All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 12, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:38
How Britain’s Criminal Justice System Let Down Grooming Gang Victims: MP Suella Braverman
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The Pakistani men who were involved in this abhorrent behaviour were targeting white girls for a specific reason.
They have an outdated, unacceptable view of women.
And the authorities failed to act because they were scared of the charge of racism.
It's one of the biggest national scandals in our history.
Suella Braverman is the former Home Secretary of the United Kingdom and a Conservative member of the UK Parliament.
We've got this problem in the UK of hate marches where Islamism can be paraded on our streets and it's caused a real increase in anti-Semitism and it's made parts of our streets and our public realm no-go zones for Jewish people.
While she was in DC for Trump's inauguration, we sat down to talk about what's been happening in the UK and what the election of Donald Trump means to her and her constituents.
We have a crisis of free speech in the United Kingdom.
The police have the powers to record your information and log your details.
If someone somewhere happens to be offended, the case is closed.
You will be considered guilty of what we call a non-crime hate incident.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
Right, Honourable Suella Braverman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you very much.
Pleasure to be here.
So I noticed on X that you have been following the movement of the bust of Sir Winston Churchill from in and out of the Oval Office over the years and that he's back.
Why is that significant to you?
Oh, it's so significant because Winston Churchill is not just a British hero, but a hero for Western civilisation.
And it's thanks to Winston Churchill's courage, focus, determination and bravery above all that fascism and the Nazis were beaten.
With thanks to the Americans, of course, and the Allied forces in World War II. But he symbolises, he personifies in many ways the beginning of the special relationship.
Indeed, it was he who coined the phrase, the special relationship between the US and the UK. And I think it's symbolic and symbols are very, very powerful today.
And the symbolism of having his bust back into the White House, I think, speaks volumes about the way in which...
I think it's enormous.
Donald Trump has not just shifted the Overton window, he's shattered it.
And that's very influential upon us in the United Kingdom when it comes to right-wing politics and what we can do to save our country and make Britain great again.
We need to learn a lot from the MAGA movement, from the success of the Republicans under Donald Trump, and really try and apply some of those lessons to UK politics right now.
Because we are mired in the Depression, the...
the recession, the doom and gloom of socialism, I'm afraid.
Not a year old.
And we've got about four years, at least, of a socialist, woke, high immigration, high taxation, low growth, net zero militants government.
And, you know, it's the British people who will suffer.
So there is, you know, a lot that we can learn from the success here in the United States.
Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got to today.
Oh, and by the way, talking about empire, I can't tell, but...
I can't help but notice that you're Indian.
Yeah, well, how far back do you want me to go?
Because I could actually go back to the 19th century in terms of where my background, we've done some research on my ancestry.
But my mother is from Mauritius, and my father is from Kenya.
And so they were born under the British Empire.
In the 1940s, and they grew up really with admiration and gratitude for the British Empire.
They saw the good that Britain did for the world in the Victorian era, in the 1800s, in the 1700s and the 1800s and into the 20th century.
You know, take India.
The British built the railways and the ports and the infrastructure and the irrigation, and in Mauritius, the legal system and the parliamentary system.
In Kenya, again, the railways and infrastructure and the civil service were all fruits of the British Empire, and they laid the foundations for subsequent prosperity for these countries when they gained independence.
My parents came to the UK. In the 1960s, after independence was gained by their countries, and they met in the United Kingdom, and then they made their life in the UK. And then when I was an adult, I got involved in student politics at Cambridge University, and I chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association.
I was studying law.
I qualified as a lawyer, a barrister, and I worked for a decade as a barrister in London and around the country, specialising in public law, administrative law and judicial review and immigration.
A lot of that area of law takes you into the field of immigration, and I defended the Home Office.
In a lot of immigration and asylum cases as a lawyer.
I then got elected to Parliament to represent an area in Hampshire, a beautiful area called Fairham, on the south coast.
And I've been the MP in Fairham for coming up to 10 years.
It will be 10 years this May.
And in that time during my parliamentary career, I've served as a minister in the Brexit department.
So we had the referendum in 2016. The British people voted to leave the European Union.
We set up a new...
I was a minister in that department, tasked with delivering this massive constitutional change.
I served as a Brexit minister under Prime Minister Theresa May.
I was then Attorney General under Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
And then I was Home Secretary under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
And did you leave the May government?
I think you did, right?
