We could have had someone other than Trump too, but it does seem to take a certain level of odiousness to really bust through the establishment bulwarks. A giant middle finger isn't very subtle after all.
Both Trump and Robinson are giant middle fingers pointed up at the establishment, yes—Robinson perhaps even more so, given he was a bona fide football hooligan in his youth.
> And the worse the MSM treats him ("Convicted Felon[TM]"), the bigger that hand gets.
-- Yes. Trump supporters go "Look, the elites don't like Trump. The elites don't like me either, so maybe that means Trump is on my side." Well done, MSM and Democrats, all your years of hating on white working class people have paid off!
I'll have to write about this in a bit of detail (I thought of including it in this piece), but in this context, "grooming gangs" is correct. Muslim rape gangs do indeed exist—Australia had a rash of them in the 90s. The relevant offenders were all incarcerated for extremely long terms for what were serious crimes directed at women not previously known to them or only glancingly known, often on a racial and religious basis (hatred of whites and Aborigines specifically, and non-Muslims generally).
Child sexual exploitation does not follow the same patterns as attacks on adult women. Instead, it is directed to winning the trust and confidence of a young person, often over a period of weeks or months. Street grooming of the type perpetrated by Pakistani Muslims in the UK involves plying unsupervised children (many were and are in care or in foster homes) with drugs or alcohol or in some cases, toys, food, and clothes. This is the "grooming" aspect.
This meant police and the CPS were (and are) often confronted with young girls who insist that Ahmed or Muhammad were/are their boyfriends and that they wouldn't/won't give evidence against them. I'm afraid this is something I've also observed in practice (with non-Muslim offenders in Australia) and it is very disturbing to see but nonetheless common. It is so far outside the ken of most people (and was for me until I started out in 2005 as a baby barrister) that understanding is difficult.
The other issue was a false dichotomy separating offenders into two different categories. Only the enablers and facilitators were charged, tried and convicted. What about the men who were active and knowing participants in child rape as customers?
The Court of Appeals already uses lie detectors as a means of sifting through applications as a means of separating out the guilty who protest their innocence. It's not beyond the realms of the feasible that the CPS could have used lie detectors to separate out men who knowingly raped children from those who unknowingly did the same.
That's a pattern of sex trafficking more generally- what outwardly might appear as prostitution or sex work, is actually predicated on addiction paired with occasional abuse and the omnipresent threat of force and coercion.
But this is exactly the problem with the grooming gang scandal. Police, schools, local authorities and social workers all knew that under British law, no child under the age of 16 is ever capable of giving consent under any circumstances- but all of Britain's institutions persisted internally with the fiction that underage girls were willing prostitutes to protect their precious notions that cultures are equally valid.
On specific issues, some cultures are inferior to others.
It's got bugger all to do with culture, as the vast number of white British perverts, including many of the so called elite, proves quite conclusively. Some people are just wankers and given power, will prey on the weak.
Just to be clear, I have zero tolerance for any sexual predator, male or female.
We are one species, human, the rest (race, culture, religion) is just software.
Demonstrably, there's nothing in British software stopping the rape and murder of working class kids, they just cover it all up. Jimmy Saville just one of many. Given that's the case, don't get distracted by some kind of culture war shit stirring.
The problem is not that the perps are brown or Muslim, it's that the services paid to ensure this doesn't happen and prosecute when things get past, didn't do their job. The problem is how vulnerable kids are cared for in the sixth largest global economy.
It's nothing to do with the fact that people are brown, but culture does make a difference. Age of consent is a social construction. Don't get me wrong, at the same time that the Victorians were covering table and furniture legs, the average age of a prostitute was 9 in London (mainly because of syphilis and the perception that younger girls were less likely to be infected).
However, the data is quite clear. The 2011 report for the Office of the Children's Commissioner is/was the best source we have thus far. Roughly 2,400 victims of group CSE were detected in a 14 month period. 36% were White, 27% were Asian. At the time Whites were about 86% of the population and Asians were 8% (4.8% Muslim- who have been found to overrepresented amongst Asians in group CSE). Some pretty basic Maths should tell you that Asians/Muslims were/are substantially overrepresented in group CSE.
