Anarcho-Tyranny And The UK Grooming Gangs Scandal – OpEd
By Lipton Matthews
recently attended an event at the Prosperity Institute in the United Kingdom, and, as a foreigner listening to the discussion unfold, I found it both unsettling and clarifying. The panel addressed the grooming gang scandal, a subject that remains profoundly uncomfortable for Britain’s political and cultural establishment. What distinguished this event was its refusal to soften the reality of what occurred or to retreat into evasive language. The discussion did not merely revisit past failures; it exposed a deeper pattern in how British institutions exercise power.
At the center of the panel was Fiona Goddard—a victim of grooming who spoke with calm precision. She described how the police betrayed her trust after she came forward with her story, only to discover that information she had shared in confidence had been passed back to members of the grooming gang. That institutional betrayal placed her at renewed risk and compounded the original abuse. She also recounted something even more disturbing. The men who groomed her told her explicitly that they targeted her because she was white and that their aim was to destroy white girls. The starkness of her testimony stripped away any remaining illusions about the ideological framing that has often surrounded these crimes.
Listening to Fiona, what struck me was not only the brutality of what she endured, but the nature of the state’s response. Fiona explained that her claims were subjected to extraordinary scrutiny. She was examined by ten attorneys, her credibility tested repeatedly before her story was taken seriously. This stood in sharp contrast to the cultural climate of the #MeToo era, when allegations of harassment were often treated as self-validating. Men whose names appeared on the “Shitty Media Men” list were publicly ruined without due process or serious examination of the accusers. The disparity raises uncomfortable questions about which victims are believed, which are doubted, and how ideology governs the distribution of moral concern.
The wider panel discussion was notable for its candor. Panelists criticized diversity and multiculturalism not as benign aspirations, but as governing ideologies that discourage honesty and enforce selective silence. It was repeatedly noted that in many cases connected to the grooming gang scandal, the individuals who faced punishment were not the professionals who ignored, enabled, or concealed abuse, but whistleblowers who attempted to raise concerns. Those who spoke out were disciplined, sidelined, or removed, while senior officials who presided over failure often escaped consequences altogether.
Several speakers sharply criticized politicians and senior security officials for ignoring, minimizing, or suppressing the scandal over many years. This pattern reflected not incompetence but fear, fear of reputational damage and fear of challenging ideological orthodoxy. Enforcement did not fail because institutions were incapable, but because they were unwilling.
One panelist in particular, Leila Cunningham—a prosecutor and Reform politician—was especially forthright. Cunningham identified herself as Muslim and criticized what she described as police cowardice, arguing that law enforcement repeatedly failed to act decisively out of fear of being accused of racism. In her assessment, the grooming gang scandal amounted to a systemic cover-up by legal and political authorities.
Cunningham stated that local councils were aware of what was happening for years and yet chose inaction. This was not ignorance or bureaucratic delay, but deliberate suppression. The failure of councils, police forces, and senior officials to intervene represented a national shame, one that discredited Britain’s claims to moral seriousness and institutional competence.
She also argued that British institutions apply justice unevenly. When perpetrators are white, she claimed, the system acts swiftly and punitively. When offenders fall outside that category, it becomes hesitant and evasive. This asymmetry is not justice but ideology masquerading as principle. She further emphasized the class dimension of the scandal, pointing out that the victims were overwhelmingly working-class girls whose lack of social power made them easy to ignore.
In one of the evening’s most controversial moments, Cunningham argued that elements within Pakistani immigrant communities had encouraged what she described as “rape tourism” and that Britain’s immigration and visa regime had failed to respond. She called for strict visa bans and enforcement measures against countries that refuse to take back convicted offenders, naming Pakistan explicitly. Whether one agreed with her conclusions or not, the bluntness of her language stood in stark contrast to decades of official euphemism.
These criticisms of multicultural orthodoxy were reinforced by Labour peer Lord Maurice Glassman, who criticized multiculturalism as an ideology that deters solidarity. By fragmenting society into competing identity groups, he argued, multiculturalism had weakened shared moral obligations and eroded the foundations of working-class politics.
Despite the severity of the subject, the atmosphere in the room was introspective rather than confrontational. The audience was largely composed of elite professionals, yet there was a palpable sense of unease. During the question-and-answer session, a man of Pakistani descent criticized the media for its longstanding refusal to speak honestly about the ethnicity of the groomers. He accused journalists of deliberately suppressing factual description and of turning truth-telling itself into a punishable offence. The reflex, he argued, was not to investigate wrongdoing, but to manage narratives.
It was only after hearing these accounts and observing the broader patterns of selective enforcement that the evening’s discussion began to coalesce into a sharper insight, one that echoes the warnings of the late political theorist Sam Francis. What unfolded before us was a clear case of anarcho-tyranny—a system in which the state withdraws from enforcing basic law and order where it is most needed, while simultaneously expanding its authority over thought, speech, and symbolic behavior. Police and councils proved incapable or unwilling to protect vulnerable girls, yet the same institutions have shown remarkable zeal in punishing those who defy approved narratives.
Across Europe, governments increasingly appear more interested in prosecuting thought crimes than confronting serious harm. In Britain, Sam Melia sits in prison for posting stickers reading, “It’s OK to be white,” while blogger Pete North was reportedly arrested for sharing an anti-Hamas meme. In Germany, a woman was given a harsher sentence for insulting her attacker, calling him a “disgraceful rapist pig,” than the rapist himself received for the crime. Words are treated as dangerous, while actions are often tolerated or excused.
By the end of the evening, it was difficult to ignore the sense that something was shifting. The event suggested a broader ideological change, even within elite environments long aligned with liberal orthodoxies. There was a growing willingness to question the dogmas of diversity and multiculturalism, and an emerging resistance to what several speakers openly described as liberal, anti-white politics. More fundamentally, there was a dawning recognition that a state which punishes speech while tolerating predation is not compassionate or progressive, but decadent. Whether this shift will endure remains uncertain, but the discussion itself felt like a decisive break from years of silence, deflection, and managed anarchy.
- About the author: Lipton Matthews is a researcher, business analyst, and contributor to Merion West, The Federalist, American Thinker, Intellectual Takeout, mises.org, and Imaginative Conservative. Visit his YouTube channel, with numerous interviews with a variety of scholars, here. He may be contacted at lo_matthews@yahoo.com or on Twitter (@matthewslipton).
- Soure: This article was published by the Mises Institute