Who Do You Trust To Tell The Truth About The Rape Gang Cover Up And Postal Vote Fraud?
Manchester Mill Continue Their Smear Campaign of Rape Gang Whistleblower And Man Who First Exposed The Political Corruption That Made Oldham 'Ungovernable'.
Yesterday, The Mill published a story about the extraordinary collapse of politics in Oldham.
The council has now failed five times to elect a leader. Politicians despise each other. Cars have been petrol bombed. A Ferrari has been smashed up. Councillors have received death threats. The council is breaking the law. Westminster may now have to intervene.
The Mill's headline says it all:
"Death threats, gangsters, and smashed up Ferraris: forget Manchesterism - this is Oldhamism."
Quite.
And somehow, in an article about a council that cannot even elect a leader, they managed to make the story about me. Again.
I am not a councillor. I am not standing for election. I am not involved in negotiations between the five political groups. I haven't petrol bombed anybody's car. I haven't smashed up anybody's Ferrari. I haven't threatened anybody. I haven't prevented councillors from voting for a leader.
But there I am. Instead of writing how I have exposed the cover up of the gang rape of little girls and led the campaign that forced a national inquiry, the Mill tells its readers that I have spent much of the last decade:
"seeding the downfall of Oldham's various leaders."
Later I get an entire section:
"Miah, Musk and the 'seeds of division'."
Apparently my name, the reporter tells us,
"will continually creep into conversations about Oldham politics no matter which angle you come at it from."
No shit. The Mill keeps fucking putting it there. And this is not the first time.
For five years, whenever I have exposed something uncomfortable in Oldham, The Mill's response has been remarkably consistent. Turn the camera around. Investigate Raja Miah. Mock him. Smear him. Attack him for daring to speak out on matters in his home town.
HOW MY FIGHT WITH OLDHAM LABOUR ACTUALLY STARTED
This matters because The Mill has constructed an entire bullshit mythology about why I began challenging Oldham Labour.
Joshi Herrmann's preferred version begins with the closure of schools I was involved in. According to him, who has never once spoken with me, I was bitter and I wanted revenge.
Eventually, according to Herrmann, I discovered that talking about grooming gangs gave me access to what he actually called a:
"whiter audience."
It is a useful story if your objective is to explain Raja Miah without ever seriously examining the things Raja Miah was exposing or his 30 year career in public service including sitting in rooms with multiple Prime Ministers and advising government.
The real story is rather less convenient.
My direct confrontation with Arooj Shah and Oldham Labour began around my mosque. And this wasn't simply a dispute about politicians turning up at a place of worship.
The mosque had been secretly funded by Oldham Council. The entire management committee were Labour Party members. Its chairman had previously stood as a Labour Party candidate for council. And Labour politicians would turn up to the mosque to harvest votes. Even a national newspaper named the mosque as involved in a 100% surge in postal votes at a by-election.
My intervention, in my mosque, only took place after a concerned mother desperately approcahed me for help. The chairman i referenced earlier, the former Labour Party candidate, was actually a convicted sex offender. The Council and the police both knew, but they refused to intervene, I suspect because of the same political arrangement that we now know protected the rape gang leaders.
I campaigned to remove him. The police came after me. Labour Party politicians came after me. As did members of the local Muslim militia that attempted to attack me whilst I attended a wedding. I persevered and the mosque was forced to remove the chairman from his position.
Think about that combination.
A religious institution secretly receiving council money. A chairman with direct Labour Party political history. A safeguarding issue involving that chairman.
And then Labour politicians arriving at that same mosque to campaign for votes. I objected. I would object again tomorrow.
I am a Muslim. I don't want the Labour Party using any mosque to harvest Muslim votes. I don't want the Conservatives doing it. I don't want Reform doing it either, though I'd have a chuckle and get the popcorn out to watch if they ever tried.
In all seriousness, I don't want imams being used as political brokers any more than I want priests standing at an altar telling Christians which party they should support.
People should vote as citizens. Freely. Individually. Without religious authority or community gatekeepers being used to deliver entire communities to political parties. There is a reason British electoral law recognises religious coercion as potentially serious. The law on undue influence can encompass undue spiritual pressure intended to influence how somebody votes.
