HnH's silence over segregated Labour meeting explains how Rotherham happened

Labour have finally broken their silence over the segregated meeting attended by MPs Tom Watson, Liam Byrne, and Jack Dromey and MEP Sion Simon in Birmingham over the weekend. According to a story just published by the Daily Mirror a Labour spokesman is quoted as saying:

"Labour fully supports gender equality in all areas of society and all cultures... the seating arrangements ensured women from Muslim communities could take part."

As Orwellian newspeak and doublethink go, it is pretty standard Labour fayre which translates to "we accepted illegal segregation by sexes rather than illegally denying women entry". Presumably just refusing to attend the meeting unless it was in accord with the law didn't cross anybody's mind as there were votes at stake. By attempting to gloss over such blatant inequality while taking part in it and then trying to excuse it on the basis of 'culture' is such a sickening evasion that we can scarcely believe they had the gall to put out such a statement, not least as the meeting was arranged by Labour councillor Ansar Ali Khan. Surely it would make more sense just to expel Khan for sexism if he is unable to arrange a Labour Party meeting where men and women are treated equally.

Meanwhile, Hope not Hate - the great self-appointed moral arbiter of equality - has so far had nothing at all to say on the subject, and we can't see that changing.

We have blogged before on this subject: The responsibility for the grooming crisis lies within the culture Hope not Hate has infected the Labour Party with , and nothing we said then has changed: if anything, the current sexism scandal simply underlines the double standards at play. In Birmingham, Labour MPs went along with the meeting because they saw not the injustice and inequality of women being segregated, but only the votes that could be delivered by attending. And, of course, there were the concerns that by speaking out, they would be accused of 'cultural insensitivity' and 'racism'. Exactly the same reason that police officers, council officials, Labour councillors and Labour MPs did nothing in Rotherham over child abuse.

Are there any women here? - meeting
addressed by Liam Byrne

Sadly, the meeting at Hodge Hill has proved that nothing has changed either within the Labour Party, or within its associated hard-left, anti-UKIP organisations who pretend to believe in equality, who are the first to shout 'sexism' at UKIP, and yet are right at the back of the crowd mutely acquiescing when it is there in front of them in the own party. The hypocrisy is staggering - if it is against the law for the Christian owners of a B&B to turn away homosexual guests because of their beliefs, then how can it be right for a Labour Party meeting in a community centre to require segregation of men and women?

If nothing will convince you of the cynicism of both Labour and Hope not Hate, then consider these facts: Tom Watson is an active campaigner for Hope not Hate, writing recently how "We did a Hope Not Hate thing in Sandwell". Liam Byrne on his Flickr photostream - and without apparent irony - is pictured addressing several all-male Muslim gatherings in addition to being pictured delivering Hope not Hate leaflets. Sion Simon on his website boasts of meeting local Hope not Hate activists to 'celebrate the cultural harmony we enjoy' - the women were left outside in the rain, we assume.

Liam Byrne delivering (with no sense
of irony) Hope not Hate leaflets

Hope not Hate themselves frequently revisit what they claim is UKIP's sexism; a couple of minutes searching their website will return hundreds of results, with most articles based on a wilful misunderstanding of what was actually said by the UKIP person they are attacking at the time. Despite this, we don't recall UKIP ever having arranged a meeting where women were made to sit separately from men or - as in the case of one meeting addressed by Byrne - where women were excluded altogether.

It is these very double standards which bring us to the heart of the argument. In Rotherham, former MP, convicted thief and Hope not Hate activist Denis MacShane said of the child grooming scandal that:

""I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that. We were aware of the oppression of women within bits of the Muslim community in Britain but....Perhaps yes, as a true Guardian reader, and liberal leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.”

UKIPs sexism? When did they hold a segregated meeting?

This attendance at segregated meetings is simply putting an official, Labour Party rubber stamp on behaviour which would be unacceptable elsewhere; an acknowledgement that 100 years of women's suffrage, 50 years of Women's Lib and 40 years of equality legislation don't apply if you believe in certain religions. As others have said elsewhere, if the meeting had been segregated by race or by sexual orientation there would have been hell to pay.

It is sadly this same approach which has seen Labour councils across the UK face similar problems with paedophilia, or as it is now politely called, 'Child Sexual Exploitation'. We saw in Rotherham - and heard from then MP MacShane - that Labour didn't want to rock the boat for fear of being called 'racist'. Council employees, police officers and politicians alike were infected by this top-down fear of being branded with the one label which is guaranteed to halt any career in its tracks where Labour are involved. And so - just like Watson, Byrne, Dromey and Simon - they held their tongues, and let thousands of school age young girls pay the price of their right-on political correctness.

What we should be worried about is the law against Islamophobia promised by Laobur leader Ed Miliband should he become Prime Minister. We wonder which crimes could then be reported by the media: would reports of the Rotherham scandal and the Birmingham meeting be considered Islamophobic?

 Here in the UK, most of us were brought up to believe that justice is blind, and took that to mean that we were all equal before the law, without excuse. When will Labour, Hope not Hate and their bully boys in Stand up to UKIP and Unite Against Facism learn that a crime is still a crime even if the person committing it is a Muslim?

Lowles edges closer to admitting HnH culpability in child grooming scandal

A revealing blog post by Hope not Hate director Nick Lowles has edged closer to admitting his
organisation's culpability in driving the culture of fear over being labelled a racist which helped sexual offenders hide their crimes.

In an article posted this afternoon (Friday) entitled 'Whose side are we on?', he argues that Hope not Hate activists should not oppose a march allegedly organised by the EDL to protest against child grooming, and goes on to explain how his own organisation's approach to past grooming scandals lead to the perpetrators of such crimes escaping justice.

