There is an interesting and potentially politically explosive press release that has been put out by the United Kingdom Independence Party. It is based on a statement made by a former Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal, on the BBC’s PM programme on Radio 4, where he claims that a instruction was issued by the Home Office to the effect that young girls who were allegedly being exploited by Pakistani Muslims were making a ‘lifestyle choice’.
Mr Afzal, is said by UKIP to have claimed that:
“You may not know this, but back in 2008 the Home office sent a circular to all police forces in the country saying ‘as far as these young girls who are being exploited in towns and cities, we believe they have made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour and therefore it is not for you police officers to get involved in.’”
If Mr Afzal’s claims are correct then it implies that, at least at some level, the Home Office knew what was going on and not only did nothing, but also encouraged local authorities, Crown Prosecutors and the police, to also do nothing. I must admit here that I have made criticisms of Mr Afzal’s approach to the problem of Islamic Rape Gangs in the past. He stated in a Guardian interview in 2014 that he believed that deprivation and class play the major role in these sorts of offences and although I accept that these factors can account for making some of the victims more vulnerable to grooming, this does not answer the question as to the motivation of the offenders. In my opinion the reason why so many Muslims are involved in these brutal rapes and enslavements is Islam and Islam’s attitude to both women and non Muslims, which Mr Afzal may not have been as vocal about as he should have been in the past. Sure, as Mr Afzal has said in the past, there is an element of ‘male power’ in the offences but he has previously failed in my view to properly highlight the issue of Islam in these offences.
I get the distinct impression that maybe Mr Afzal may be changing his views somewhat and now that he is much more distant from his job, which included prosecuting some of these Islamic Rape Gang offences, he’s more willing and able to speak more openly of the pressures he and other public servants seems to have been put under by central government. Mr Afzal’s claims, if they can be proven, do indicate that police, councils and prosecutors may well have been pressured by the Home Office into taking a softly softly attitude to Islamic Rape Gangs.
I must admit that this is appalling advice which is alleged to have come out of the Home Office. It looks very much as if the Home Office knew about the problem of Islamic Rape Gangs and knew about how damaging to the Government of the day any revelations about this problem would bring. The Home Office then made a blanket statement in order to stop the police opening up a massive can of worms. The Home Office statement is also one devoid of any subtlety and nuance. Whilst there are adult women (and men for that matter) who freely choose to engage in prostitution and have made a lifestyle choice, it is very plain from the number of Islamic Rape Gang cases that have come before the courts recently that this is not the case with Islamic Rape Gangs. In many of the Islamic Rape Gang cases we are not dealing with adult women making free choices, we are instead dealing with children and young women below the legal age of consent being forced into unwanted sexual activity by gangs of Muslim men. As the author Shazia Hobbs said recently in a post on the Gab platform, ‘children cannot consent’ but shockingly the Home Office appears to have treated children, who are legally unable to consent to sexual activity, as adults in order to make the problem go away.
If this document was indeed sent out to various police forces by the Home Office then this raises major questions for me about where and who within the Home Office authorised this advice? Were there senior civil servants who put out this advice in order to protect other failed policies, such as multiculturalism, or were they afraid of public unrest should the extent of the crimes committed by the Islamic Rape Gangs come to public attention? It is also possible that civil servants and ministers could have been misled by leftist groups and leftist academics as to the nature of the problem as indeed being one where the victims have chosen their enslavement? We do not know at this stage and in any event much of the advice given to Ministers by senior civil servants is probably restricted under the Official Secrets Act and probably won’t be released for thirty years or so.
The nature of this advice also raises the question as to whether this advice was given for political reasons. The political scene at the time with Labour was one of unrest and upheaval, Jacqui Smith the Home Secretary at the time of the advice was in the middle of a Parliamentary expenses scandal which in large part brought about her resignation. It could be the case that Ms Smith was distracted by her own political problems and therefore was less than properly aware of how her department was being run and the advice that was being doled out by her civil servants? There is also the much darker possibility that Labour, who were going to have to fight an election in 2010, put pressure on civil servants, to keep a lid on the Islamic Rape Gang problem.
I believe that there needs to be an urgent enquiry into how this problem was handled during the tenure of not just Jacqui Smith but other Home Secretary’s of both Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments in the period since 1997. However, as this advice came during Ms Smith’s period in charge of the Home Office that she should be questioned as to just how much she knew about what was going on and also what her civil servants were telling her what was going on. To be fair to them, Ministers although responsible for the conduct of their ministries, do not always know the detail of what is going on in the various subsections of their departments. It would be unreasonable for example to expect the Trade Minister to know all the ins and outs of the donkey work that goes on at levels far below their office.
But the advice that Mr Afzal is claiming was sent out by the Home Office must have come from someone or somewhere pretty senior within the Home Office, it’s not the sort of thing that a junior civil servant could have sent out, it must have come from someone of level SCS3 or above, someone at Director level. My big question about this is whether or not this advice was referred up to the Secretary of State and whether Ms Smith saw this advice and approved it before it went out?
If Ms Smith approved this advice then she needs to come clean and state why she approved it, and I believe that both those who wrote this advice and Ms Smith should be brought before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee to explain why such contentious and in my view disgusting advice was sent out and whether it had ministerial approval. The problem of Islamic Rape Gangs is now so huge and widespread that the British public deserve to be shown just where and why the decision was made to send this noxious advice out, advice that probably contributed to the victimisation of hundreds of not thousands of girls and young women. How much did Jacqui Smith know about both the existence of these Islamic Rape Gangs and the advice given to police to not tackle them with any vigour? Ms Smith owes the British public some honesty over this advice and her involvement, if any, in it.