That doesn't mean a politician entering a mosque has committed a crime. It doesn't mean an imam expressing a political opinion is automatically breaking the law. But the underlying principle matters. Religious authority must never become a mechanism for coercing the democratic franchise.
That was the political culture I began challenging. Council money. Community gatekeepers. Religious institutions. Political patronage. Safeguarding. Votes.
These things were not always as separate in Oldham as polite society liked to pretend. That is where my confrontation began. Not because I woke up one morning and decided to cultivate white people angry about Muslims. I was a Muslim challenging what was happening inside my own Muslim community.
That rather complicates The Mill's racial caricature doesn't it?
WHAT EXACTLY DID I DO TO AROOJ SHAH?
From there, my scrutiny of Shah became much more serious. I investigated her political record. I investigated the people around Oldham politics.
And I reported her associations. Among them was Mohammed Imran Ali, better known locally as "Irish Immy."
Ali is a convicted criminal who assisted Dale Cregan after the murder of David Short. Shah has acknowledged knowing him since childhood. She was photographed alongside him at an election count.
I also published a family photograph showing Shah alongside Ali and her brother, who had himself been convicted of money laundering. I also exposed her links with the convicted kidnapper and torturer Zia Hussain. A version of this has been doing the rounds for some time now. It was me that shared it.
These aren't people I invented. The photographs aren't conspiracy theories. And I didn't force a senior Labour politician to associate with anybody.
I reported what was there. People from my own community shared it with me. They were too scared to speak out for fear of what would happen to them. I was not.
The Mill itself has subsequently been forced to report Shah's friendship with Irish Immy. As has multiple national newspapers. Yet in its latest article, Councillor Kamran Ghafoor is permitted to tell readers:
"I may not see eye to eye with Arooj, but Raja Miah has done some nasty things to taint Shah's reputation."
What nasty things? The Mill doesn't tell us. It doesn't ask Ghafoor to identify a single lie I have told about Arooj Shah. It doesn't identify a single false story I have published about her. It just prints the allegation.
Perhaps The Mill should have asked him. Because I have investigated Kamran Ghafoor too.
THE MAN ACCUSING ME OF DOING "NASTY THINGS"
In 2013, Kamran Ghafoor pleaded guilty to a housing offence after failing to comply with a council notice concerning a flat inspectors had found unfit to live in. This is why I describe him as a convicted slum landlord. This is why I laughed at his lawyers letters threatening to sue me.
Ghafoor was fined and ordered to pay costs. His record as a landlord has subsequently been raised in the very council chamber in which he now sits.
Oldham Chronicle
I also exposed the fact that his brother, had appeared on Greater Manchester Police's most-wanted list in connection with alleged Class A drug supply. And that the Deputy Leader of his so called 'Oldham Group' also has a brother convicted as a member of an international drug smuggling gang.
The Mill's treatment of Ghafoor is rather different. We are told about his Ferrari. We are told somebody thinks he is a "Del Boy." We are told he invited their reporter into his office. We are even told he plied him with lime chocolates.
Then he is given space to accuse me of doing "nasty things." No particulars. No challenge. No evidence. And then just publish it.
This, remember, is an article whose headline contains the word "gangsters." The Mill wants to write about criminality surrounding Oldham politics?
Fine. Let's write about it. All of it.
WHEN AROOJ SHAH ACCUSED ME
There is another part of my relationship with Arooj Shah that The Mill's readers might find useful. I know what it is like to be accused by her. I was arrested by Greater Manchester Police as part of Operation Hexagon.
I was subsequently charged. Shah had made allegations against me. Eventually, those allegations were going to have to survive somewhere very different from Facebook, Twitter or the pages of The Mill.
A courtroom.
My lawyers went through Shah's retrospective statement after eight police officers had dawn raided my house without before even taking her statement. They identified the lies. They identified the contradictions.
We were ready to challenge her account. And then something remarkable happened. Arooj Shah didn't take the stand. I know what happened. I was sitting in the courtroom. I was the defendant waiting for the allegations made against me to finally be tested. They never were. She ran away from testifying against me.
So forgive me if I find it slightly rich that The Mill can now publish an allegation that I did "nasty things" to her reputation without even bothering to tell its readers what those supposedly nasty things were. Or that Shah had even openly endorsed the offer of my murder on Facebook.
When I make an allegation about somebody powerful, The Mill demands evidence. When somebody powerful makes an allegation about me, apparently quotation marks will do.