Look, there are other factors. Drug dealing is more common in many poorer socioeconomic groups and group child sexual exploitation is associated with drug-related organised crime, but there are real world consequences for a religion arbitrarily setting the age of consent at the age of monthly courses. Islam needs to disown the fact that Aisha had her marriage consummated at age 9. It was paedophilia plain and simple (and a sin), even back then.
For example, when Margaret Beaufort gave birth to Henry Tudor at 13, it highly unusual and would have been frowned upon, because people then knew that sex before age 14 risked a much greater chance of death for the mother, permanent injury (including future infertility), and stillbirth for the child. Most rites of passage were set at age 13, and it would have been normal for the girl to wait at least a year to settle into young adulthood, before marriage and consummation would have been contemplated. The only reason why Margaret Beaufort risked pregnancy so young was because she justifiably feared that the King might take her lands away unless she had a male heir.
In Pakistan 3.6% of girls are married before age 15. Iraq is considering lowering the age of permissible marriage to age 9. Many of the girls who were raped and molested reported having men use thighing practices whilst they were still prepubescent.
In the wake of Elon Musk raising the subject of gang grooming Google et al are in the process of trying to redact any sources which show that Islam has age of consent social construction which is radically different to that of the Western world, but barbaric practices in many Muslim countries are a matter of record no matter how much Google and other browsers try to hide to truth, as are the hadiths which permit sex with a bride who has started her monthly courses, regardless of age.
This doesn't mean that things cannot change. Crime reporting from Austria shows that Muslims who have lived in the West for decades and have integrated, commit sexual violence at rates almost identical to the local White population- unfortunately, the same cannot be said of recent arrivals, who are heavily overrepresented in national crime figures for sexual violence, even though recent Muslim arrivals to Austria only comprise 1% of the total population. At the same time many more modern and forward looking Muslim countries are in the process of raising the age of consent and changing the culture- fully aware that historic Islamic paedophilia aids the arguments of both apostates and anti-Islamic activists.
But it doesn't help anyone to hide to truth. Darkness and censorship always makes a problem loom larger in the human imagination, creating circumstances where the worst possible spin will be placed on true events. Everybody knows this instinctively- if one waits to go to doctor or the dentist one usually imagines the problem is far worse that it usually is- we should learn that things work exactly the same way with cultural phenomenon.
I predict a decent data-driven inquiry would show people the extent of the problem was far less extensive than many of the claims circulating the internet. In addition, a substantial percentage of supposedly religiously inspired group CSE amongst Asians will be drug-related organised crime- the same as for many Whites and Blacks,
My own calculations show a maximum of 150,000 girls victims of group CSE by Asians- a far cry from 500K or a million as some claim. That's still terrible- but once one correctly assigns the percentage driven by drug gangs, the religious aspect will probably be far smaller.
I'm not incorrect in saying that the "Well TECHNICALLY..." framing helped get the U.K. into this position in the first place. It's legalese and there's absolutely no patience left for it.
I'll use language as explosive as the crime, even if it's not "technically☝🏻🤓 accurate".
Rape gangs it is, seeing as there's no fucking consent involved whatsoever.
This specific grooming was happening at a time in Western culture when it became inappropriate for any adult, in pay of government, to suggest that girls forego sexual liaisons outside marriage.
Our current moral framework is to encourage girls to experiment sexually as though they were boys: as early as a sexual preference is felt, girls should express it, and with no commitment either since babies can be aborted if a girl conceives because her contraception fails.
So if the girl liked the alcohol and drugs and attention... by what principle can society say "no" if the girl might be simply exploring her sexual preferences? I bet a lot of adults said nothing because they knew they should not say "no", not anymore.
Behaviour of this type (especially from social workers) is described in Baroness Alexis Jay’s report. The children were seen to have “consented” to the sexual attention, despite the fact that minors cannot consent to sex as a matter of law.
Looking forward to the 2027 BBC police procedural "Groomers", where the rapist perpetrators are all portrayed by white male actors, the victims played by a cast of multi-cultural/racial girls, and of course a strong black female lead to play the cop/journalist/lawyer/mother, who blows the lid on the "groomers", and extracts righteous vengeance/justice.
This moral framework is well described by the phrase “philosophies convenient for predators.” I forget who wrote that phrase, but the essay was focused on Sartre.
