THEY COVERED IT UP. THEY PROTECTED THEIR OWN. THEY LED A COUP AND NOW RULE THE NATION.

THEY PERFECTED THEIR OPERATIONS IN GREATER MANCHESTER. NOW THEY RUN THE COUNTRY.

The Labour Party divided the scandal so nobody saw the whole of it. They held the silence. Operation Hexagon ran under a Labour Party police and crime commissioner, in partnership with a Labour Party run council, and went after the people who broke it. They kept convicted criminals close to power and promoted the politicians who allowed it. The man at the top of their operations in Greater Manchester was Andy Burnham. He is now the Prime Minister.

THE MAFIA WORKED THE SAME WAY

For a century the Sicilian Mafia was prosecuted as though it were a collection of local gangs. Every trial took one family, in one town, and every trial failed. Giovanni Falcone worked out why. It was one association, and prosecuting it locally was how it survived.

Territory divided so that no single authority ever saw the whole. Silence that held because breaking it cost you everything and bought you nothing. Punishment for the ones who broke it anyway. Protection handed out as patronage, so the men who took it owed you rather than feared you. And the men at the top never touching the act, so nothing was ever provable against them.

Falcone stopped prosecuting clans and prosecuted the association. Four hundred and seventy-five defendants in one courtroom, the first time anybody had looked at all of it at once.

They killed him for it in May 1992.

Five mechanisms. Eight years in Greater Manchester and I have watched every one of them operate here.

THE TERRITORY

Ten local authorities. One police force.

The men crossed every boundary. The 2012 Rochdale gang was men from Rochdale and Oldham. Operation Earby covers Rochdale and Oldham together. The three men charged in Bury in July come from Bury, Bolton and Accrington in Lancashire. Kasir Bashir traded on Rochdale market and lived in Oldham. Girls were driven between boroughs and out of the county to be raped.

The combined authority publishes its own record. On 30 April last year Operation Sherwood, named after Oldham, arrested three men in Bolton, Rochdale and Oldham. Five weeks later it arrested five more in Oldham, Tameside and Manchester.

One operation, one town's name on it, men lifted across five boroughs in five weeks.

Andy Burnham commissioned assurance reviews in three boroughs. Manchester, Oldham and Rochdale. Bolton, Bury, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan got nothing.

None of those reviews could compel a witness. None could seize a document. None could follow a name across a boundary. Burnham has since admitted they were limited, that they could not compel anyone in authority to give evidence, and that what he instigated was not a public inquiry.

They admitted failure and buried responsibility. Failure could be regretted. Failure required lessons. A cover-up required names.

That was the political purpose of Burnham's assurance reviews. Admit enough failure to look credible, keep the investigations too weak to force out the names, and protect the political establishment sitting around him.

Three reports, each stopping at its own borough boundary while the men they were examining crossed them every week.Nobody ever had to look at the whole thing, so nobody ever had to answer for it.

THE SILENCE

Operation Augusta identified at least 267 girls in the care of Manchester City Council believed to be at risk of sexual exploitation, and around 97 men involved. Five of those men were ever designated as suspects. Two prosecutions followed.

It was closed on 22 April 2005. A gold group met at Manchester Town Hall that day, council officers and their communications people in the room. Press strategies were discussed. When the review team asked for the minutes, neither Greater Manchester Police nor Manchester City Council could produce a copy.

Both of them lost the same document.

Twenty years later inspectors found that material provided by Manchester City Council took many months to reach detectives and was so heavily redacted that some pages contained only a few words. It made it impossible to assess the evidential value of the information. Operations Green Jacket and Bernese were held up and the detectives went back to the beginning.

In July 2004 a communications meeting recorded that the enquiry was sensitive because it involved Asian men, and recorded the fear of inciting racial hatred. They knew race was shaping how they dealt with the rape of children and they wrote it down.

One of the people the review team interviewed described how those men were seen at the time. Not as sex offenders. A group of men from one ethnicity taking advantage of children from dysfunctional backgrounds. It could have overwhelmed child protection. There had to be a degree of pragmatism.

