For years now, the euphemism “South Asian" has been used, particularly in the UK, in a vain, although not inexplicable, attempt to hide the culpability of British-Pakistanis in heinous crimes perpetrated there. And nowhere has this been more egregious than in the case of the long-running so-called “grooming" scandal in which underage white girls in the northern UK were lured, abducted, and then sexually abused by gangs of mostly Brit-Pakistani men, often for years.

Although the specific ethnicity of the criminals was known from the beginning, local councils and even national watchdogs glossed over that detail and even sought to minimise the implications of it. Even though Professor Alexis Jay had conducted a seven-year inquiry into child sexual abuse, grooming gangs were not the sole focus and her recommendations were actually aimed at better supervision of the authorities responsible for the care of abused children.

Now, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, feigning that he had just gotten wind of the “real story", has ordered a fresh inquiry into the grooming issue, and the Pakistani angle has finally been brought out of the shadows. After stonewalling for months, Starmer has suddenly accepted the recommendations of Baroness Louise Casey’s audit of the data and evidence of group-based child sexual abuse and ordered a national inquiry covering England and Wales.

In April 2023, when Rishi Sunak was PM, the government promised more specific data on those notorious grooming gangs, including their ethnicity, to ensure they could not “hide behind cultural sensitivities as a way to evade justice". At that time, Sunak and his Home Secretary Priti Patel, were accused of bias, racism, and “dog whistling" by Labour because they are of Indian ancestry ,even though there was no........

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