Why Broadening The Rape Gang Inquiry Will Bury It
Fiona Goddard is a survivor who wants to fight for everyone who was failed. That impulse is admirable.
Fiona Goddard came to Oldham. I attended and encouraged people to attend. I shared her content and spoke at the event at her request. I said publicly what I have always believed. Without the courage of survivors like her, there would be no national inquiry.
Her position, however well meaning, now changes the direction of what that courage built.
Scope Creep Is The Government's Best Friend
Fiona's statement after the event is clear enough. She wants to broaden the work to cover all forms of child sexual exploitation. The strategic consequences, at this precise moment in this inquiry's life, are a different matter entirely.
The inquiry started last week. Politicians have blocked it for years. The government has rigged the terms of reference and installed a chair whose independence remains contested. They will not miss an opening. The moment this campaign declares it is about all CSE, the government borrows the language and uses it against the inquiry. The perpetrators and the networks behind them, the cover-up that shielded both across Oldham and Rochdale, Bradford and Rotherham, all of it dissolves into a general safeguarding conversation. Nobody named. Nobody charged with a specific failure.
The Cover-Up Had A Racial Architecture
I am a brown-faced Muslim man. People who call me a racist and a far-right activist do not trouble me. What troubles me is watching people who know better talk themselves into confusion because they are concerned of those same labels.
The Pakistani rape gang phenomenon is distinct. The men who ran these networks chose their victims deliberately, by class and vulnerability. The state knew. It protected them. Race was the primary reason for the silence. Political cowardice kept it going for decades. That is why the inquiry exists.
Mohammed Nadeem is from Oldham. In 1993, aged twelve, he was sent to a madrassa in Lahore. Over the next two years he was raped and abused by ten men. He suppressed it for thirty years. When he finally reported it to Oldham Police in 2025, naming the perpetrators, one was arrested and released without charge. The offence took place before 1996 on foreign soil. Greater Manchester Police told him they had no power to prosecute. Three of his abusers had been living in the UK for two decades, two of them working as Imams in Oldham. All remain free.
His testimony at Fiona's event moved everyone in that room. I have met him and find his story haunting. But Fiona made a decision that night. She placed his testimony alongside Jamie Lee's, a survivor of the Oldham rape gangs, and presented both as evidence of the same phenomenon. They are not.
Nadeem was not targeted by the same network, through the same method, protected by the same institutional silence. The failure that produced what happened to him is a different one. Folding the two together dissolves the specific question the inquiry must be forced to answer.
The Door She Is Opening Has Wolves Behind It
Fiona says she will not exclude people based on past failings. Those who failed the most are often the most important to engage with.
Amongst those she is describing is Cllr Brian Hobin. He attended her event and received a barrage of criticism from those there. I was civil to him because she had invited him and it was her occasion. Hobin is a convicted fraudster. He sat with me and agreed a deal to help keep Labour out. He then reneged on it in secret. He did this twice. He cannot be trusted. He also argued in favour of the rape gang inquiry widening its remit.
Charlotte Hall
Due to Hobin's secret deal with Labour, the independent vote split and Labour came back through the door we had spent years trying to close. Once in power, he manoeuvred for self-gain and aligned himself with the party that spent six years blocking this inquiry. He was rewarded with the promise of Mayor in exchange for propping up a Labour administration that tried everything to censor the truth.
A platform will not redeem him. In May, his Failsworth Independent Party sidekick, Cllr Neil Hindle, faces a ballot box. He will lose. We will then remove Hobin the year after.
Every One Of Them Has Demonstrated The Same Thing
It is the same at a national level. I have spent years watching Jess Phillips, Naz Shah, Starmer, Jim McMahon, Andy Burnham and many others. At every opportunity, each of them chose obstruction. They fought to prevent the inquiry. Once they failed, their party moved to rig it. Giving any of them a seat at her table hands them a legitimacy they have not earned. I have no interest in negotiating with these people. The evidence speaks for itself. They are part of the cover up.
I understand why survivors want to fight for everyone who was failed. It is admirable. Unfortunately, the desire to broaden hands the advantage to the people who caused the failure.
We fought eight years for this inquiry. The crimes it must examine are distinct. The perpetrators must pay a price specific to what they did. Others can do what they want to do. They have every right to do so. I will not play any part in widening the frame so the guilty can hide inside it.
Raja Miah MBE
We are not where we are by accident. We will not get where we need to be if we leave it to those that were part of the cover up to deliver justice. Stand with me.
I’m Raja Miah. For seven years, I 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.
This 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.The Rape Gang protecting 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