And what of the police, politicos and councils, who at best ignored the children? Have they upped their game? Are they now squeaky clean?

Sarah Champion, MP for Rotherham is talking to the Times about the now:

“It is still going on, absolutely,” Ms Champion says in her office overlooking the South Yorkshire town, without a scintilla of doubt in her voice. Just the other day she met 13 girls from a local school. They were unanimous in their view that they did not feel safe from predators and cited examples of attempts to blackmail them over incidents of sexting. They also spoke of knowing girls they thought were in danger. “They all had examples of people where they felt some sort of grooming was going on.”

She says that women and girls are coming to her all the time with allegations. “The majority of them are people who reported abuse and nothing happened. About 10 per cent of the people coming forward are new cases.”

The Office of the Children’s Commissioner hs published this handy guide to spotting abuse:

Nowhere in that circle of trust does it mention race< what to do if your child is approached by a young Asian man with cigarettes, weed and a gateway to adulthood.

Melanie Phillips tells her Times readers that Islam is at the heart of the problem:

“It’s not Pakistani Christians, Hindus or atheists who are involved in these crimes. Nor is it just white girls who are targeted: Sikhs have been complaining for years that their girls are attacked by Muslim men..in Muslim society women are treated as inferior people, and non-Muslims are widely regarded as trash.”

Wrong. It’s not Islam. It is as much to do with the culprits’ tribal roots and attitudes to sex.

But what really created this massive problem is that the powers that be ignored it. These gangs did not mass around sex abuse. Nascent criminality spread amongst friends and associates because when one gets away with it, others in your immediate social circle are more likely to join in.

Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley at University College, London’s Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science state:

“Gangs did not develop around a shared furtive interest in child sex abuse. Rather, abuse was introduced into pre-existing social networks.”

We can look at Islam. But we look at many other areas of what is a complex crime. To think that only Islam is to blame is a weak and dangerous argument. If we want to understand, we should begin with the culture of denial and a lack of accountability, where failure to do is brushed over with the manta “lessons will be learnt”.

Ukipists have their settled narratives about Rotherham, It’s all about Muslims, multiculturalism and political correctness. But it isn’t. It’s none of those things. A former Home Office researcher says a bullying culture at Rotherham Council led to her warnings of child sexual exploitation being suppressed in 2002, years before action was finally taken… This isn’t political correctness. This is abuse of process to silence dissent – a bureaucratic technique, one among many, of averting future accusations of policy error or wrongdoing by deflecting responsibility in advance. Or as you and I call it, arse covering.

 

This is exactly what we saw with the Staffordshire NHS whistleblower. A report released at the time, by the Public Administration select committee highlighted a culture of “hostility, defensiveness and denial” where complaints are concerned.It wouldn’t matter if the council was caught up in bailiff fraud, mistreatment of elderly people, chronic hospital neglect, social services dereliction or child abuse. This is how our public sector responds to criticism…

 

There is now very clear evidence that the root cause is nothing to do with Islam or political correctness, and it makes me all the more angry because as much as Ukip in their bigotry are digging the grave of euroscepticism, they are also paving the way for the next grubby council stitch-up where once again they real culprits walk free because bigots choose to bark up the wrong tree – and ignore the real lessons.