> Child sexual exploitation does not follow the same patterns as attacks on adult women. Instead, it is directed to winning the trust and confidence of a young person, often over a period of weeks or months.
Those victims are often sold, adbucted, locked, and beaten up when trying to leave. There's little about 'winning the trust" in any of it.
But even when grooming is involved, the important thing to point should be the bigger crimes commited - so they should be called by that, rapists and human traffickers, not by the process they followed to get the girls.
We don't call park rapists "jogging behinders", or abductors "unmarked van drivers"...
Exactly, Josh, I prefer to call them child rape gangs, for they raped and tortured minors. Some commentators, like the wonderful Matt Goodwin, is calling them rape gangs, and I noticed yesterday that Patrick Christys of GBNews called them child rape gangs.
It’s tragic that we are so cowed that it takes a Walmart version of Tony Stark to “bring awareness”. In the mean time the same savior is curtailing the speech he claims to support when he throws people off Twitter when they rightfully disagreed with his position on the H1B visas.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s good thing that Elawn is concerned and now people are waking up to the issue, but I grow concerned that they have to be “brought” to that awakening. As though they have been granted permission.
One bit of irony with Elawn calling for King Charles to dissolve Parliament: the last time a King by the name of Charles dissolved Parliament he lost his head.
The left had no problem promping up 'bad' people if they fit the narrative, like George Floyd or Jordan neely, who have been arrested more times than Robinson
Thank you for this Helen, to my shame I had forgotten about Peter McLoughlin, despite owning Easy Meat and the insightful Mohammed's Koran.
It really is something that it takes Elon Musk to puncture the UK 'elites' avoidance of the whole issue, they now have to react and to have an opinion that cannot be the usual 'ghastly working class white oiks and fascists lying about the nice Pakistanis' because the new US Administration is looking on. Our class system in action.
I am confident that Elon and Trump world will keep ramping up the pressure, an International led enquiry would be ideal, US oversight, Danish Investigators perhaps, that would give confidence.
As horrible as the rape gangs are, even more worrisome have been the efforts of the establishment politicians and media to suppress and hide the crimes. Today Germans bear a heavy burden of guilt for the actions of their government 1933 - 1945, but there was a partial reckoning at Nuremberg, and few if any of those responsible are left alive. But in Britain those responsible for ignoring these horrible crimes and enabling their perpetuation for their political and ideological advantage remain "respectable" and in positions of power. The culpability evidently extends even to the PM who was once in charge of public prosecutions. The odious behavior of the establishment is a moral stain on British nation.
There was a whole lot of class warfare going on. I can't help thinking that if these gangs had been targeting the sort of schools where the children of local politicians, senior social workers or police officers had been sent, then those responsible would have been banged-up a lot quicker than they were.
It was just a typo, which I've now fixed. I can't type—I'm a member of that generation of professional women who (deliberately) wasn't taught to type so that when we became solicitors and accountants we weren't turned into glorified secretaries.
Thanks Helen, for the ability to look beyond the Current Thing to analogize to other plebs v power dynamics all the way back to the Roman Empire. Whether or not the medium is the message, we still need messengers, some of whom are unsavory folk. Hopefully the silver lining will be for those in power to get their head out of their ass before the next Current Thing becomes a thing.
> Second declension with an indeclinable portion, due likely to being the name of an office
No?
The link does say "second declension with an indeclinable portion", but it also gives a declension table, and there is no indeclinable portion.
The word "plebis" ("of the plebs") doesn't change, but that's not because it's indeclinable. It's because it must be genitive regardless of the case of "tribunus", in exactly the same way that the plural form of the title "Leader of the Free World" is "Leaders of the Free World" and not "Leaders Free Worlds". Does that make "world" indeclinable? Obviously not.
It broke because the man who is now Prime Minister (who is universally loathed) is implicated in covering it up because he was, during some years whilst it was going on (it still is), head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
This post just made me look up Tommy Robinson's bio and learn that he had done some actual crime in the 2000s, rather than just being arrested for what is known as journalism in the rest of the Western world (maybe with the attribute "ambulance-chasing") in the 2010s/20s. I always thought that his criminal past was referring to the latter!
