By Press Trust of India: UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman stays defiant amid accusations of being racist after she said that an incredible majority of sexual grooming gang members in parts of England had been British Pakistani males, reiterating that the “truth” cannot be classed as racist.
In an article for “The Spectator” journal this week, the Indian-origin cabinet minister harassed that it was important to acknowledge the perform that ethnicity carried out in masking up the grooming gangs scandal.
Targeting the Opposition Labour Party, Braverman said “unfashionable facts” such as a result of the ethnicity of those behind such scandals in parts of England had been being countered by “fashionable fictions.”
“If we are to address the injustice of the grooming gangs scandal, we must be willing to acknowledge the role that ethnicity played in covering it up,” Braverman writes throughout the article entitled ‘The truth can’t be racist’.
“To say that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators in towns such as Rotherham, Telford, and Rochdale were British Pakistani and that their victims were white girls is not to say that most British Pakistanis are perpetrators of sexual abuse. The former is a truth, one that made authorities reluctant to confront the issue. The latter is a lie, the speaking of which would be a disgraceful prejudice,” she writes.
ALSO READ | Suella Braverman once more as UK Home Secretary in PM Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet
She lamented the “politician’s lot” as she admitted that her motives for making the assertion is perhaps questioned, nonetheless hit once more at these “casually” accusing her of racism for speaking plain truths.
“There is something peculiar about this political moment, where those of us advancing unfashionable facts are beaten over the head with fashionable fiction. I suppose the ethnicity of grooming gang perpetrators in a string of cases is the sort of fact that has simply become unfashionable in some quarters. Like the fact that 100 per cent of women do not have a penis,” she notes, alluding to a distinct emotive debate spherical transgender entry to female areas.
Her intervention comes throughout the wake of sturdy objections from all through the British Pakistani group, along with claims that it has led many to distance themselves from the governing Conservatives since Braverman’s suggestions earlier this month for the launch of the federal authorities’s new Grooming Gangs Taskforce.
Last week, the British Pakistani Foundation (BPF), which claims to indicate 18,000 Pakistani heritage members, wrote to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to ask his cabinet minister to withdraw her “irresponsible words” because it is perhaps perceived as normalising bigotry in opposition to the group.
Similar letters had been moreover issued by totally different British Pakistani groups, with Tory peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi warning that she feared a backlash in opposition to British Muslims due to the remarks.
ALSO READ | ‘I’ve made a mistake’: UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman quits Liz Truss Cabinet
In a sequence of television interviews earlier this month, Braverman said that the perpetrators of sexual crimes by grooming gangs are “groups of men, almost all British Pakistani”.
Led by the police and supported by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), Downing Street says that data analysts will work alongside the federal authorities’s new Grooming Gangs Taskforce using cutting-edge data and intelligence to determine the forms of criminals who carry out these offences, along with police recorded ethnicity data.