The elite class doesn't care about white working-class girls. A reply to my critics
What happened when I dug a little deeper
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Look at the above picture.
Lucy Lowe was groomed by a rape gang and then murdered, along with her family when a taxi driver named Azhar Ali Mehmood set their house on fire.
Charlene Downes disappeared from Blackpool when she was 14 years old, having been one of dozens of young girls abused in the town by takeaway owners.
Victoria Agoglia died of a heroin overdose two months after reporting she had been raped by up to 25 men a night.
There are just three of the countless victims of Britain’s rape gangs scandal —a scandal that as I said in my last piece has been consistently ignored and downplayed by much of the elite class in this country.
Instead of doing their job, instead of pursuing truth, instead of throwing light on one of the biggest and darkest scandals in our entire history, too many journalists ignored and then downplayed the mass rape and abuse of white working-class children like Lucy, Charlene, and Victoria at the hands of Pakistani Muslim gangs.
The media class, unsurprisingly, did not like me saying this.
Over the weekend, several prominent journalists —Matthew Syed, David Aaronovitch, among them, took to X/Twitter to criticise me, saying it was nonsense and claiming the media had been all over this scandal.
But were they?
Were they really?
In response, last night I decided to take a closer look at this media coverage and pull together a thread which has now been shared by Elon Musk and read by nearly 7 million people.
Just trust me on this —you’ll want to read to the end of this post.
Because what I’m about to show you reveals a lot about how utterly broken our society really is, how biased the “national conversation” really is, and how out-of-touch many people in the elite class have truly become.
First, the boring bit.
How did I analyse media coverage of the rape gangs in UK newspapers?
I used something called Lexis —a database researchers use to search content across broadcast and print media.
Every good researcher out there knows how to use it so they can duplicate my work and check it out if they like.
We can use this to look at the number of articles that are specifically about the “grooming gang” phenomenon.
What did I find?
Let's look at the years 2011-2025 because before that, even though the rape gangs scandal goes back decades, there was basically NOTHING in UK media about this.
There was just one article, in 2010, by Sue Reid in the Mail, who dared to highlight a shocking case of nine men from Derby who were jailed for ‘the biggest case of serial sex abuse ever uncovered in Britain’.
But that was basically it.
As Sue Reid noted at the time: “The simple fact is that the perpetrators are almost all Asian and from the north of England — and their victims white”.
While the BBC also reported on the Derby case, she pointed out, they barely mentioned the fact that all but one of the gang members were Asian, or the fact the vast majority of the victims — 22 of the 27 in court — were white girls.
Sue Reid was a pioneer in Media Land.
Even though there had been persistent rumours about the rape gangs since the 1970s, and even though political groups like the British National Party and the English Defence League were pointing to them from as early as the mid-to-late 2000s, the media class did not really touch this issue AT ALL until around 2011.
That’s when renegade journalist Andrew Norfolk, at The Times, began to write the first big pieces on the scandal —doing so in the face of sustained pressure, intimidation and harassment from a loose alliance of “anti-racist” groups, Labour politicians, and Conservative peers like Sayeeda Warsi, many of whom said it was “Islamophobic” to discuss this issue or was feeding “the far right”.
So, let’s look at coverage of the grooming gang issue across ALL UK newspapers, between 2011 and 2025.
Overall, throughout this period, there were 4,659 articles in UK newspapers that were mainly about the "grooming gang" phenomenon.
Sounds like a lot, right?
Remember the number.
"Grooming gang" = 4,659
Now, let's compare that with how much coverage the media class gave to other national scandals and debates in this country. Have a look at this:
"white privilege" = 6,146
"anti-Muslim" = 17,152
"post office" and "horizon" =20,274
"extreme right" = 21,252
"Islamophobia" = 23,461
"Greta Thunberg" = 22,717
"expenses scandal" =25,585
"Stephen Lawrence" = 29,808
"anti-racism" = 34,484
"Windrush" = 35,515
"George Floyd" = 38,824
"Black Lives Matter" = 59,338
"Grenfell" = 71,422
"Britain" and "racism" = 75,693
"Net Zero" = 141,367
"far right" = 231,540
"racism" = 382,069
I could go on. But I think the numbers speak for themselves.
Relative to other scandals and amid a strong liberal bias in the media class, the mass rape of young, working-class white girls & women just wasn't a priority.
Yes, there were newspapers that broke the story and pushed it, like The Times in 2011.
But even there, the number of articles in The Times on the “grooming gang” phenomenon between 2011 and 2025, 440, is dwarfed by the 2,868 articles on "Islamophobia", the 3,202 on Stephen Lawrence, the 2,603 on George Floyd, or the 5,524 on Black Lives Matter (BLM).