He was a pretty bad egg in his youth; there’s no point denying it. However, people can repay their debt to society and come out the other side as better human beings—think of the rehabilitated prisoner who fought off a pair of terrorists with an elephant tusk a couple of years ago.
Musk has now given Robinson that opportunity. Many other people in similar circumstances do not get such a chance.
“The grooming gangs scandal, by contrast, now has Tommy Robinson as tribunus plebis, and that is indeed very discomforting precisely because he isn’t a good man, and isn’t one of the victims.”
Not sure exactly what his earlier transgressions were, but it seems that his attempt to bring up the child rape scandal could serve as some form of redemption. And I think being locked up for reporting on it counts as being a victim of the state, if not of the rape gangs.
I will confess, I am not terribly well-versed on him or on the rape gangs, but I have the distinct impression that (1) a great many rapists were never punished and (2) those who were received sentences less than they deserved (life without parole, if not, in my revanchist opinion, death).
Doesn't redemption require the person to have left behind their iniquituus behaviour? Which is not the case with Yaxley-Lennon. He's in prison for continuing to libel an individual who was a child at the time of said libel... https://www.mountfordchambers.com/nobody-is-above-the-law/
Your characterization of Tommy Robinson as tribunus plebis suggests an acknowledgment that this is fundamentally an “Elite Progressives vs. Ordinary Britons” issue rather than a strict left/right divide. The grooming gangs scandal isn’t inherently a right-leaning concern—it’s about justice for the victims, accountability for the perpetrators, and the systemic failure of institutions that prioritized self-preservation over protecting vulnerable citizens. These are universal concerns that should transcend political affiliations, even if their framing has historically been dominated by left-leaning narratives.
I think Musk’s retooling of Twitter/X reflects a broader realignment, shifting public and media focus away from elite progressive gatekeeping toward a perspective that includes the middle-class Britons—the “plebes,” if you will—who form the majority. It’s a reclamation of issues that should have been nonpartisan all along, perceived as a shift to the right only because they’re no longer filtered exclusively through a left-leaning lens.
(by the way, I'm in california, so do not have any direct experience with the "grooming" gangs issue)
The Infected Blood and Post Office scandals became truly bipartisan in terms of public concern; the same should have happened with Grooming Gangs but did not—until now.
Its obvious you're in the USA! You are performing the tell-tale Americanism of labelling as "middle class" what is actually the working class.
Other than this I agree with everything you state. Britain (& Australia) are behind on the mainstream media to YouTube shift, I only truly appreciated how far the USA is along that process once I started examining the Trump victory. Our own conservatives are just discovering the opportunity.
Doctors, lawyers, upper management & civil service, MPs. Most people who call themselves mc in the US are actually economically secure working class. Its not just a money thing, its about sport (rugby & cricket vs soccer), education in private schools (ironically named "public" schools), accent etc.
There is a very obvious dislike amongst wc Americans to use the label and they borrow the mc label for themselves. This may be an artifact from the post WW2 boom rather than an eternal trope.
$44 billion, with a "b"!
We could have had someone other than Trump too, but it does seem to take a certain level of odiousness to really bust through the establishment bulwarks. A giant middle finger isn't very subtle after all.
Both Trump and Robinson are giant middle fingers pointed up at the establishment, yes—Robinson perhaps even more so, given he was a bona fide football hooligan in his youth.
The MSM has always underestimated how much of a middle finger Trump is, and how powerful he is because of that.
I've compared him to one of those foam rubber "We're #1" hands, but with a different finger sticking up.
And the worse the MSM treats him ("Convicted Felon[TM]"), the bigger that hand gets.
> And the worse the MSM treats him ("Convicted Felon[TM]"), the bigger that hand gets.
-- Yes. Trump supporters go "Look, the elites don't like Trump. The elites don't like me either, so maybe that means Trump is on my side." Well done, MSM and Democrats, all your years of hating on white working class people have paid off!
He is indeed a giant foam finger, which finger you see depends mostly on your political alignment.
Wrecking balls are not subtle, but they are very effective at their stated purpose.
Something has bothered me about this story (the broad story of what happened to the girls), and it's the name given to it: "grooming gangs."
