The Scandal McMahon Tried to Bury and a Truth Running to Bangladesh Still Won't Outrun

This is the truth Labour has spent years trying to bury. I first uncovered it in my own hometown, but what happened in Oldham echoes in at least a hundred other towns across the country. The same patterns, the same institutional failures, the same refusal to confront what was happening to children.

Jim McMahon, now an MP, and at the time Leader of Oldham Council, was at the helm during a period in which serious warnings about grooming, exploitation, and the targeting of vulnerable White girls by groups of predominantly Pakistani men were repeatedly missed, minimised, dismissed, or allowed to drift into silence. Those failings are now a matter of public record.

While children were being dragged into shisha bars, while children's homes were becoming child brothels, and while girls were being dragged into cars at school gates, McMahon's Muslim bloc vote reliant council failed to safeguard the town's children.

To this day, no one can say with certainty how many girls were harmed or how many offenders were involved. And here is the uncomfortable truth for those in power: without the relentless campaigning we have done, much of what the public now knows would still be hidden in locked filing cabinets and buried in “lost” minutes.

McMahon will not be able to politically distance himself from the period he oversaw. Nor will those who defended the system around him, including Andy Burnham, escape scrutiny. They still haven’t realised that the ground has shifted. The only reason the National Inquiry has been forced to confront these issues at all is because we pushed, exposed, documented, and refused to let them turn the page.

And yes, we already know the inquiry will try to contain the damage, narrow the focus, and sanitise the conclusions. That is how these things are designed.

But the inquiry is not our destination. It’s only one step.

Our goal has never been a glossy final report. Our goal is full accountability. Those who allowed these failings to persist must face consequences, not in carefully worded press statements, but through transparent public reckoning. By the time we are finished, politicians will go to prison.

We are nowhere near the end of this. We have only just begun to expose the scale of what was allowed to happen. And who allowed it.

See the man pictured next to McMahon. This is not an old photograph. It is this week where for reasons now obvious, McMahon hosted a roundtable with Cllr Abdul Jabbar and representatives from 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗕𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗮𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗵.

Abdul Jabbar was Mayor of Oldham Council when Shabir 'Daddy' Ahmed was being prosecuted. Jabbar is on record as being not able to recall whether he used his position to provide the Rochdale rape gang ring leader with a reference to help protect him from prosecution.

No one should be surprised with the sight of Jabbar once again sitting alongside McMahon whilst they host dignitaries from Bangladesh. They think they have got away with it. It is up to us to prove them wrong.

I am Raja Miah. For seven years, I led a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs.

I cannot do this on my own. I need you to stand with me and help make sure we see this through and see politicians put in prison for selling children for votes.

We’re running out of time. Without the numbers, they will rewrite history. It’s as simple as that.

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Raja Miah MBE