I'm one of these politicians who has a few principles and they sometimes get in the way of...
They get in the way, basically.
So I was very much a Brexit enthusiast.
I campaigned to leave the European Union in 2016, and I was very cheered on by the chutzpah of the British people when they decided to leave the European Union.
I didn't think we were going to win the referendum, but we did.
I wanted us to take back control over our borders, because previously it was the European Union who controlled our migration policy.
Take back control of our laws, because previously it was the European Parliament that set the diktats on the limits of what our laws could be.
And I wanted us to take back control of our trade policy, because, again, previously it was the European Union that dictated with whom we could have trade deals.
On laws, borders and trade, I thought there was a very strong case and ultimately sovereignty.
You know, the UK Parliament is the mother of all parliaments and I really felt that self-government was the right thing for us to do.
So that's why I voted for Brexit.
Those were my objectives.
Unfortunately, what happened under Theresa May is that the negotiations failed and she was unable to present a Brexit deal.
That honoured those objectives that I set out.
Control of our borders, control of our laws, coming out of the single market and the customs union, and full extrication from the EU orbit.
And so her deal was a failure.
It was called BRINO, Brexit in name only, or Brexit betrayal deal.
And it was very controversial.
I had to resign from her government because I couldn't support the deal that she had negotiated.
I couldn't defend it because it didn't satisfy the criteria that Brexit represented.
So one of the things that we've been hearing a lot about in the U.S., and I think in good part because of Elon Musk getting interested in the issue, is this, you know, what's dubbed the grooming gangs scandal.
Explain to me what this whole scenario is.
Yeah, I think you're right.
This is the first time that it's exploded into the public consciousness, even though, tragically, the problem has been going on for over a decade.
And so what the problem is of the grooming gangs, or more accurately, the rape gangs, is that in some of our towns and cities around the United Kingdom, there have been...
Organised gangs, gangs of men, who've targeted girls.
These gangs have been made up of predominantly Muslim Pakistani men.
And they have targeted white girls, poor white girls.
And this has been an open secret in these towns.
The authorities have been aware, the teachers have been aware.
Sometimes the girls themselves have reported the suspects, the perpetrators, to the police.
And what's happened is the authorities turned a blind eye.
And they didn't take sufficient, or in some cases, any action to arrest these perpetrators or to investigate the crimes.
They were scared of...
Backlash from community leaders.
Ultimately, they didn't want to be called racist and they were fearful.
And there was an institutional cowardice on the part of the police, on the part of social workers, on the part of teachers, on the part of elected officials who knew about this, should have known better, owed a duty of care to these girls and did nothing.
So there are two elements to this scandal.
There's the actual wrongdoing itself, which is going on today.
And then there was a failure of the authorities to take any action.
And over the years, there have been reports commissioned into it which have concluded some of the things that I've just set out, independently verified.
There have been investigations, there have been some convictions, and there has been recommendations to try and reform the whole of the system to try and fix this.
I think the problem is there's been a squeamishness in British society to really tackle it head-on.
When I was Home Secretary, I was very keen to tackle it.
I went to Rotherham, I went to Rochdale, I met with some of the women.
Now women, girls previously, who had survived some of this horrendous abuse and they told me about their experiences just as I've told you.
There have been whistleblowers.
Maggie Oliver is a former police officer who worked for Greater Manchester Police and she writes, she's written a book about it actually called Survivors, detailing what she came across.
And so when I set up a task force, I set up a dedicated unit involving the National Crime Agency, which is a very kind of elite set of crime investigators in the United Kingdom and in England, Wales, and the police to expedite.
And improve the criminal investigations to get these investigations to court so justice could be secured.
And in its first year, it did secure over 550 arrests and it identified 4,000 victims.
But there was much more that could have been done.
And, you know, if I'm honest, I did struggle to get the support to do more and to do more faster.
When I talked about it publicly, there was a real, you know, shutdown by the kind of mainstream media and people on the left accusing me of racism and accusing me of Islamophobia.
So we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with the former Home Secretary of the UK, Suella Braverman, MP. Just a few statistics from the Daily Mail.
76 gangs in total in 41 towns.
I think just about 400 were convicted.
Something like 150 have been released back, they say, quietly.
How can this happen, I guess, is the question, or why does this happen?
So again, the criminal justice system has let a lot of these victims down.
So you're right, some of these perpetrators have been convicted and sentenced, and then they've received short sentences, and then they've been released quite early.
