Row erupts as Nigel Farage outlines Reform UK’s grooming gangs plan | Politics | News
Nigel Farage says Reform UK government will increase funding of gangs taskforce to £300m (Image: Getty)
Controversy broke out on social media after Nigel Farage outlined his plan to “deliver justice”. rape gangs victims of scandal The leader of Reform Britain announced his plans on Saturday (May 30), telling followers that mostly white working-class girls were being persecuted by criminal gangs who he said were “and still are” of Pakistani nationality or origin.
He claimed “state-sponsored” child sexual abuse was continuing in places such as Wigan and Makerfield, where Reform UK was hoping to win the byelection. Mr Farage He accused Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham of waging a “conspiracy of silence” on these issues with the police, media and local authorities “for decades”. The leader of Reform England said: “It’s time for action.”
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Rupert Lowe accuses Nigel Farage of doing nothing about grooming gangs (Image: Getty)
The action will include the UK Reform government publishing within 100 days all files held by public bodies linked to grooming gangs going back 40 years, if the organization wins the next general election in 2029.
Mr Farage said Reform would increase the National Crime Agency’s task force funding by £300 million to adequately investigate perpetrators and “accomplice” police officers, social workers and politicians who he claimed were “enabling” gangs grooming criminals.
He concluded his post: “This is our plan to finally get justice for our daughters.”
Half an hour after the announcement, the former Reform UK MP said: Rupert LoweHe accused Mr Farage of doing nothing despite previously promising an independent rape gang investigation.
He replied to Mr Farage: “I sat next to you in Parliament when you promised to launch your own independent rape gang inquiry. You went around the media and took the credit. You bragged about the headlines. You accepted the political gain.”
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“What did you do? Nothing. You delivered nothing. You never spoke of it again. I forced you to act, and you didn’t care.
“You broke that promise. You even insulted our own independent investigation by calling it a ‘waste of space’. This is a dirty policy and you should apologize for it.”
Mr Lowe left Reform UK last year amid allegations of workplace bullying, threats and political differences. The MP for Great Yarmouth insisted he was kicked out of Reform for challenging Mr Farage.
Since leaving Reform UK, Mr Lowe has founded Restore Britain, which also fielded candidates in the Makerfield byelection.
In October, Mr Farage called on MPs to take over the grooming gangs inquiry and run it as a select committee inquiry or a Parliament-wide committee so that prosecutions can be carried out.
His intervention came after a survivor of a grooming gang dropped an official investigation claiming the investigation was “rigged from the start”.
Andy Burnham says he has launched the biggest review into the problem the country has ever seen (Image: Getty)
The Government has launched an investigation into grooming gangs in response to Baroness Casey’s National Audit into Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Exploitation.
Mr Burnham stressed in a tweet that he had taken immediate action on the grooming of the gangs, while criticizing others for manipulating the facts.
The mayor of Greater Manchester said he was looking at the issue while “a lot of other politicians, in fact the vast majority of them, are just looking the other way”.
In a video published on X, Mr Burnham claimed he had “launched the biggest review into this problem the country has ever seen”. In the clip, Mr Burnham addressed issues and concerns being raised on the doorstep, including gangs and clean air zones.
On the grooming of gangs, he said: “I have a very clear story that I want to get across, because sometimes people play politics with this issue and manipulate the facts.
“I want to tell you directly what I did. A few days after taking office as mayor we watched the BBC program The Three Girls and I jumped into action, especially after hearing an interview with Maggie Oliver about Operation Augusta, a closed police investigation in Manchester.
“I launched the biggest review the country has ever seen on this issue. That’s when I was looking at it, but most other politicians, in fact the vast majority, were just looking the other way.
“This review into Manchester, but later the reviews and wider review into Oldham and Rochdale, led to the reopening of major police investigations. It led to the arrest, charges and conviction of perpetrators who would otherwise have gone free.”
The evidence on the ethnicity of gang members who sexually exploit children is mixed.
In an independent review of the Rotherham case, Professor Alexis Jay found that “the majority of the known perpetrators were of Pakistani origin”. These included five people convicted in 2010.
Greater Manchester Police identified those convicted at the trial in the Rochdale abuse scandal in February 2012 as British Pakistanis.
The abusers in Telford were men of South Asian descent, according to an independent investigation into the case.
A study commissioned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs on available data in 2020 revealed that research on the identity of criminals is limited and the data is of poor quality.
Abuse by white offenders has received less attention, including convictions in 2010 after a group of white men and a woman abused 30 children in Cambourne, Cornwall.
