No joke, these girls were sacrificed at the altar of PC

Billionaire rabblerouser Elon Musk has helped to propel Britain’s so-called ‘grooming gangs’ scandal into global headlines with his furious tweeting. Picture: Getty Images

We all love making fun of political correctness. It’s so ripe for mockery. No one is more deserving of derision than these fun sponges who police people’s banter and jokes.

PC – or wokeness, as we call it now – is that zany pastime of time-rich, blue-haired leftists. They stomp around on campuses and in the HR departments of hip workplaces wagging a finger at anyone who is not fully au fait with the latest correct-speak. Misgender someone, say “black woman” instead of “woman of colour” or, worst of all, crack a joke that wasn’t pre-approved by one of these neo-wowsers, and they’ll be hauling you off for diversity training.

That’s a euphemism for re-education. You’ll be schooled on pronoun usage, racial linguistics and all the other Edwardian etiquette of the PC derangement. Nothing less than full capitulation to right-think will do.

The antidote, surely, to all this joyless ratbaggery is laughter. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past 30 years anyway: chortling in the face of these champagne Stalinists. As Kurdish novelist Burhan Sonmez reminds us: “Dictators hate people who laugh at them.”

But across the past week I think I’ve changed my mind. Not on whether PC is irritating and illiberal – it still is – but on whether it’s funny. I now believe it’s more lethal than loony – something that poses a threat not only to our right to tell crude jokes but to civilisation itself.

It was Britain’s “grooming gangs” scandal that prompted my rethink. That’s the euphemistic name given to one of Europe’s worst social outrages of the post-war era: the sexual abuse of thousands of white working-class girls by bands of mostly Pakistani Muslim men in towns up and down England. Brits have been talking about this horror for years. We’ve had inquiries into it. The Times covered it, as did all the tabloids, and even the BBC.

I’ve written about it numerous times, including in an essay for The Wall Street Journal a decade ago, in which I said officialdom had turned a blind eye to this plague of violent debasement, thus abandoning the “civilised requirement to protect the vulnerable”.

But the scandal has had a new lease of life in 2025. It has “trended” online. Billionaire rabblerouser Elon Musk has helped to propel it into the global headlines with his furious tweeting.

He has accused the British government of being “deeply complicit” in these “mass rapes” and has even wondered out loud if Keir Starmer and some of his ministers might deserve a little jail time.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Picture: Getty Images

Revisiting this outrage – in all its gross detail – I am reminded of the ideology that underpinned it. The ideology that fuelled officialdom’s fatal disinterest in the suffering of the girls. The ideology that kept this atrocity hidden from the public for so long. It was political correctness.

It is impossible to overstate the enormity of the rape-gang scandal, to give it its more accurate name.

In various towns and cities, gangs of men from primarily Pakistani backgrounds preyed on poor and destitute white girls in the most diabolic fashion.

In Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester and elsewhere, squads of these men pimped, abused, raped and in some cases even killed girls from the dirt-poor parts of town.

There was a racial streak to their beastly behaviour. The girls who became their victims report being referred to as “white whores” and “white slags”. They were treated as a lower form of life. The gangs’ behaviour seemed to be motored not only by misogyny or the warped urge to dominate but by a desire for racial vengeance too. The racist belittling of the girls contained creepy echoes of the fashionable anti-whiteness of the modern left.

On campuses and in other woke circles we’re forever being told to atone for our “white privilege”, while in these grim, post-industrial towns girls were punished for their original sin of whiteness.

What made these events even more monstrous was officialdom’s indifference. Report after report has found that local politicians and police forces were initially loath to investigate the gangs because they feared appearing racist.

The inquiry into Manchester’s “grooming gangs” found that cops kept their distance to begin with because they didn’t want to “upset race relations”. They dreaded the public anger that might greet news of poor white girls being exploited by Pakistani men.

In Rotherham, too, officials hushed up the existence of the gangs because they were “afraid to be called racist”.

In 2014, an official inquiry headed by Professor Alexis Jay spelled it out: there was institutional “nervousness” about discussing the gangs and it was driven by a “fear of being thought (of) as racist”. In some cases, said the Jay inquiry, the truth about the gangs was “effectively suppressed”.

As the London Evening Standard summed it up this week, “political correctness about race” effectively “chilled investigations” of the rape gangs. PC pushed out truth. In town after town, a craven calculation was made – it is more important to be right-on than to do what is right.

The protection of political correctness was elevated above the protection of working-class girls from rape. Officials seemed more interested in steadying the ship of multiculturalism than in securing the safety and dignity of poor girls.

This shameful episode shows just how deadly political correctness can be. PC is not just the eccentric hobby of posh snowflakes. It’s far more dangerous than that. It can even kill.

The true tragedy of these girls is that their suffering did not fit the narrative. Brown-skinned men racially and sexually abusing white girls? It just didn’t compute to the overlords of wokeness who view brown people as oppressed and white people as privileged.

This unsettling spectacle threatened to undo the self-flattering ideologies of the new elites, to unravel their entire identitarian belief system. And so they ignored it, they “effectively suppressed” it. They sacrificed girls at the altar of ideology.

This scandal is a searing indictment of the hyper-racial thinking of the new elites. It should serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of the left’s anti-whiteness, hierarchies of oppression and cavalier cancellation of any story that doesn’t obey their narrative.

Where does it all end? With girls being raped right under the nose of an indifferent bureaucracy.

So in 2025, I am resolved – I’ll probably still laugh at PC but I will also do everything I can to dismantle it. For there is no place in the 21st century for an ideology that lets girls suffer.