The children in those care homes paid for the pragmatism. Ninety seven men were identified. The case against them was closed

THE PATRONAGE

In a functioning political party a serious criminal conviction pushes you to the edge of political life. In Oldham it did not. Convicted men remained close enough to campaign, to advise, and to stand beside the people running the town.

Mohammed Imran Ali, known in Oldham as Irish Immy, was convicted in 2013 of assisting an offender. He drove Dale Cregan away from a murder. Cregan went on, while at large, to lure PCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes to a fake burglary call, shoot them, and throw a grenade on their bodies. The Spectator reported this January that Ali has also served time for assault and for trafficking heroin. We also know that he traded viagra.

Who do you think he was selling the viagra to? Whose arms do you think the men were injecting the heroin into?

Zia Hussain was jailed for nine years for conspiracy to kidnap and assault. He was one of two lieutenants to the ringleader of a gang that abducted four men, tortured them and sexually abused them. The judge, Jonathon Durham Hall QC, described them as an extremely sordid group of men who enjoyed the torture and sex show and left their victims degraded and terrified.

Both men have been repeatedly photographed at Labour events in Oldham, alongside Labour politicians. They are just two on a long list of men.

Ali was a key figure in Labour's campaign team in Oldham.

Arooj Shah has known him since they were eleven. She stood up in the council chamber in December 2019 and put that friendship on the record. Then she appointed him as her Special Political Adviser.

In March 2024 he was facing criminal trial on charges of criminal damage and possession of an offensive weapon, arising from an arrest days after the 2023 local elections. Then the public record goes dark. No report of a conviction. No report of an acquittal. No report that the charges were dropped. Nothing. As with Operation Augusta, the case was closed.

A man with that record did not end up exiled from civic life in Oldham. His company is registered at The Hive, the business hub inside the Spindles, co-run by Oldham Council, on the same upper mall as the council's own offices and its business investment team. The council spent around £800,000 fitting that building out. Shah has collected two national awards for it.

In January the Spectator reported that Ali was standing for public office in Werneth as an independent. Not one Labour politician campaigned against him. Not Angela Rayner. Not Arooj Shah. And not Andy Burnham, who knows perfectly well how to campaign in Oldham, because I watched him come here to keep Amanda Chadderton in power. He was chased off the streets by a group of pensioners. Chadderton lost her seat that May and we removed her.

Burnham mobilised when Labour control was at risk. He said nothing when a man convicted of assisting a cop killer stood for public office.

Throughout all of it Arooj Shah sat on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which Burnham chaired, holding its portfolio for Equalities and Communities.

Then the voters of Oldham removed her. She returned the following election cycle, re-elected in the Pakistani gangster heartland of Glodwick. We continued to fight against her as the police threatened our people. We removed Labour from power. It made no difference, Forty-eight hours after being appointed Keir Starmer's adviser on violence against women and girls, Baroness Harriet Harman was publicly asking about the next Lords list. Jim McMahon, has been reported to become Sir Jim McMahon. A man neck deep in the politics of Oldham, knighted for what he has done.

THE PUNISHMENT

In August 2019, while people in Oldham were demanding answers about the rape of children, Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council ran a joint Gold Command operation called Operation Hexagon.

It appears twice in the terms of reference of Burnham's own Oldham assurance review, so the people who drafted those terms knew it existed. Sean Fielding, then leader of Oldham Council, confirmed its existence and the surveillance it involved in an email dated 22 July 2020. In December 2020 the force admitted its referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service under Hexagon contained no child sexual exploitation offences at all.

I was one of those referrals. They tried to prosecute me and failed.

While that was happening, their partners in the media reported my arrest in terms that let readers take it as part of a child sexual exploitation investigation. The brother of a sitting Oldham councillor published my home address online.

Mohammed Imran Ali was convicted twice for what he did to me. The first time after he boasted online about sending his scouts out to follow me. The second for breaching the restraining order that came with it.

Neither conviction was ever reported in the mainstream press. My arrest was.

