There's a good post from Douglas Murray at The Spectator headlined 'Will the BBC go back to ignoring grooming gangs?'
He fears it will following the revelation about the BBC's Three Girls being the trigger for Darren Osborne's radicalisation. After nearly a decade of ignoring the issue ("They didn’t know any of the victims, didn’t know the towns and somewhere along the way (subliminally or otherwise) made the decision that all this was just too horrible and delicate a story to wade into"), the BBC finally commissioned a drama about it that was "far from sensationalist, far from untrue".
Yet what does the BBC’s tentative step in the direction of covering such a relevant news story lead to? After a few weeks an evil maniac in Wales hires a van and causes mayhem on the streets of London.
I know what people at the BBC and elsewhere will be thinking. Perhaps this vindicates the silence of all those years. Perhaps the public cannot be trusted. Perhaps they are indeed the sort of people who have in their midst people on a hair-trigger who are willing to hire trucks and drive them into crowds of people at a moment’s notice. Perhaps the censorship and silence were after all a good idea? Personally I happen to think not. But nobody should be surprised if the BBC reverts to ignoring crimes like Rochdale in the future.