THEN THERE WAS THE FIREBOMB
The new Mill article opens with one of the most notorious incidents in recent Oldham politics.
In July 2021, Arooj Shah's car was firebombed outside her home. It was an appalling criminal act. But something else happened afterwards. An attempt was made to connect that attack to me and my writing.
Jim McMahon MP went to the Daily Mail. The suggestion was that the political environment created by campaigners like me had something to do with what happened to Shah.
There was an immediate problem. The piece of writing being used to make that connection was published after Shah's car had already been attacked. Unless I had somehow developed the ability to send articles backwards through time, it could not possibly have incited an attack that had already happened.
But I didn't stop there. I obtained the CCTV footage. And I published it. People could watch what happened for themselves.
The footage showed the attackers approaching Shah's car. It showed the UNLOCKED car door being opened. Then it showed the window being smashed after the door was already open.
That raised obvious questions about what had happened and about the narrative being constructed around the attack. I didn't hide the footage. I didn't tell people what they should believe and refuse to let them examine the evidence. I published the evidence.
Yet here we are, five years later. The Mill opens another story with the firebombing of Arooj Shah's car. No mention how the police has still failed to prosecute anyone after I released the video footage. Funny that isn't it? Maybe they were hoping to arrest and convict someone else?
A few paragraphs later I appear as the man who has spent a decade:
"seeding the downfall"
of Oldham's political leaders.
Later still, Shah tells The Mill:
"The sad thing for Oldham is people have sown seeds of division."
Seeds. Interesting choice of language.
WHEN THE JOURNALISTS CAME FOR ME
None of this started yesterday.
When I began exposing what had happened to children in Oldham and campaigning for a proper public inquiry, The Mill didn't devote its resources to investigating the evidence I was putting forward.
It investigated me.
Joshi Herrmann went through my background. My schools. My finances. My motivations. My supporters. The racial composition of my audience. The people commenting underneath my posts. Then The Mill joined forces with Tortoise Media. The resulting podcast was called:
"Smear."
Xavier Greenwood
Tortoise described what I was doing as "lawless digital politics" and claimed I had "baselessly" associated politicians with voter fraud, Asian cartels and grooming gangs.
The Mill called me a conspiracy theorist. Herrmann wrote:
"The paranoid style in Oldham politics."
Its subtitle explained his thesis:
"How Raja Miah is harnessing a town's racial resentments for his own ends."
According to this version of events, the explanation for my campaign wasn't the evidence I had uncovered. It was bitterness. Revenge. And the discovery that grooming gangs could attract what Herrmann called a:
"whiter audience."
Just consider how grotesque that looks against the actual origins of my confrontation with Oldham politics. A Muslim man challenges political interference in his mosque. He intervenes to remove a sex offender from its leadership. He objects to Labour politicians campaigning for votes inside it.
He begins investigating the relationship between political power, community gatekeepers and safeguarding. And then a former politician, Warren Bates, begs him to help safeguard other children in my own home town. Remember, this is a man who Queen Elizabeth II pinned an MBE to his chest. A man that has faced down extremists and helped keep the United Kingdom safe from terrorists.
And The Mill eventually explains him to its readers as a man exploiting White racial resentment. How fucking dare they.
"RAJA MIAH'S PROPHECY FAILED"
Then came 2022. Oldham's Assurance Review was published. The review itself documented serious failures. But it did not establish the wider institutional wrongdoing I had been alleging. The Mill celebrated.
Joshi Herrmann wrote an article comparing my supporters to members of a UFO cult waiting for a spaceship that never arrived.
The headline was: "What happened when Raja Miah's prophecy failed?"
And Herrmann announced:
"This week's report dismantled those claims."
That was supposed to be the end of it. The wider cover-up wasn't real. There was no need for the inquiry I had spent years demanding. Raja Miah's prophecy had failed. Except I didn't go away. I continued to campaign. And in the end, not only did we force a national inquiry, we forced Andy Burnham to admit that his so called assurance reviews were 'limited' and failed to get to the truth.
"I SUSPECT IT'S MIAH WHO FEARS ONE MOST"
I kept campaigning. I kept publishing. I kept demanding a proper inquiry. And as recently as January 2025, Herrmann was still at it.
