British-Pakistani Grooming Gangs have nothing to do with the Genocide in Gaza.
Last edited 9 January 2025
I am increasingly dismayed by the trend for media commentators to casually associate Hamas, Hezbollah and the wider Axis of Resistance with British Pakistani grooming gangs and Muslims in general.
GBNews has recently - in my view rightly - been covering the ongoing scandal of the grooming gangs in several British towns, which in many cases involve British men of Pakistani heritage.
One of the GBNews presenters, Matt Goodwin, who was a professor of politics at the University of Kent for nine years until July 2024, exemplified this on 2 January 2025. His statement is posted on the GBNews YouTube channel :
“MATT GOODWIN: MY VIEW. Matt gives his take on the grooming gangs scandal”.
“This is the scandal that has been dominating social media over the last few days. I’m of course talking about the grooming gang scandal”. Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips presents as a feminist but refuses to discuss the protection of women and girls from “predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs”. One explanation for Labour’s refusal to discuss this issue might be that “Labour is simply worried about alienating and losing the Muslim vote.”
Goodwin mentions some results in the July 2024 General Election. In Leicester South senior Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth’s majority of 22,000 was overturned by a candidate he calls “Gaza Independent Shockat Adam”. And he continues:
“Independent Gaza MPs caused a lot of chaos in Labour-held seats. Even the Health Secretary Wes Streeting secured a majority of just a few hundred votes because of that strong Gaza vote in his constituency”. And the Labour Minister for Safeguarding, Jess Phillips, herself “nearly lost her seat [in Birmingham Yardley] to a Gaza Independent too.”
“So could the fundamental threat posed to the Labour Party in these heavily Muslim seats be the reason behind Labour’s reluctance to treat the grooming gangs scandal with the attention it really deserves?”
“Professor” Goodwin makes a glaring factual error: the challenger in Jess Phillips’ constituency was not an Independent (“Gaza” or otherwise) but Jody McIntyre of the Workers Party of Britain.
Three days after the General Election, on 7 July 2024 The Guardian published an article Who are the pro-Gaza independents who unseated Labour MPs? In Leicester South (where Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth lost his seat) Shockat Adam does not have a Pakistani background. His full name is Shockat Hussain Adam Patel, he has Indian roots and he was born in Malawi into a Muslim family of Gujarati descent who moved to Leicester in the 1970s when Shockat was aged three. He is an optometrist with his own business in Leicester.
Shockat Adam told Politics Home that at the end of October 2023, weeks into Israel’s assault on Gaza, he went to see Labour MP Ashworth along with 25 to 30 others to convey their anger over the party’s position on Gaza:
“All I asked Jon was to call for a ceasefire. Nothing complicated. Nothing about taking Israel to the international courts, nothing about arms deals. Call for a ceasefire and instant access to uninterrupted humanitarian aid. That statement didn’t come.”
While canvassing in Leicester South, his supporters covered areas with “traditionally white working-class, possibly low socio-economics” voters. “It was there, in those areas in particular, where I feel that it was won,” he explains.
The Guardian piece also notes that
“like the other pro-Palestinian candidates, [Shockat] was keen not to be seen as a single-issue candidate. His campaign website talks about Gaza – one of his main policy pledges was to stand for global peace and justice, with an explicit reference to ‘a genocide being committed’ – but also much more.”
In Blackburn Adnan Hussain, a 34-year-old solicitor, narrowly defeated incumbent Labour MP Kate Hollern. The new MP said: “This is for Gaza. I cannot deny that I stand here as the result of a protest vote on the back of a genocide.”
In Dewsbury and Batley Iqbal Mohamed, an engineer and IT consultant, defeated Heather Iqbal, a former adviser to chancellor Rachel Reeves, by almost 7,000 votes. Mohamed had quit the Labour party over its stance on Gaza, and the plight of Palestinians played a big part in his campaign, but he said his victory was due to “a combination of several things”.
And in Birmingham Perry Barr Ayoub Khan, a barrister, beat Khalid Mahmood, England’s first Muslim MP, who had held the seat since 2001.
In an opinion piece for The Guardian on 8 July 2024 Nesrine Malik wrote that Pro-Palestine votes aren’t ‘sectarian’. Dismissing them would be a dangerous mistake for Labour.
“The four independent candidates who won in last week’s election by harnessing frustrations about Gaza are already being treated as a worrying sign of the emergence of sectarian politics. The implication is that it’s only Muslims who care about Gaza, and that they do so at the expense of their domestic concerns and loyalties. The truth is that Gaza’s resonance stretches across diverse demographics. It is both connected to and informed by other political grievances, and it has become the expression of something that our political climate has made it difficult to countenance – that voters can have principles they care about without this being an indication of extremism or irrelevance.
“There has been a persistent tendency to treat frustrations about Gaza as crude, separatist and confined to a small but vocal minority. Despite poll after poll indicating that the majority of the public supports a ceasefire, politicians – in particular the leadership of the Labour party – continued to ignore the issue….. Those four independent candidates won because non-Muslims voted for them too, and because many people didn’t vote at all….
“The bigger picture is of an uninspiring election that turned off many voters, Muslim and otherwise, coupled with an issue that galvanised voters, many of whom were Muslim, some of whom were not…. If one were to take a cross section of nationwide opinion polling on Gaza and the diversity of large protests across the country, it is clear that Gaza is far from a single-demographic concern.
“Neither is the issue ringfenced from broader frustrations with the Labour Party. It has been expressed as an indication that the party, in its handling of the war, has displayed the absence of a crucial ethical feature…. People who felt strongly about Gaza and refused to vote Labour on this basis did so partly because the issue stood for so much more: it suggested that the party’s rebrand had purged Labour of a moral backbone. When Keir Starmer says he will govern ‘without doctrine’, what he is not recognising is that centrism at home and ‘progressive realism’ abroad is a doctrine, one that excludes the sort of compassion and solidarity that means so much to others.”
Finally, let me remind you that in Keir Starmer’s own constituency of Holborn and St Pancras his support in 2024 fell by 17 percent from the 2019 election. His Independent challenger, who came second with 7,312 votes, was Andrew Feinstein who from 1994-2001 served as a parliamentarian with the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and was first elected under Nelson Mandela. Feinstein is Jewish, the son of a Holocaust survivor.