My point here is not to bash individual newspapers because at the end of the day The Times and Andrew Norfolk should be applauded for finally highlighting this issue (though, at the same time, how many journalists publicly and aggressively defended Norfolk when he was targeted by organisations with links to Islamist extremism?)
What I am saying is that relative to other national scandals, stories and debates the mass rape of mainly working-class white children —arguably the biggest scandal in our history—received remarkably little coverage from the media class.
And when you look at newspapers that lean more heavily into the liberal progressive bias that infects many of the institutions in this country, such as The Guardian/Observer, the numbers become even more astonishing.
Between 2011 and 2025, The Guardian/Observer had 113 articles that focused on the grooming gang scandal compared to 3,325 on "Islamophobia".
They were nearly 30 times more likely to write about Islamophobia than the mass rape of young white girls and women by predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs.
What about the BBC?
We can look at BBC News 24 and BBC Radio 4 and, once again, you see the same bias running through the coverage.
Between 2011 and 2025, there were 357 specific mentions of the "grooming gang" scandal in BBC News/Radio 4 transcripts compared to 7,537 for "George Floyd", 3,219 for "Stephen Lawrence", 7,416 for "Black Lives Matter", and 2,259 for "Islamophobia".
You get the picture. I won't keep going.
But what I will say is this. These girls were never a priority for Britain’s London-based media class, much like they were never a priority for the political class.
Compared to other scandals, the mass rape of white working-class children was at first ignored completely and then routinely downplayed.
Why?
Because too many of the middle-class, Oxbridge-educated, London-based, and strongly socially liberal if not radically woke progressive elites who dominate media, who shape what they think is our national "debate", deliberately steered clear of a scandal that directly challenges their tightly-controlled taboos around the supposed positive effects of mass immigration, multiculturalism, Islam, and “diversity” in all its forms, much of which is backed up with alarmist narratives about the supposed “threat” from the “far right”, “hate”, and "Islamophobia" to warn others off from asking difficult questions or challenging the elite consensus in London.
Even now, Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips, Wes Streeting and many others find it difficult to talk about, preferring to spend their time criticising Elon Musk than committing to what we really need —a national inquiry, the deportation of dual nationals convicted of grooming, and a memorial in the very heart of Westminster so that the elite class is continuously reminded of its failure to protect children.
These girls from the white-working class were simply never fashionable enough to warrant the same attention as the likes of Stephen Lawrence and George Floyd.
This HAS to change.
As I wrote in my last piece, whatever you think of Elon Musk, on this issue he has done us a favour by forcing our country and political leaders on all sides to reckon with what is now, finally, emerging as a truly NATIONAL scandal that has for too long been ignored and pushed to the side by elites.
This past week, our national debate has crossed a threshold.
We have been pushed into a new era in which millions of people up and down this country are either learning about the rape gangs crisis for the first time or hearing shocking new details they did not know before and can scarcely believe.
And this has all happened online —on X/Twitter and Substacks like this one.
This is why millions of people are now asking enormous questions.
How did our country let this happen to our children?
Why was it overlooked for so long?
Why did so many people in positions of power stay silent?
Why are some of them still in parliament, today?
Why is this scandal still happening today?
What can we do to stop it?
Why did the media stop pursuing truth?
Why has it focused much more on progressive causes than this one?
And why did the UK media class fall over itself to cover a single American man dying in Minneapolis while seemingly not caring anywhere near as much when thousands of children are abused, raped, and harassed here in Britain?
The people have tuned into this scandal.
They have taken notice and they are watching how the institutions respond.
The only question now is whether the media class has bothered to notice and will, finally, get on top of this scandal and push it to front of the agenda or continue to ask ridiculous questions like it did for much of this weekend, deflecting from its glaring failures over the last thirty years by trying to blame Elon Musk and criticise people like me who are pointing out their obvious failure.
So, here’s my message to the media class.
Find the truth. Tell us the truth. And do your job.
Matt, I've spent the last few days following your posts on X and here on Substack with horror and anger, although anger real doesn't describe my feelings. These girls have been rated and abused by these gangs and then been discarded and treated appallingly by those who should have been protecting them.
Please 🙏 keep shining the light on this and leave the politicians, police, local authorities and the media no place to hide.
Each and every one of these girls deserves justice
And now we are getting the push back from the rape gang apologists - I’m seeing lots of posts on X about child sexual abuse by gangs of white people and that this demographic is much more prevalent than Pakistani rape gangs. I say this to those apologists that the motivation for the Pakistanis targeting vulnerable white girls is evidence of the worst case of Race Hatred in the UK’s modern history. The rapes are atrocities and should be treated as such when pursuing and sentencing the perpetrators. Oh and the establishment are still avoiding talking about deportation!!!