cover-up can be used to claim no cover-up occurred. He is attacking the person raising these questions.This is what happens when whitewash reviews fail to end scrutiny. Personal attacks replace substantive engagement.

Why This Matters

The Oldham review was used by Labour politicians to claim vindication on child protection failures. But on close scrutiny, the review admits it was not designed to investigate the most serious allegations and that it could not access key evidence.

Using a flawed review to foreclose accountability is not accountability. It is the opposite. It is institutional protection dressed up as independent scrutiny.

The children documented in this review deserved protection. They did not receive it. The institutions responsible deserved investigation. They investigated themselves instead.

That is why continued scrutiny was necessary. That is why a national inquiry was essential. Because when politicians use compromised reviews to claim vindication, someone must continue asking the questions they hoped would disappear.

My full line by line tear down of Burnham's Oldham whitewash will be published this week.

In the meantime, I will say again what I have said previously - name the time and place Andy Burnham, let us have this out in the open where people will be able to judge for themselves whether I am a liar or you a Pakistani Rape Gang protector.

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 safeguarding children and protecting communities from extremists.

My 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.

Starmer, Burnham, McMahon and the Labour Party fear thousands reading, sharing, and backing the same work because numbers mean witnesses, pressure, and consequences. That’s why I am blacklisted by the legacy media. That's why this matters.

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– Raja Miah MBE