They Chose the Cover-Up

How Oldham's grooming gang cover-up became a national reckoning they could no longer contain.

Children were being raped in towns like Oldham. The people responsible for stopping it knew. They made a choice.

They chose the cover-up.

This investigation began in 2018, five years before Red Wall and the Rabble existed. From the start it was suppressed. Facebook bans became routine. YouTube videos disappeared without explanation. Content was buried or quietly removed. Even on Twitter, years before Elon Musk bought the platform, the pressure to choke this work was relentless.

The campaign needed somewhere that could not simply be switched off. So we built something of our own.

When the newsletter launched in July 2023, the community numbered just 388 members. That was the audience after five years of writing, campaigning and speaking out. Growth was slow. By December 2024 the publication had reached just 700 members, but even that number gave a misleading picture. Some of those accounts belonged to opponents watching the campaign through fake profiles. Others were friends and family who stood beside me when the pressure became intense. In truth, the movement around this work was still very small.

The political battle surrounding it was not.

Alongside the newsletter we were running a campaign unlike anything this nation had seen before. We were directly challenging Labour politicians involved in the grooming gang cover-up and demanding a public inquiry into what had taken place. Those in power wanted the opposite. They wanted the scandal buried, the questions silenced and the story forgotten.

Over the next five years we defeated three consecutive Labour council leaders. In the fourth year we achieved something many people had said was impossible. Labour lost control of Oldham Council.

Ousted Oldham Council leader says town’s politics remain toxic

Amanda Chadderton says her defeat in the recent elections was partly due to a conspiracy theory.

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Shortly afterwards, we outmanouvered the council and forced them to vote to write to the government demanding a public inquiry into the grooming gang scandal. Those events helped push the issue onto the national stage and played a role in triggering the inquiry that now exists today.

Without the political campaign in Oldham, there would be no national inquiry.

But the personal cost of that fight was immense.

During those same years I was nursing my terminally ill mother. I spent three years on police bail while the state attempted to maliciously prosecute me. There were nights when the pressure felt overwhelming. Under the protection of Andy Burnham's police force, those allied with the Labour Party in Oldham published my home address online. They claimed I was a Gay Christian convert and also a police informant. They published my photograph and a picture of the front door of where I lived. Pakistani gangsters followed me home. Islamists demanded my death. The police refused to arrest any of them. Those determined to silence me were politically protected. To this day, not one mainstream news outlet will report on what is established fact.

I would barricade the front door before going to bed and sleep with a knife under my pillow. My daughter was still little more than a baby. I knew what they were trying to do. I knew why. I refused to let them succeed.

The very questions that powerful institutions once tried to silence are now being asked across the country. What began as a local struggle for truth and accountability in Oldham had become part of a much wider national reckoning. The reality of the rape gang cover-ups can no longer be contained within council chambers or buried in official statements.

As the cover-up began to unravel, people started searching for the voices that had been documenting the truth long before it became politically unavoidable. This is why the community around Red Wall and the Rabble has grown to more than 10,000 members.

Despite an ongoing blacklist from all of the legacy media, the analysis we once struggled to publish now travels across social media where it is shared, debated and repeated by thousands of people. Arguments that were once dismissed or suppressed are now part of a national conversation. Politicians now echo our words.

The truth that powerful institutions tried so hard to bury is no longer hidden.

Parents now know what happened.

Whatever happens next, whatever they do to rig the national inquiry, my daughter will grow up in a world where parents know the truth about what took place. The institutions that spent years trying to prevent that failed. The cover-up is broken. And without you, none of this would have been possible.

Thank you

Raja 🙏

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 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 🙏