A former police officer turned grooming gang whistleblower, Maggie Oliver, has accused Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham of effectively covering up ongoing Muslim grooming gang child sex abuse.
The former Greater Manchester detective constable said that “political ambition” was behind Mayor Burnham’s decision to enter the Makerfield by-election for the House of Commons to challenge the leadership of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Oliver, who became a whistleblower over the politically correct failures to confront grooming gangs in Manchester, said that while she may prefer to have a beer with Burnham over Prime Minister Starmer, she believes he showed a lack of “leadership and courage” in dealing with the mostly Muslim child sex rings, which would typically force young girls to become addicted to drugs and alcohol and pass them around networks for sexual abuse afterwards.
She told Times Radio that although Burnham had been “very open” about abuses that occurred prior to his tenure as Mayor, the former detective said that she believed he became hesitant when it came to ongoing cases and reviewing the implementation of recommendations to ensure that further abuse did not occur.
Oliver said that the fourth part of the series of reviews initiated by Burnham was meant to study between 2019 — when he came into office — and 2025. However, she said, “In my experience, was actually a cover-up.”
“They did not speak to a single victim or a single survivor who had been caught in the last seven years of working with Greater Manchester Police,” she said.
“What I had come to see and believe is that whilst the PR machine [was] wheeled out very well about what was already in the public arena. When it comes to leadership and courage and gripping what is going on now, unfortunately, he turned away. We missed a huge opportunity to bring changes that are needed,” Oliver lamented.
The issue of often grooming gangs and the failures of local officials to safeguard mostly young white working-class girls has long dogged the left-wing Labour Party, which in many cases was in power in the regions where the most infamous cases of child sexual exploitation occurred, including towns and cities in Northern England like Rotherham and Rochdale in Greater Manchester.
While Prime Minister Starmer initially baulked at the notion of conducting a national inquiry into the failures of police and local officials, claiming at the time that those who were demanding accountability were doing the bidding of the “far-right“, public pressure ultimately forced the government into backing down and launching an inquiry with statutory powers to compel testimony.
This came after a review from Dame Louise Casey last year, which found that Pakistani Muslims were indeed the primary perpetrators of grooming gang crimes, despite years of the political and media establishment branding anyone who stated the obvious as being a conspiracy theorist worthy of cancellation. The report went on to admit that officials “institutionally ignored” this reality for years for fear of appearing racist.
This also appeared to be the case in Manchester, with a 2020 report finding that an officer was told by superiors to “try and get other ethnicities” after investigations had led to the arrest of “predominantly Asian males”.
The issue appears set to become a significant factor in the upcoming Makerfield by-election, with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage being quick to highlight Burnham’s alleged failures and to deconstruct his image as the “King of the North”, which he carefully crafted in a bid to rebrand himself from the Westminster swamp creature of the Blair-Brown era.
“Burnham failed the grooming gang victims, and he will fail the people of Makerfield too,” Farage told The Telegraph. “He would be a disaster for the economy and betray every Brexit voter in the constituency. Open Borders Burnham must be stopped.”