"There will be some who will be tempted to organise a counter-protest, which will amount to little more than standing behind a line of police chanting 'Nazi scum off our street'.
While I understand the desire to show opposition to the EDL, I believe that this approach is futile and counter-productive.
In the autumn of 2012, an EDL demo against grooming attracted a coach load of people (mainly men) from the former pit village of Maltby. These people weren't fascists and most weren't racist; in fact many were decent union men who had stood loyally with their union during the year-long miners’ strike and, more recently, had even leafleted with us against the BNP.
What they were, however, was angry.
They were angry because some of their daughters had been sexually abused and they were angry because the Labour Party - for so long their party – had, at best, ignored the problem or, at worst, connived to keep it under wraps. The EDL, on the other hand, gave them an outlet for their anger.
But as they filed through Rotherham town centre that day they were genuinely horrified to be called racists and fascists by those protesting against the march and rather than dissuade them against joining up with the EDL this name-calling only pushed them closer into the pack."

Which is all very well, but fails to address the wider issue: that there are some crimes which have a cultural or ethnic bias, and yet the motivation behind organisations such as Hope not Hate and UAF is to ignore this in the broader interests suppressing opposition to multi-cultural harmony through fear. In fact, Lowles goes on to admit that the combined actions of his organisation, their trades union financers and the Labour Party prevented an earlier investigation of similar offences in Keighley and Bradford by dismissing the claims of victims as 'BNP propaganda':

"We found this out, to our cost, in Bradford and Keighley in 2004, when there was a consensus to dismiss BNP claims of grooming in Keighley as racist propaganda. The BNP won four council seats and just missed out in several more.
Grooming was occurring in Keighley and everyone there knew it. In fact, nine Muslim men were sent to prison and as many as 65 young girls were believed to have been abused."

To 'our' cost? It didn't cost the left anything - that price was paid not by Lowles and his fellow travellers, but by 65 young girls. We already know that Hope not Hate is far from being a grass-roots organisation, and has few if any feet on the ground in terms of genuine activists. But still, we find it amazing that none of their Labour Party or trades union supporters on the ground in Keighley thought it worth mentioning if 'everyone there knew it'. It demonstrates one of two things: either the distance between their supporters and the genuine working class which Labour used to pretend to represent is so vast that they genuinely weren't aware that this was going on, or more worryingly - not to mention cynically - they were perfectly well aware of it, but after it was raised as an issue by their political opponents there was a conscious decision to conceal its existence and to use their media muscle to shovel it all under the carpet simply to prevent the BNP from using it as an issue. We tend to agree here that the latter is more likely, and there is something deeply, deeply sinister about it if that is the case.

Part of the reason for this wilful ignorance - which Lowles describes as 'a consensus' - is the entire modus operandi of HnH - it doesn't matter how obvious a problem is, if their political enemies annunciate it then it must be rubbished. This is particularly true of any issues which touch on immigration: we need only look at their denial of recent crime figures which show the scale of Romanian organised crime in the capital and elsewhere. The problem for Lowles is that if they cease doing this, then what is the point of their organisation? This is something which Lowles acknowledges without providing any solutions when he says,

"We need to have something tangible and meaningful to say about Grooming; we need to be genuine in our condemnation of this evil and, fundamentally, we need to have some answers to prevent it happening again."

Quite what those answers would be is difficult to guess. The fundamental problem with this type of grooming is that it is committed by groups of men who are immigrants and who are Muslim. It would also appear to be relatively widespread, and to affect significant numbers of victims. The nature of such offences leads inevitably to wider questions about certain types of Islam, and immigration from certain countries. While Hope not Hate have been happy to pay lip service to supporting sexual equality and gay rights, they have always shied away from tackling the difficult questions that certain strains of Islam raise and which spring from fundamental cultural differences which are diametrically opposed to the values of a secular western democracy: homophobia, misogyny, vote rigging and electoral violence spring to mind. Far from having Lowles 'answers to prevent it happening again', Hope not Hate has so far offered a mechanism to ensure it is kept out of sight by condemning all who raise any of these issues as 'racist'. Does anybody outside of Lowles closed circle really believe that all of a sudden his organisation will welcome free and open debate on issues relating to race and religion, particularly Islam?

"The people of Rotherham have every right to be angry about what has happened but unless we intervene in a constructive way then we become complicit – through our actions or our silence – in pushing them into the hands of right wing groups"

The problem with Lowles self-righteous sentiments is that there are 1,400 young girls in Rotherham, 65 in Keighley and God only knows how many across the rest of the country who are already paying the price in suffering for his attempts to stifle genuine, legitimate concerns. Lowles has nothing constructive to say - if he did, he would have said it already. He is already complicit, because his organisation is largely responsible for the conspiracy of silence which has infected mainly Labour authorities and which was brought about by a fear of being labelled 'racist', something the left views as worse even than the rape of a child.

So how sorry is Lowles? Apart from his failure to openly acknowledge his own responsibility, there is also the lack of any concrete suggestions as to how to proceed. His caution against calling people who are genuinely concerned about the issue 'racists' and 'fascists' has all the hallmarks of a stopgap measure designed to last until the heat is off: after all, how will they campaign on behalf of Labour against UKIP if they can't return to the tried and trusted (if discredited) tactic of calling any mention of immigration, race, culture, ethnicity or religion as 'neo-nazism'. If he was serious in his intentions to deal with the issue, he'd forget the Labour antipathy towards Respect and sing from the rooftops the details of Imam Alyas Kharmani's 'Together Against Grooming' campaign, which is based in Bradford - precisely where Lowles let down 65 young girls in the interests of political gamesmanship. Instead, his silence about this excellent campaign demonstrates that his statement - apart from being an unintentional admission of culpability - is nothing more than cynical, self-serving temporising designed to ensure that Hope not Hate continues to be a hobby horse for his own ambitions.