The Truth About Britain's Biggest Rape Gang Investigations
Burnham and the Pakistani Rape Gang Cover Up
Part 2: What Burnham Should Have Done
The BBC documentary The Betrayed Girls aired in July 2017. Burnham had been Mayor since May. He had been in post for two months when the programme confronted the country with what had been happening to children in Greater Manchester. Maggie Oliver was on that documentary. The evidence was there.
What he should have done was stand up and demand a statutory public inquiry. He could have said he did not have the powers to get to the truth. He could have said the government must come in, must compel the evidence, that he would not allow this to be managed at local level by the organisations responsible for the failure. He knew he did not have the powers to get to the truth.
Instead, he spent seven years commissioning a series of toothless, worthless processes, specifically in Oldham. Called Assurance Reviews, Burnham's interventions could not compel a single witness, could not compel a single document, could not place anyone under oath, and could not name a single person responsible for the cover-up.
Those processes, across four separate publications failed to name a single person responsible. Burnham failed to hold a single person to account. Not one police officer was exposed, not one politician was identified, not one council official who had looked the other way while children were being raped was named. Worse than this, the people summoned could simply ignore the summons. The vast majority did.
Seven years. Not one person held to account. Yet Burnham celebrates it as an achievement. He uses the word BIGGEST to describe what he did.
The Reviews Were Built to Fail
The Oldham Assurance Review was requested by Oldham Council after their attempt to facilitate their own review collapsed. Shaun Fielding, then Oldham Council leader, ran to Andy Burnham to help. Let that settle. The body under scrutiny asked for its own review and was then allowed to help write the terms of reference under which it would be investigated.
Greater Manchester Police also sent amendments to the terms of reference. Read that again. The police force whose decisions regarding the rape gangs were being examined amended the document that defined what would and would not be examined. The council, the police, and the politicians all shaped the scope of what was supposed to hold them to account.
The subjects of the review then sat on the steering group that oversaw it.
GMCA lawyers shaped the drafting of the review itself. They delayed publication when Oldham Council warned that certain sections, their words, a direct quote from the correspondence, "could open Oldham Council, GMCA and the review team to legal action." The institution under scrutiny threatened legal action to sanitise the document examining its conduct, and it worked.
The terms of reference excluded organised crime. We now know these were not groups of men who happened to know each other. They were organised crime networks dealing drugs, trafficking children, operating across town lines and across years. Excluded.
Mosque safeguarding was excluded. The men came from communities with no safeguarding architecture, where the men running the mosques and the community centres were often the same men running the political operations that delivered votes to Labour. Excluded.
Postal vote fraud was excluded. The same network that operated the abuse also operated the vote harvesting. Excluded.
Schools were excluded entirely. Survivors of the Oldham rape gangs have confirmed to me that they were dragged into cars outside school gates. School staff have told me confidentially that they went to retrieve children from rape dens and brought them back in the next morning, from flats with nothing in them but mattresses. The places where children were taken to be gang raped were outside the scope of the review. Excluded.
The review covered only the years 2011 to 2014. Years of abuse before 2011, excluded. Years after 2014, excluded.
Within that limited window, every single case it examined confirmed what I had been saying for years. Every child it looked at had been a victim of the Pakistani rape gangs. Every single one.
The review confirmed taxi drivers were still being licensed despite evidence they had sexually assaulted children in their vehicles. No one could explain why this had been allowed to take place. Burnham's expert team never stopped to ask.
Children's homes were confirmed to have functioned as child brothels. Instead of being appalled and demanding answers from those involved, the report described the Council's actions as placing all the children at risk of gang rape in a home near the traffickers and rapists as 'innovative'.
Despite everything, they were forced to admit that Shabir Ahmed, the ringleader of the Rochdale gang, had worked for a council body that gave him access to children. They failed to follow the trail to where and how many children he accessed. Confirming he was a Labour Party member, the review found nine separate occasions on which he should have been arrested and was not. Nobody was asked to explain why.
I represent no political party. I have no side other than the survivors and the communities left abandoned by a political elite. I bring a type of campaigning unique in this space. This is why those in power have desperately tried to silence me.
Selective Note Taking
When it came to taking testimony, the interviewees received questions in advance. They gave unsworn answers. They were then permitted to amend their own records before those records entered the file. The answers they gave were taken in private by Newsam and Ridgway without tape recorders. They made selective notes of what they considered important. Then GMCA lawyers could intervene in the records afterwards.
In the small print of the published report, there is a disclaimer. The review team accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of the information provided to it.
They could not compel a single witness to attend. Could not compel a single document to be produced. Placed no one under oath. Then published a disclaimer stating they take no position on whether anything they were told was true.
This is what Burnham called an investigation. Apparently, it was the biggest Britain had ever seen.
Part 3 will follow.
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