Douglas Murray on the BBC's handling of the grooming gangs issue

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.

About Three Girls

If you heard Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour tiptoeing around the ‘Asian’ question when interviewing the actress Maxine Peake and the character she’s playing in the forthcoming “Three Girls” trilogy, Sara Rowbotham, you’d have noticed the care Garvey took to stress that white males were responsible for most of the cases of child sexual abuse before tentatively mentioning that in this particular instance the perpetrators were…. just happened to be……Asian.

It’s perfectly valid for the BBC to dramatise the authorities’ unforgivable and misguided attitude to the victims and their refusal to listen to the social workers who reported it, but if they fail to emphasise that the reason the powers that be behaved this way was their fear of being thought racist, then the writers and the BBC will look guilty of exactly the same thing.

Three Girls

Here's some quite surprising news...

As reported by the Mail on Sunday, the BBC is planning to broadcast a drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal over three consecutive nights in mid-May. 

The paper quotes a programme source saying:

The drama shows that there was something racial about the way that this gang of Asian men chose these white girls to abuse, like they were just meat. 

(From the Mail article it's pretty clear that the word "Asian" will be the preferred term.)  

Whether the drama will also examine whether there was "something religious" as well as "something racial" about the way the (Muslim) gang chose their (non-Muslim) victims is looking unlikely, at least from the write-up in the Mail.

The paper also goes on to say something striking, and includes another quote from that programme source: 

The £3 million drama will be screened over three consecutive nights from May 16 but the BBC is said to have considered delaying it until after the General Election.  

‘There has been a lot of concern about showing it before the Election because Right-wing groups like the EDL or Ukip may use it to their own advantage,’ said a programme source.

That certainly sounds like the kind of thing the BBC would do.