These are not "grooming" gangs. They're rape gangs. Why does almost no one say it?
I'll have to write about this in a bit of detail (I thought of including it in this piece), but in this context, "grooming gangs" is correct. Muslim rape gangs do indeed exist—Australia had a rash of them in the 90s. The relevant offenders were all incarcerated for extremely long terms for what were serious crimes directed at women not previously known to them or only glancingly known, often on a racial and religious basis (hatred of whites and Aborigines specifically, and non-Muslims generally).
Child sexual exploitation does not follow the same patterns as attacks on adult women. Instead, it is directed to winning the trust and confidence of a young person, often over a period of weeks or months. Street grooming of the type perpetrated by Pakistani Muslims in the UK involves plying unsupervised children (many were and are in care or in foster homes) with drugs or alcohol or in some cases, toys, food, and clothes. This is the "grooming" aspect.
This meant police and the CPS were (and are) often confronted with young girls who insist that Ahmed or Muhammad were/are their boyfriends and that they wouldn't/won't give evidence against them. I'm afraid this is something I've also observed in practice (with non-Muslim offenders in Australia) and it is very disturbing to see but nonetheless common. It is so far outside the ken of most people (and was for me until I started out in 2005 as a baby barrister) that understanding is difficult.
All sensible.
But-have I not recently read that these very same gangs were also brutally raping some of the girls with baseball bats and worse?
Yes they were—after grooming them into a position of trust. And yes, even in those circumstances, prosecutions sometimes failed.
The other issue was a false dichotomy separating offenders into two different categories. Only the enablers and facilitators were charged, tried and convicted. What about the men who were active and knowing participants in child rape as customers?
The Court of Appeals already uses lie detectors as a means of sifting through applications as a means of separating out the guilty who protest their innocence. It's not beyond the realms of the feasible that the CPS could have used lie detectors to separate out men who knowingly raped children from those who unknowingly did the same.
That's a pattern of sex trafficking more generally- what outwardly might appear as prostitution or sex work, is actually predicated on addiction paired with occasional abuse and the omnipresent threat of force and coercion.
But this is exactly the problem with the grooming gang scandal. Police, schools, local authorities and social workers all knew that under British law, no child under the age of 16 is ever capable of giving consent under any circumstances- but all of Britain's institutions persisted internally with the fiction that underage girls were willing prostitutes to protect their precious notions that cultures are equally valid.
On specific issues, some cultures are inferior to others.
It's got bugger all to do with culture, as the vast number of white British perverts, including many of the so called elite, proves quite conclusively. Some people are just wankers and given power, will prey on the weak.
Just to be clear, I have zero tolerance for any sexual predator, male or female.
We are one species, human, the rest (race, culture, religion) is just software.
Demonstrably, there's nothing in British software stopping the rape and murder of working class kids, they just cover it all up. Jimmy Saville just one of many. Given that's the case, don't get distracted by some kind of culture war shit stirring.
The problem is not that the perps are brown or Muslim, it's that the services paid to ensure this doesn't happen and prosecute when things get past, didn't do their job. The problem is how vulnerable kids are cared for in the sixth largest global economy.
It's nothing to do with the fact that people are brown, but culture does make a difference. Age of consent is a social construction. Don't get me wrong, at the same time that the Victorians were covering table and furniture legs, the average age of a prostitute was 9 in London (mainly because of syphilis and the perception that younger girls were less likely to be infected).
However, the data is quite clear. The 2011 report for the Office of the Children's Commissioner is/was the best source we have thus far. Roughly 2,400 victims of group CSE were detected in a 14 month period. 36% were White, 27% were Asian. At the time Whites were about 86% of the population and Asians were 8% (4.8% Muslim- who have been found to overrepresented amongst Asians in group CSE). Some pretty basic Maths should tell you that Asians/Muslims were/are substantially overrepresented in group CSE.
Look, there are other factors. Drug dealing is more common in many poorer socioeconomic groups and group child sexual exploitation is associated with drug-related organised crime, but there are real world consequences for a religion arbitrarily setting the age of consent at the age of monthly courses. Islam needs to disown the fact that Aisha had her marriage consummated at age 9. It was paedophilia plain and simple (and a sin), even back then.
