Comment
BRENDAN O'NEILL
Sajid Javid is a politician with guts who stands by his words and beliefs even when the PC set is raging against him
AT last, a politician with guts. A politician who stands by his beliefs even when the prissy PC set is raging against him.
A politician who doesn’t retract his comments just because they upset the kind of people who make a career out of being upset.
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That politician is Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary — though perhaps we should refer to him as the Home Truth Secretary because he has been delivering a fair few of those recently.
This week, Javid was offered an opportunity to backtrack on something he said a few months ago.
And amazingly — given we live in an era of spineless politics in which MPs are forever repenting for something they said — he turned down the opportunity.
Javid’s speech-crime was to tweet about Muslim grooming gangs.
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In October, he tweeted a heartfelt comment about the Huddersfield grooming gang — 20 men who were found guilty of 120 offences against 15 girls.
They pursued a “campaign of rape and abuse” against their vulnerable victims, said the judge at Leeds Crown Court.
Javid described their predatory behaviour — including against a teenage girl who had the mental age of a seven-year-old — as “vile and wicked”.
In his tweet commenting on the case — he referred to the 20 men as “sick Asian paedophiles”.
Cue instant meltdown in PC circles.
For Javid to use the A-word — “Asian” — was nasty and offensive, they spluttered.
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Like a modern-day Inquisition, the permanently outraged Twitterati denounced Javid for “racialising” the crimes in Huddersfield.
Labour MP David Lammy said Javid had increased “the risk of violence and abuse against minorities”.
Labour’s Diane Abbott slammed him for “attributing these crimes to one ethnic group”.
But here is the thing — if we are talking about the Huddersfield crimes, as Javid was, it is absolutely right to “attribute these crimes to one ethnic group”.
As the BBC reported at the time, the 20 Huddersfield groomers were “all British Asians, mainly of Pakistani heritage”.
Javid, who is also of Pakistani heritage, was telling the truth. Every word of his tweet was correct — these men are sick, they are paedophiles and they are Asian.
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When politicians are condemned for telling the truth, for stating plain-as-day facts, you know we live in scarily censorious times.
So, this week, Javid was right to turn down an invitation to “rethink” his October tweet.
He was on the Today programme on Radio 4. A guest presenter — the British-Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie — asked him if he thought his tweet might have fuelled hate crimes. Coolly, and with rare principle, Javid said that of course politicians must be “careful with their language”.
But if you look at recent high-profile cases of gang-based sexual exploitation, “there is a high proportion of men that have Pakistani heritage”, he said.
He’s right.
Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale, Derby, Telford, Newcastle, Huddersfield . . . across England there have been awful grooming-gang cases, where the perpetrators have largely been Muslim men and the victims white working-class girls.
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We must be free to talk about this. To analyse it. To ask how such a terrible situation came about where vulnerable, mostly white girls are preyed upon by wicked, mainly Muslim men.
But we are not free to talk about it. Anybody who raises the issue of Muslim grooming gangs risks being branded as foul, a racist, a troublemaker whose words will fuel hate crimes.
Indeed, Javid has been subjected to genuine racist abuse for speaking out on the issue.
Vile, hard-left tweeters have denounced him as an “Uncle Tom” and a “coconut”.
Such disgusting racist insults reveal where the real prejudice lies in this debate — not in Javid’s concerned comments, but in the PC outrage that effectively says to him: “Shut up, Coconut.” Javid was not being prejudiced but many of the supposed progressives raging against him have been.
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It is all a sign of the times. From Conservatives such as Javid, to Labour MP Sarah Champion and radical feminists such as Julie Bindel, anyone who expresses concern about Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs can expect to be bombarded with abuse.
But a nation that cannot discuss its communal tensions is a nation that is in very serious trouble.
That significant numbers of Muslim men are abusing significant numbers of white working-class girls suggests “multicultural Britain” is a fractured, sometimes ugly place — and we must be at liberty to talk about this.
Shushing debate about Muslim grooming gangs is insulting not only to the victims of those gangs, but to Britain’s Muslim community, too.
One of the Rochdale sex assault victims of Three Girls speaks about horror
It suggests they are too fragile, too weak, to cope with honest debate about problems and crimes within their communities.
So let us be thankful for Sajid Javid — a politician who is willing to look modern Britain in the face and ask it some difficult but essential questions.
This is a Tory to watch.
GET LOST, CALORIE POLICE
WHY won’t the public-health lobby leave us alone?
Their latest wheeze is to force restaurants and supermarkets to impose “calorie caps” on their dishes.
Public Health England is thinking about stopping supermarkets from selling sarnies that have more than 550 calories and capping restaurant meals at 951 calories. This would effectively mean using the power of the state to force us slovenly, greedy plebs to go on diets.
It’s so paternalistic.
Here’s a radical idea – bugger off and let people eat whatever they want.
Our lunchtime triple-decker sandwich and occasional restaurant blowout are none of your business.
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Testing times?
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TALK about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The former head of the civil service – Gus O’Donnell – says exams are stressful for schoolkids.
We are creating a “troubled generation” by asking kids to take exams all the time, he reckons.
Please. Testing schoolchildren is a perfectly normal, good thing to do. The more we talk about exams as “stressful”, the more we actually encourage young people to see themselves as “stressed”.
I can see the doctor’s note already: “Jimmy can’t take this exam because it will probably damage his mental health.”
The old excuse that “the dog ate my homework” was more convincing than this.
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