Analysis: the rape gang report

As per usual, I’m not making myself very popular over on X. Criticising Rupert Lowe’s rape gang “inquiry” is not the done thing. Generally, any criticism of the latest messiah brings all the trolls out of the woodwork, but they’re especially militant about this now that the final report has been published. My criticism of it is that it’s been amateurish, ill-focussed and not particularly well executed.

The basic problem is that it never had a clearly defined purpose. Certainly, you wouldn’t have found any explanation on the official website, which was (and is) a static page. Nearly all communications regarding the proceedings were piped through Rupert Lowe’s personal X account - and if you missed his tweets, the purpose is lost to the mists of time.

This to my mind was already deeply unprofessional, but especially so now that Restore Britain is a registered political party. There should have been a firewall to ensure that nobody who worked for the party was involved in the inquiry in order to protect its integrity. Given the nature of Restore Britain as a party, the associations therein, the blurring of lines does not help the cause or serve the victims.

Had this been executed with proper planning, it would have been ringfenced as an entirely separate enterprise, with Lowe keeping his distance, especially given his unguarded views in the matter.

As to the report, it is impossible to ascertain if the inquiry achieved its objectives since no formal objectives were ever outlined. It wasn’t an investigation into the scale of the epidemic, nor was it an exploration of the criminal landscape. The report itself is comprised of written testimonies, with what amounts to punditry attached to it. It doesn’t tell us anything that was not already widely understood.

As such, the report is little more than victim amplification, and not in a particularly helpful way. It’s impossible to escape the suspicion that the whole thing is designed to funnel support towards Lowe’s political enterprise. After all, that’s exactly what it was when it was first mooted by Farage. It should be recalled that this whole idea was a half-cocked Reform gimmick that was quietly dropped after wiser counsel put a word in Farage's ear.

To do it properly would have taken years and millions of pounds. It could not and should not have been done on the cheap by egotistical amateurs for political point scoring purposes. Lowe, though, did not think it through, and chose to pursue it just to upstage Reform in a fit of pique. He was always biting off more than he could chew but was too naïve and ill-advised to back out. It was a fool's errand from the get-go and those who cheered him on have been taken for a ride.

As to the report’s recommendations and conclusions, the report is alarmingly threadbare. None of them are especially original or insightful - and largely based on supposition rather than a detailed operational knowledge of local government and policing. Had this inquiry made a decent stab at it, policy recommendations would have been a very large component of the exercise - which would have dovetailed quite nicely into Restore Britain party policy. It’s a missed opportunity not just for the inquiry, but also the party. Restore could then have campaigned for other parties to adopt their own polices.

So far as I can see, the recommendations are wholly derivative. The nature of police and social services failings are widely known. What is less well understood is how grooming is vertically integrated into an organised crime business model, which requires a broadening of scope for grooming investigations, looking at all aspects of organised crime and how it exploits Britain’s weak immigration system. The report only touches on this.

As I’ve often remarked, illegal immigration is a symptom of institutional dysfunction and a collapse of the administrative state. The same can be said of grooming, where all the systems of detection are badly degraded. It is not divorced from the fact that hundreds of police stations and local magistrates courts have closed, and forced centralised and amalgamated. Nor is it divorced from the fact that social services have reduced numbers of experienced field workers, obsolete and disorganised data systems, and a lack of proper central supervision. There is a lot to be said about recruitment and retention.

Essentially, this inquiry culminates in a piece of lightweight PDF slop that will be discarded and forgotten by next week - eclipsed by Makerfield by-election punditry. It is already lost in the noise. Meanwhile, if you look at a hard copy of a proper inquiry it’s as thick as telephone book, takes months to digest, and spawns several lines of journalistic inquiry.

Everything about this inquiry, though, has been conducted in a hurry with zero thought to preparation and professionalism. They phoned it in at every stage, not least because Lowe supporters do not hold him or his operation to a high standard, and would lavish praise upon him whatever he produced. There is no incentive for him or his staff to do better. Slop will do.

As to the measure of success, it’s gone viral on X and wider social media, punted by large accounts such as Elon Musk’s and and Visegrad24.

This is where the lack of substance and attention to detail has a price. The figure cited is not the finding of this inquiry. Rather, it comes from a Lords debate in 2019. The claim is based on speculation by Lord Pearson of Rannoch in 2019. There is no forensic attempt to verify this. The report merely extrudes the same speculation - saying "When the Rotherham/Telford scale is applied across the documented national distribution, and multiplied by the extreme under-reporting factor accepted by official reviews, the total reaches the 250,000 threshold as a bare minimum".

The claim, therefore, is pure conjecture. As such, the report leaves Lowe wide open to accusations of misinformation and wilful distortion. It generated a cheap headline which doesn’t withstand any scrutiny. The report goes on to say "We are far from grasping the full extent of grooming gang criminality in modern Britain". My question is, if the point of the inquiry wasn't to find out, what was it for? I don’t see anything that justifies the attention and money lavished on this enterprise.

The problem I saw with this fake inquiry, from the beginning, was the lack of any kind of formal structure, much like their party. Given that Restore was never able to compel witnesses or do any of the things a formal inquiry could do, the very least it could and should have done was follow an established academic methodology similar to a qualitative research thesis. It required expert analysis rather than Lowe's skivvies cobbling together their own punditry. If this was a masters dissertation, it would not get a pass mark.

This, incidentally, is the same critique I make of Restore Britain as a party (and Reform, as it happens). There is no formal definition or statement of aims and values - and it is that very lack of a structured intellectual foundation that causes *everything* that follows to be disorganised, incoherent and sloppy. It taints everything they do, and its why this dog and pony show played out the way it did. Not for nothing do I call them the Slop Right.