For example, when Margaret Beaufort gave birth to Henry Tudor at 13, it highly unusual and would have been frowned upon, because people then knew that sex before age 14 risked a much greater chance of death for the mother, permanent injury (including future infertility), and stillbirth for the child. Most rites of passage were set at age 13, and it would have been normal for the girl to wait at least a year to settle into young adulthood, before marriage and consummation would have been contemplated. The only reason why Margaret Beaufort risked pregnancy so young was because she justifiably feared that the King might take her lands away unless she had a male heir.
In Pakistan 3.6% of girls are married before age 15. Iraq is considering lowering the age of permissible marriage to age 9. Many of the girls who were raped and molested reported having men use thighing practices whilst they were still prepubescent.
In the wake of Elon Musk raising the subject of gang grooming Google et al are in the process of trying to redact any sources which show that Islam has age of consent social construction which is radically different to that of the Western world, but barbaric practices in many Muslim countries are a matter of record no matter how much Google and other browsers try to hide to truth, as are the hadiths which permit sex with a bride who has started her monthly courses, regardless of age.
This doesn't mean that things cannot change. Crime reporting from Austria shows that Muslims who have lived in the West for decades and have integrated, commit sexual violence at rates almost identical to the local White population- unfortunately, the same cannot be said of recent arrivals, who are heavily overrepresented in national crime figures for sexual violence, even though recent Muslim arrivals to Austria only comprise 1% of the total population. At the same time many more modern and forward looking Muslim countries are in the process of raising the age of consent and changing the culture- fully aware that historic Islamic paedophilia aids the arguments of both apostates and anti-Islamic activists.
But it doesn't help anyone to hide to truth. Darkness and censorship always makes a problem loom larger in the human imagination, creating circumstances where the worst possible spin will be placed on true events. Everybody knows this instinctively- if one waits to go to doctor or the dentist one usually imagines the problem is far worse that it usually is- we should learn that things work exactly the same way with cultural phenomenon.
I predict a decent data-driven inquiry would show people the extent of the problem was far less extensive than many of the claims circulating the internet. In addition, a substantial percentage of supposedly religiously inspired group CSE amongst Asians will be drug-related organised crime- the same as for many Whites and Blacks,
My own calculations show a maximum of 150,000 girls victims of group CSE by Asians- a far cry from 500K or a million as some claim. That's still terrible- but once one correctly assigns the percentage driven by drug gangs, the religious aspect will probably be far smaller.
That is a really thoughtful comment. Thank-you.
I'm not incorrect in saying that the "Well TECHNICALLY..." framing helped get the U.K. into this position in the first place. It's legalese and there's absolutely no patience left for it.
I'll use language as explosive as the crime, even if it's not "technically☝🏻🤓 accurate".
Rape gangs it is, seeing as there's no fucking consent involved whatsoever.
This specific grooming was happening at a time in Western culture when it became inappropriate for any adult, in pay of government, to suggest that girls forego sexual liaisons outside marriage.
Our current moral framework is to encourage girls to experiment sexually as though they were boys: as early as a sexual preference is felt, girls should express it, and with no commitment either since babies can be aborted if a girl conceives because her contraception fails.
So if the girl liked the alcohol and drugs and attention... by what principle can society say "no" if the girl might be simply exploring her sexual preferences? I bet a lot of adults said nothing because they knew they should not say "no", not anymore.
Behaviour of this type (especially from social workers) is described in Baroness Alexis Jay’s report. The children were seen to have “consented” to the sexual attention, despite the fact that minors cannot consent to sex as a matter of law.
Looking forward to the 2027 BBC police procedural "Groomers", where the rapist perpetrators are all portrayed by white male actors, the victims played by a cast of multi-cultural/racial girls, and of course a strong black female lead to play the cop/journalist/lawyer/mother, who blows the lid on the "groomers", and extracts righteous vengeance/justice.
This moral framework is well described by the phrase “philosophies convenient for predators.” I forget who wrote that phrase, but the essay was focused on Sartre.
Found it. It’s “theories-convenient-for-predators” and the essay is relevant to a discussion of grooming. https://voegelinview.com/bad-faith-at-sartres-cafe/
> Child sexual exploitation does not follow the same patterns as attacks on adult women. Instead, it is directed to winning the trust and confidence of a young person, often over a period of weeks or months.
