Sarah Champion was dismissed from the shadow front bench last month for saying that Britain has a ‘problem’ with British Pakistani men exploiting white girls
The Left is turning a blind eye to sex grooming gangs for fear of being branded racist, a sacked Labour MP has said.
Sarah Champion was dismissed from the shadow front bench last month for saying that Britain has a ‘problem’ with British Pakistani men exploiting white girls.
In her first interview since then, the former shadow women and equalities secretary said the ‘floppy left’ was failing vulnerable children with its silence.
In a newspaper piece last month, the MP said: ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.’
She quit her role after the piece caused an outcry among her Labour colleagues.
After her resignation Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – an MP in Islington, north London – said his party would not ‘blame’ or ‘demonise any particular group’.
He accused the paper of inciting Islamophobia and stigmatising ‘entire communities’. But Labour was accused of stifling free speech.
The Rotherham MP used an interview with The Times yesterday to highlight differences in attitudes between the capital and Labour’s northern heartlands.
She said a liberal fear of being branded racist was preventing those on the Left from speaking out.
She said: ‘If I’m on the floppy left, to be accused of racism is probably the worst thing you can call me. That fear will motivate me to step away from a lot of topics I’d maybe tackle head on if I didn’t have that phobia.’
Her constituency Rotherham was home to one of the most high-profile grooming scandals.
After her resignation Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – an MP in Islington, north London – said his party would not ‘blame’ or ‘demonise any particular group’
She said many Labour members and politicians based in London had ‘never been challenged by a reality that’s different’ from their largely ‘tolerant, multicultural world’.
‘London is not representative of the UK and it’s definitely not representative of the north of England in relation to race,’ she said.
‘Rotherham and many post-industrial towns are still segregated.’
She added: ‘The multicultural policies that I, through my working career, grew up with, and which Jeremy Corbyn grew up with, need a translation to come outside London.’
Miss Champion stressed: ‘It’s not that Yorkshire’s racist, it’s that Yorkshire is very blunt and doesn’t sugar-coat anything.
‘In Rotherham, people’s frustration is that if they all knew what was going on, why didn’t the people who were meant to protect them do anything about it?’
Miss Champion made her comments about ‘British Pakistani men’ in a Sun column last month. She then resigned and made an apology for what she called her ‘extremely poor choice of words’.
Rotherham was one of many English cities, including Rochdale, Oxford and Newcastle, which have been home to grooming gangs.