He described my work as a:
"remorseless information war."
I warned that one day he might find himself having to answer questions about his journalism before an inquiry.
Herrmann responded:
"on balance, I suspect it's Miah who fears one most."
I kept that quote. Because then something rather inconvenient happened. We got the inquiry.
Not another council review. Not another assurance exercise. A statutory national inquiry into grooming gangs. And Oldham has been selected as one of its first local investigations.
The inquiry will examine what institutions knew. What they did. What they failed to do. It will examine institutional failures. It will examine ethnicity and religion. It will examine whether authorities failed children because of a misplaced desire to protect community cohesion.
And unlike the review that supposedly proved my "prophecy" had failed, this inquiry has statutory powers. It can compel evidence.
This is what I spent years demanding. This is what The Mill spent years telling its readers was the obsession of a conspiracy theorist. So who exactly should be frightened of the inquiry, Joshi? Because it certainly isn't me.
THEY STILL CANNOT LEAVE ME ALONE
Which brings us back to this week's article. It isn't about grooming gangs. It isn't about me.
It is about Oldham Council's inability to elect a leader. And still The Mill cannot resist. They drag me into it. They describe me as "seeding the downfall" of political leaders.
They mention donations. A publication, that hides its content behind a paywall, objects to me sharing all of my wrk for free, and leaving it to people to decide whether I am worth supporting.
They mention Elon Musk. They give Kamran Ghafoor space to accuse me of doing "nasty things." They give Arooj Shah space to talk about people sowing "seeds of division" and share with her that I had attended a meeting in what was the public library that they have stolen as their offices. How dare Raja Miah attend a meeting.
And then they put the whole thing behind a paywall and use me to promote it. There is a pattern here.
When I exposed politicians, I was attacking them. When I reported associations, I was tainting reputations. When I exposed grooming-gang failures, I was spreading conspiracy theories. When I demanded an inquiry, my prophecy had failed.
When the police came for me, the allegations against me were newsworthy. When those allegations finally had to survive the courtroom, the woman who made them didn't take the stand and not one newspaper reported on it.
When Shah's car was attacked, my campaigning was dragged into the story as somehow responsible. When the political establishment began collapsing at the ballot box, I had "seeded" its downfall. And now that Oldham Council itself is so dysfunctional that The Mill describes the town as "ungovernable," somehow Raja Miah is still part of the pathology.
There is apparently no outcome capable of falsifying The Mill's theory of me. Perhaps that's because The Mill isn't investigating Raja Miah anymore.
It is defending a story it decided was true five years ago.
I HAVE A QUESTION FOR THE MILL
I could ask what do a staff team that look like this know about Oldham? I could ask why they refused to report on Arooj Shah driving around in the passenger seat of Irish Immy's bright white Bentley or Kamran Ghafoor's sectarian Oldham Group and their Biraderi postal bloc voting supporters. I won't. Instead, I'll ask this.
What exactly have I lied about?
Not what have I said that you dislike. Not which of my supporters have said unpleasant things on Facebook.
Not whether Joshi Herrmann approves of my language, my skin colour, or what I suspect he has a problem with the most, my working class background and my belief that the children of mill workers are capable of standing up for ourselves.
What did I expose that was false? Name it.
Because something has changed since The Mill first came to Oldham looking for a conspiracy theorist. The inquiry I demanded now exists. Oldham is one of the first places it is investigating.
And the town whose dysfunction I was supposedly inventing is now described by The Mill itself as "officially ungovernable."
I have spent years putting my evidence into the public domain. So perhaps it is time for The Mill to do the same.
No more insinuation. No more psychological profiles. No more guilt by association. No more character assassination dressed up as sophisticated liberal journalism. Put your over priced oat milk latte down and put your evidence on the table. Tell your readers precisely what Raja Miah got wrong.
Because after five years of articles about me, podcasts about me, investigations into me and sneering about the inquiry I demanded, there is another possibility The Mill appears incapable of contemplating.
Perhaps you investigated the wrong fucking person.
I’m Raja Miah. For eight years, I have led a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs. Before that, I spent over a decade trying to stop violent extremists exploiting abandoned communities.
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.
Burnham and the Establishment fear thousands reading, sharing, and backing the same work because numbers mean witnesses, pressure, and consequences. That’s why this matters.
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– Raja Miah MBE