Thread by @Katie_Lam_MP

It’s easy to dismiss uncomfortable truths as “racist”. The British establishment often does.

Like when @maitlis interviewed @RupertLowe10 on grooming gangs.

It’s harder to confront the truth.

The truth may be uncomfortable but facts cannot be racist. These are the facts: 🧵

https://twitter.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1923007963947495731

About 90% of people in the UK have British citizenship. If 90% of criminals were British, this would be in line with their share of the population.

If it were higher than 90%, Brits would be more likely than average to be criminals.

If it were lower, they would be less likely.

In 2021, 10% of people in the UK were not British nationals.

But those people were convicted of 23% of sex crimes. They are therefore over-represented amongst sex offenders.

They're 230% as likely as Brits to be convicted of sex crimes.

This is not racist. This is a fact.

The other way that you can look at this mathematically is per capita, or per person.

Rather than the percentage relative to population, you can say, “for every 10,000 people, how many of them do X or Y?".

For example:

Ministry of Justice data shows that from 2021 to 2023, for every 10,000 Afghans in Britain, 59 were convicted of a sex crime.

The equivalent number for 10,000 Brits is 2.66.

Clearly, this isn’t all Afghans. It’s about 0.6%. But that still makes Afghans 22.2 times as likely as British people to be convicted of sex crimes.

This is not racist. This is a fact.

Another example:

For every 10,000 Eritreans in Britain between 2021 and 2023, 53.6 were convicted of a sex crime, making them 20.2 times as likely as Brits to be convicted as sex offenders over that period.

This is not racist. This is a fact.

Interviewing Rupert Lowe, Emily Maitlis said that there are, “ten times as many white grooming gang suspects”.

This is wrong, and she should correct it.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) happens – sadly and repulsively – almost everywhere.

Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a form of CSA, where a person or group coerces, manipulates or deceives someone under 18 into sexual activity.

Group-based child sexual exploitation (GbCSE) is where two or more people work together to sexually exploit a child.

This could be two parents abusing their child. Or two paedophiles sharing photos of a child.

Grooming is just one type of GbCSE, as defined by police's Hydrant.

The figures Maitlis cites are not for grooming gangs. They are taken from a report that looks at GbCSE more broadly.

The report only had information about 34% of GbCSE suspects. In two-thirds of cases, data about suspect ethnicity was not recorded.

Maitlis used partial data collected about a broader category of crime to conclude that Lowe’s focus on Pakistani grooming gangs was, “probably because you’re racist”.

This is an outrageous claim. She should retract it and apologise.

The majority of convicted child abusers are white.

This is unsurprising; the majority of people in this country are white (and statistics include historic offences, which will have been committed when the population was more white than it is now).

But study after study has identified a particular phenomenon of usually Asian — generally Pakistani — Muslim men, operating in gangs, grooming and raping underage children.

This is not racist. This is a fact.

The Hydrant Programme, the partial data Maitlis used, does in fact show that Pakistanis are overrepresented in grooming cases.

In their latest data (the first nine months of 2024), 13.7% of grooming suspects were Pakistani, five times their share of the population (2.7%).

Most grooming gang victims – in some cases, almost all – are white girls.

The Rotherham inquiry made a “conservative estimate” that 1,400 children were abused there.

There are 50 towns we know of with grooming gangs.

The Catholic Church is well known to have had a serious child abuse problem.

Lots of other institutions have or had a child abuse problem. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t acknowledge the problem in the Catholic Church.

This is not anti-Catholic discrimination. It is a fact.

The same is true of Asian Muslim, predominantly Pakistani, grooming gangs.

This is a specific issue, covered up for decades.

The race of the perpetrators is relevant, not least because it is central to that cover-up. Public officials were afraid of being labelled 'racist'.

That’s one of the reasons it’s particularly poor for people like Emily Maitlis to still be dismissing these concerns as racist, or Lucy Powell to say they’re a “dog whistle”.

That sort of attitude is why the cover-up was so successful — and persists to this day.

Telling the truth can be uncomfortable, even deeply so, but it cannot be racist.

Like it or not, these are the facts. And it's up to every one of us to draw our own conclusions from these facts. Here’s what I conclude:

Over decades, we have allowed people to come to this country from cultures very different from our own.

In many cases, these people have integrated into our society.

But we have been naive about where they have not.

Where integration has failed – sometimes with horrifying consequences – and people have pointed this out, they have been shut down with accusations of racism.

This has protected the perpetrators of some of the most disgusting crimes this country has ever seen.

It must stop.

Thousands of women and girls have paid a terrible price for the naivety and the subsequent dishonesty of the British establishment about this problem.

Until we confront the truth about this, so will thousands more.