Those victims are often sold, adbucted, locked, and beaten up when trying to leave. There's little about 'winning the trust" in any of it.
But even when grooming is involved, the important thing to point should be the bigger crimes commited - so they should be called by that, rapists and human traffickers, not by the process they followed to get the girls.
We don't call park rapists "jogging behinders", or abductors "unmarked van drivers"...
Non-consensual sex is rape. Children cannot consent. Away with the bolloxed sophistry. A spade is not a shovel.
Exactly, Josh, I prefer to call them child rape gangs, for they raped and tortured minors. Some commentators, like the wonderful Matt Goodwin, is calling them rape gangs, and I noticed yesterday that Patrick Christys of GBNews called them child rape gangs.
It’s tragic that we are so cowed that it takes a Walmart version of Tony Stark to “bring awareness”. In the mean time the same savior is curtailing the speech he claims to support when he throws people off Twitter when they rightfully disagreed with his position on the H1B visas.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s good thing that Elawn is concerned and now people are waking up to the issue, but I grow concerned that they have to be “brought” to that awakening. As though they have been granted permission.
One bit of irony with Elawn calling for King Charles to dissolve Parliament: the last time a King by the name of Charles dissolved Parliament he lost his head.
I would say that Tony Stark is the comic book version of Elon Musk.
Charles, the last king of England?
The left had no problem promping up 'bad' people if they fit the narrative, like George Floyd or Jordan neely, who have been arrested more times than Robinson
Thank you for this Helen, to my shame I had forgotten about Peter McLoughlin, despite owning Easy Meat and the insightful Mohammed's Koran.
It really is something that it takes Elon Musk to puncture the UK 'elites' avoidance of the whole issue, they now have to react and to have an opinion that cannot be the usual 'ghastly working class white oiks and fascists lying about the nice Pakistanis' because the new US Administration is looking on. Our class system in action.
I am confident that Elon and Trump world will keep ramping up the pressure, an International led enquiry would be ideal, US oversight, Danish Investigators perhaps, that would give confidence.
As horrible as the rape gangs are, even more worrisome have been the efforts of the establishment politicians and media to suppress and hide the crimes. Today Germans bear a heavy burden of guilt for the actions of their government 1933 - 1945, but there was a partial reckoning at Nuremberg, and few if any of those responsible are left alive. But in Britain those responsible for ignoring these horrible crimes and enabling their perpetuation for their political and ideological advantage remain "respectable" and in positions of power. The culpability evidently extends even to the PM who was once in charge of public prosecutions. The odious behavior of the establishment is a moral stain on British nation.
Ever taken a look at Paula Vennells’s career trajectory? Talk about failing upwards.
These scandals are repeated precisely because the British establishment wrote the book on arse-covering.
There was a whole lot of class warfare going on. I can't help thinking that if these gangs had been targeting the sort of schools where the children of local politicians, senior social workers or police officers had been sent, then those responsible would have been banged-up a lot quicker than they were.
Oh yes, this has all the worst bits of the British class system underlying it.
I see you come by your Classical referenced honestly, not like me from Mike Duncan. :)
@ D. Malcolm Carson: "$44 billion, with a "b"!"
I spotted that too. However, I think the magnitude of the number is more graphically presented by writing it as "$44,000 million".
It was just a typo, which I've now fixed. I can't type—I'm a member of that generation of professional women who (deliberately) wasn't taught to type so that when we became solicitors and accountants we weren't turned into glorified secretaries.
When is Musk going to highlight the one way interracial violent crime in America, the rape stats are particularly interesting.
Thanks Helen, for the ability to look beyond the Current Thing to analogize to other plebs v power dynamics all the way back to the Roman Empire. Whether or not the medium is the message, we still need messengers, some of whom are unsavory folk. Hopefully the silver lining will be for those in power to get their head out of their ass before the next Current Thing becomes a thing.
many of the historic tribunis plebis weren’t good men either
I guess your Latin tutor would remind you that tribunus belongs to the second declension.
Second declension with an indeclinable portion, due likely to being the name of an office: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tribunus_plebis#Latin
Oooh, burn!! 🤣
What was the burn? Helen's response was both inapposite and factually incorrect.
