Nigel Farage has announced that a Reform UK government would release all government files concerning the scourge of child rape grooming gangs, and quadruple the budget for investigating the scandal and the local officials and police who “enabled” the mass rape of English girls.
Mr Farage said on Saturday that the “rape gangs scandal is the greatest state failure in British history” and therefore the government must take firm action to redress the dereliction of duty in areas of the country often controlled by the left-wing Labour Party.
“Public bodies and politicians aided and abetted the mass rape and sexual exploitation of children. Predominantly white working-class girls were brutalised by criminal gangs who were (and still are) disproportionately men of Pakistani nationality or heritage,” the Reform boss wrote on X.
“Inquiries and words are not enough. State-enabled child sexual exploitation continues to this day, including in Wigan and Makerfield. For decades, politicians like Andy Burnham, local authorities, the police and the media engaged in a conspiracy of silence – institutional avoidance in the name of political correctness,” Farage claimed.
The Brexit leader said that if given power, a Reform government would release “all files held by public bodies relating to the grooming gangs, going back 40 years” within the first 100 days in office.
Farage also vowed that Reform would increase the funding for the National Crime Agency taskforce against grooming gangs from £100 million to £400 million per year.
He said that this funding increase would better allow the NCA to “adequately investigate the perpetrators and the complicit police officers, social workers and politicians who enabled them. They will be given every resource they require.”
Meanwhile, Reform looks set to make the issue a central campaign theme in the special by-election being held on June 18th in Makerfield as anti-Breitbart activist Josh Simons stood down to allow Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to run for parliament as he seeks to overthrow Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and take control of Downing Street.
Burnham has faced criticism over his handling of the grooming gang issue, with former Manchester police detective turned whistleblower Maggie Oliver even going so far as to accuse the mayor of engaging in a “cover up” of child sex abuse and failures to protect young girls during his near decade in office.
This week, Reform Shadow Home Secretary Zia Yusuf told the Daily Mail that Burham “seeks to use the very communities he betrayed to catapult himself to power.”
“Andy Burnham has had the power to bring the perpetrators and enablers of the grooming gangs to justice, but in the words of Maggie Oliver he “turned away” from the victims,” he told the paper.
“Time and again he spurned opportunities to do what was necessary. The thousands of survivors are rightly furious, including the ones in the Makerfield constituency.”
A spokesman for Mr Burnham replied: “Andy has always been clear that these young women were seriously harmed and appallingly failed by the very institutions meant to protect them, and that the truth of what happened to them needed to be told.
“When others looked the other way, he didn’t. Within days of taking office he set in motion an inquiry that vindicated the whistleblowers, exposed institutional cover-ups, and led to arrests and convictions of perpetrators who would otherwise have walked free. When he hit the limits of what local power could do, he called for a national inquiry – before it was politically convenient to do so.”