Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk has told GB News he was "warned off" by party figures from raising the issue of ethnicity in grooming gangs, due to concerns about "votes".Speaking to host Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Rochdale representative revealed that he was "told not to mention the ethnicity or the religion of the perpetrators" when raising concerns for rape gangs operating in his constituency.FULL STORY HERE.
00:00You were telling your friends in the Labour Party about this scandal years ago and nobody wanted to listen.
00:07Yeah, that's exactly right. I was the MP from 2010 to 2017 in Rochdale.
00:12The Rochdale grooming scandal broke as a story in 2012.
00:18I quickly came out saying that ethnicity and religion were a key factor in the abuse.
00:24The perpetrators had a very low opinion of the victims because they were Christian, because they were white.
00:30Because they were working class perhaps.
00:32And they used that as an opportunity to groom them and to rape them.
00:37And I made this clear. I was warmed off by a couple of significant members of the Labour Party.
00:44I was told not to mention the ethnicity or the religion of the perpetrators, but I ignored that and continued to do so.
00:51So you came under pressure from senior figures within the Labour Party not to mention ethnicity.
00:56Why were they doing that?
00:57Well, there's no doubt about it. I mean, the most senior figure was Tony Lloyd, who was chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party at the time.
01:04And I wrote to the National Inquiry in 2017 saying that he'd warmed me off it.
01:12And he was concerned about votes. I mean, that's quite clear.
01:15They thought it would upset the voting of Pakistani communities and they didn't want to lose the vote.
01:22I was quite clear about that.
01:24The previous MP for Rochdale, not immediately before you, was Cyril Smith, who was himself a major abuser.
01:30So Rochdale had a long, has a long history of covering these sorts of things up.
01:34Yeah, that's right. Cyril Smith had abused children. His modus operandi was to become a school governor.
01:42So he was a school governor of many schools and he would abuse children.
01:45I outed him as a paedophile in 2012. I wrote the book, Smile for the Camera, The Double Life of Cyril Smith.
01:52And in that book, I made the point that because people in the community knew of Cyril Smith being an abuser, it also almost made it acceptable to some people in the community.
02:03It sort of normalised it. And I think that, you know, that is a real concern.
02:08The good news now is because of what's gone on since since 2010, 2012, is that everybody is quite clear abusing children is totally unacceptable.
02:19And that's something that's more commonly talked about now.
02:23It's more talked about. But one of the things that's come out of the report, some of the abuse is coming from people who are illegally, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants,
02:30who, once they've broken one law, they've got much less sanction against them if they break other laws because they're already in a criminal world.
02:38Yeah, that's right. And because a number of people in authority, the police and in social services, have deliberately ignored or covered up the abuse by these particular perpetrators,
02:48I think they feel emboldened. I think Smith was the same. They feel emboldened and continue to commit these types of crimes. There's no doubt about that.