A different man came after me once we forced the National Inquiry. Greater Manchester Police gave him a conditional caution rather than putting him before a court. They protected him. Just as they had been protecting the filth that had been gang raping and trafficking children. I took the Chief Constable to the High Court and won. The judge found the caution had been unlawful from the outset.

The men accused of raping children were the real scandal. Instead, the people exposing them got the Gold Command operation and the criminals that came after us found themselves protected. Protected by the politicians. Protected by the media. And protected by the police.

Everybody watching was shown what breaking the silence costs. They knew the price for speaking out.

Nobody has ever said who authorised Operation Hexagon, what it was for, who was watched or what it cost.

Hexagon ran inside Burnham's police force. His own assurance review named it twice. He never forced it into the light and he has never answered a question about it. Why?

THE INSULATION

The last piece is what makes all of it survivable for the man at the top. Nothing reaches the desk.

In March 2020 Burnham gave out the Mayor's email address himself, from his own account. That month he asked the people of Greater Manchester to write to him in confidence about employers putting them at risk for brach of the 2 metre Covid rule, and GMCA published his promise that all correspondence would be treated in strict confidence and complainants would remain anonymous. Three hundred people wrote in two days.

That address still exists. Use it now and the system acknowledges your email, then tells you that action is required from you before your enquiry can progress. It sends you back to a web form.

The GMCA page marked Contact does not carry the address at all. It offers a form to invite the Mayor to an event, the press office, and a sign-up for her newsletter.

A survivor can write, or a parent failed by the police, or an officer. Every one of those letters enters the same queue with a reference number, and none of them can know whether the Mayor ever saw a word.

Years later, when somebody asks what the Mayor knew, the answer has already been built.

It never crossed my desk.

That sentence has followed every scandal I have ever seen. Nobody knew. Nobody was told. Nobody saw the warning, the minutes, the email. The warnings were always there. The men at the top were never the ones holding them.

WHAT IT BOUGHT THEM

Dividing the scandal meant nobody ever had to answer for the whole of it.

The silence left 97 men identified free to continue to gang rape little girls. Punishing the people who broke that silence showed everybody else what speaking out could cost. A conviction did not put you outside the circle. It put you in the campaign team. Insulating the man at the top meant that when it surfaced, he had never been told. At the top, none of this ended careers. It advanced them.

AND NOW THEY RUN THE COUNTRY

Andy Burnham was the first Mayor of Greater Manchester. HE held the office for nine years with the police and crime powers in his hands throughout. In June, from his power base in Greater Manchester, he returned to Parliament. Within weeks the coup against a sitting Labour Prime Minister was complete and Burnham was in Downing Street.

The documents prove a scandal crossing ten boroughs was only reviewed in three, and that the reviews could compel nobody to testify.

They prove Augusta was closed at Manchester Town Hall and the minutes are gone from both buildings. They prove a Gold Command operation ran in Oldham and produced no child sexual exploitation referrals. They prove a council leader operated alongside a man convicted of assisting a cop killer in her election campaign, and sat at Burnham's table with a portfolio throughout. They prove the mayoral address once used to gather confidential complaints now answers with an instruction to fill in a form.

Nobody wrote this arrangement down. They did not need to.

I have watched them operate it for eight years, at close quarters, and watched the people who should have paid the political price move upwards instead.

This was not merely tolerated in Greater Manchester. It succeeded. The scandal was contained. The whistleblowers were hunted. The people who allowed it were promoted. The convicted stayed close. And the man who presided over all of it is now in Downing Street with the country in front of him.

Look at what they did in Greater Manchester, and ask what they will do next now these same people run the nation. I used to call them the Manchester Mafia. That name is no longer enough.

For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.

Now the harder fight begins.

Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.

As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.

Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.

Three boroughs of ten were reviewed. Seven were never looked at. His own review team asked for the minutes of the meeting that closed down an investigation into 97 identified suspects, was told they could not be found, and accepted it. Operation Hexagon ran under his mayoralty and his policing powers, and he has never answered a single question about it.

Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.

At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.

That is why this campaign cannot slow down now. Which is why I need your help to be able to continue.

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Raja Miah MBE