Roger Scruton: Fear that allowed predators to thrive

Professor Alex Jay’s report into the scandal made harrowing reading – and there is incredulity at the reluctance of some to accept personal responsibility for their failings following this week’s extraordinary Home Affairs Select Committee hearing in Parliament.

If we are to understand this shocking story, then we need to recall a landmark case 15 years ago when these crimes were just beginning.

Sir Ian Macpherson, a respected judge, conducted the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in south London in April 1993 who was stabbed to death by a gang of racist thugs – and the subsequent police failings and cover-up.

The report accused the police – not just those involved in the case, but the entire police force of the country – of “institutionalised racism”. This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be accused of it.

However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated people of different races and without regard to their ethnic identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of “institutionalised racism”, simply on account of the institution to which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting.

Not surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression. Macpherson, too, climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time – it was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.

The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities.

Matters are made worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added the new crime of “Islamophobia” to the old crime of racism.

No social worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so, to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic offences committed by those racist middle classes.

Political correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions and the tired old theories that produce them.

But among ordinary people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone of Asian origin; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own community.

They know, and have known over 15 years, that there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls, and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see English society not as the community to which they belong, but as a sexual hunting ground.

But they dare not express this knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do so if their job is that of social worker or police officer.

Let slip the mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and put henceforth under observation.

This would matter less if fear had no consequences. Unfortunately political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them; to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists.

The intention of these activists is to disrupt and dismantle the old forms of social order. They believe that our society is not just racist, but far too comfortable, far too unequal, far too bound up with fuddy-duddy old ways that are experienced by people at the bottom of society – the working classes, the immigrants, the homeless, the illegals – as oppressive and demeaning.

They enthusiastically propagate the doctrines of political correctness as a way of taking revenge on an alien social order – alien because inherited.

Ordinary people are so intimidated by this that they repeat the doctrines, like religious mantras that they hope will keep them safe in hostile territory. Hence people in Britain have accepted without resistance the huge transformations that have been inflicted on them over the last 30 years, largely by activists working through the Labour Party.

They have accepted immigration policies that have filled our cities with disaffected Muslims, many of whom have now gone to fight against us in Syria and Iraq. They have accepted the growth of Islamic schools in which children are taught to prepare themselves for jihad. They have accepted the constant denigration of their country, its institutions and its inherited religion, for the simple reason that these things are theirs and therefore tainted with forbidden loyalties.

And when the truth is expressed at last, nobody is fired, no arrests are made and Shaun Wright – the elected Police and Communities Commissioner for Rotherham and South Yorkshire – refuses to resign from his job.

After a few weeks all will have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can resume. It cannot be right.

• Professor Roger Scruton is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, and author of How to be a Conservative, published by Bloomsbury, price £20.