Political Correctness Created The Silence That Allowed Rotherham

By Norman Tebbit

Almost every day there is yet another revelation in the Rotherham child abuse scandal, and it is all too easy to become diverted from calm consideration of the deep-seated causes of the affair into emotional outbursts of anger at those who committed such crimes and those who pretended that it was not happening. 

What is important is not just that all those are brought to book, but that we try to understand the overarching causes of the tragedy. 

Like the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair, the Rotherham scandal underlines the truth of what I have been saying for many years, that no society can have more than one culture. Of course minorities should be free to practise their religion, to eat Kosher, Halal or other foods, but in matters affecting their relationship with the society in which they live, they must accept the rules and practices of the culture of the host society in which they live. 

The dangers in Rotherham and Birmingham were clear enough. The authorities, local government, social services, education authorities, and police alike had begun to talk about their relations with "the community" as though it were a sovereign body and accepting that different codes of conduct applied within it than within the host society. 

In short, parts of Birmingham and Rotherham had become places more like the bantustans of the old apartheid South Africa, places of separate development, than towns in the United Kingdom. 

The authorities had allowed the imposition of Sharia by Islamic courts, even where, as in respect of the rights of women, it conflicted with English law. 

A blind eye was turned to election practices imported from Pakistan. Indeed the evil doctrine of political correctness and the perversions of equality legislation, alongside those foreign election practices were used to intimidate politicians into silence about the scandalous crimes being openly committed. 

In consequence those of Asian descent and Muslim religion who would have been well content to integrate into the society to which they, or their parents, had come, to escape from the one into which they had been born, were intimidated into remaining culturally in those countries. 

Eventually brave men like the far from uncontroversial Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, had had enough and began to speak out. But why have they had so little support from those who should have been in the front line of the battle to protect vulnerable young girls? Where is the feminist outcry? Where is that race- and sex-obsessed organisation Liberty? I would would have expected this scandal would have been of great interest to Shami Chakrabarti, but there is not much sign of it. 

I cannot help but wonder if it had been the Salvation Army which had been abducting and abusing young Asian girls whether these groups would have been so quiet.