> Second declension with an indeclinable portion, due likely to being the name of an office
No?
The link does say "second declension with an indeclinable portion", but it also gives a declension table, and there is no indeclinable portion.
The word "plebis" ("of the plebs") doesn't change, but that's not because it's indeclinable. It's because it must be genitive regardless of the case of "tribunus", in exactly the same way that the plural form of the title "Leader of the Free World" is "Leaders of the Free World" and not "Leaders Free Worlds". Does that make "world" indeclinable? Obviously not.
The rape gang scandal broke before Musk waded in, not because he waded in.
As I pointed out. Did you read the piece?
It broke because the man who is now Prime Minister (who is universally loathed) is implicated in covering it up because he was, during some years whilst it was going on (it still is), head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
This post just made me look up Tommy Robinson's bio and learn that he had done some actual crime in the 2000s, rather than just being arrested for what is known as journalism in the rest of the Western world (maybe with the attribute "ambulance-chasing") in the 2010s/20s. I always thought that his criminal past was referring to the latter!
He was a pretty bad egg in his youth; there’s no point denying it. However, people can repay their debt to society and come out the other side as better human beings—think of the rehabilitated prisoner who fought off a pair of terrorists with an elephant tusk a couple of years ago.
Musk has now given Robinson that opportunity. Many other people in similar circumstances do not get such a chance.
Yes. And in a sense, the newer BS accusations have cleared his slate, at least to a superficial observer.
“The grooming gangs scandal, by contrast, now has Tommy Robinson as tribunus plebis, and that is indeed very discomforting precisely because he isn’t a good man, and isn’t one of the victims.”
Not sure exactly what his earlier transgressions were, but it seems that his attempt to bring up the child rape scandal could serve as some form of redemption. And I think being locked up for reporting on it counts as being a victim of the state, if not of the rape gangs.
I will confess, I am not terribly well-versed on him or on the rape gangs, but I have the distinct impression that (1) a great many rapists were never punished and (2) those who were received sentences less than they deserved (life without parole, if not, in my revanchist opinion, death).
Doesn't redemption require the person to have left behind their iniquituus behaviour? Which is not the case with Yaxley-Lennon. He's in prison for continuing to libel an individual who was a child at the time of said libel... https://www.mountfordchambers.com/nobody-is-above-the-law/
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Your characterization of Tommy Robinson as tribunus plebis suggests an acknowledgment that this is fundamentally an “Elite Progressives vs. Ordinary Britons” issue rather than a strict left/right divide. The grooming gangs scandal isn’t inherently a right-leaning concern—it’s about justice for the victims, accountability for the perpetrators, and the systemic failure of institutions that prioritized self-preservation over protecting vulnerable citizens. These are universal concerns that should transcend political affiliations, even if their framing has historically been dominated by left-leaning narratives.
I think Musk’s retooling of Twitter/X reflects a broader realignment, shifting public and media focus away from elite progressive gatekeeping toward a perspective that includes the middle-class Britons—the “plebes,” if you will—who form the majority. It’s a reclamation of issues that should have been nonpartisan all along, perceived as a shift to the right only because they’re no longer filtered exclusively through a left-leaning lens.
(by the way, I'm in california, so do not have any direct experience with the "grooming" gangs issue)
The Infected Blood and Post Office scandals became truly bipartisan in terms of public concern; the same should have happened with Grooming Gangs but did not—until now.
Its obvious you're in the USA! You are performing the tell-tale Americanism of labelling as "middle class" what is actually the working class.
Other than this I agree with everything you state. Britain (& Australia) are behind on the mainstream media to YouTube shift, I only truly appreciated how far the USA is along that process once I started examining the Trump victory. Our own conservatives are just discovering the opportunity.
Who do the British think of as belonging to the "middle class"?
Doctors, lawyers, upper management & civil service, MPs. Most people who call themselves mc in the US are actually economically secure working class. Its not just a money thing, its about sport (rugby & cricket vs soccer), education in private schools (ironically named "public" schools), accent etc.
There is a very obvious dislike amongst wc Americans to use the label and they borrow the mc label for themselves. This may be an artifact from the post WW2 boom rather than an eternal trope.