In other instances, these people have been foreigners.
They've not been British citizens.
And our immigration system, and because our border control is not perfect, and in fact is dysfunctional to a lot of people.
We've not been able to deport them to Pakistan.
And these people have been let out of prison and they're still in the UK. So there is a real failure when it comes to border control, but also our justice system.
And it's still happening, as you said.
Yeah.
It's still happening because the police is still institutionally scared.
And there is also a kind of operational...
I think what we've got to focus on is the policing response.
How many specialist officers do the relevant police forces have diverted onto this kind of work?
These cases are complex to build, to make them ready for trial.
You need a lot of evidence.
Sometimes it's difficult to get hold of this evidence.
So it can take time.
Apply more resource, you can do it more quickly.
I would ask as well, how fast is our criminal justice system working?
It can sometimes take a very long time, like over a year, sometimes two years, from arrest to a charge.
And then, even longer, from charge to trial.
And so, you know, your victim has to stay the course for sometimes two or three years.
That's a very long time to try and get justice for something so awful.
And I would say that we need to think about expediting that justice system so that people are getting charges much more quickly and then reaching a court and a judge much more quickly and so that we can start getting these people sentenced and into jail.
So I think there are real structural problems that need to be addressed before we can say confidently we're anywhere near making progress on it.
I understand in the UK, I understand there's thousands of people that are actually in jail for publicly on social media saying things that were apparently untoward, apparently illegal.
We have a crisis of free speech in the United Kingdom.
And I use that word deliberately.
We have a situation where the police have the powers to record your information and log your details if you've said something that might be offensive to someone.
It doesn't matter about the objective nature of what you've said.
If someone somewhere happens to be offended by what you have said...
And it relates to a personal characteristic, race, gender, religion, sex.
Then that's it.
The case is closed.
You will be considered guilty of what we call a non-crime hate incident.
And that's what you're talking about.
And there are thousands of these cases in the UK or in England and Wales where the police spend an inordinate amount of time policing social media.
It is having a chilling effect on our freedom of speech in the United Kingdom.
There's many people who have lost their jobs, who have ended up with criminal sanctions because they have said a man.
Can't be a woman.
Or they are very vocal about defending Israel, for example.
That seems to be another issue where the police takes a very double-standards approach.
We have a case of a journalist, Alison Pearson, famous journalist, award-winning writer.
Who wrote on social media after October the 7th?
I'm not quite sure what she wrote.
I can't recall the details.
But she wrote something which was very pro-Israel and she was criticising the pro-Palestinian extremists.
We've got this problem in the UK of hate marches where extremism, anti-Semitism and Islamism can be paraded on our streets.
And the police won't take any action.
And it's caused a real increase in anti-Semitism.
And it's made parts of our streets and our public realm no-go zones for Jewish people.
Anyway, she was criticizing this and she was commenting on it.
And she got a knock on the door from the police.
And they suggested that she might have committed a non-crime hate incident.
And there was a public outcry.
The police did backtrack because of the public backlash.
But there are many thousands of people who...
We receive that similar treatment from the police and they don't have the public profile of an award-winning journalist to stir up a backlash and an outcry.
So there is a real problem with free speech on campus.
It's very scary to be Jewish on campus these days.
It's very difficult to be a conservative on campus these days.
It's very scary.
We've had cases where Christian...
Christian followers or believers have prayed silently outside abortion clinics.
They're not waving a placard, they're not being aggressive, they're not intimidating anyone, but they've been arrested and prosecuted by the police and the CPS just for doing that.
So I think it's incredibly worrying that we are sliding down this Orwellian slope towards a dystopia.
Is there a way out of this?
Well, I think, first of all, the non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped.
As Home Secretary, I tried to get rid of them, but unfortunately I didn't have the political support to go as far as I wanted to, so I had to settle on issuing some clarificatory guidance.
We need better protections for students on campus when it comes to free speech.
I was actually cancelled myself a few months ago.
I was invited to speak at Cambridge University.
A former university.
The event was shut down because of the mob.
The pro-Palestinian mob mobilised and they got their activists together and said, we're going to protest very heavily and very reciferously outside this event.
I wasn't bothered by that.
I was happy to go ahead with the event.
But the police got involved and they instructed us to cancel the event because they couldn't guarantee my security.
And their advice was this shouldn't go ahead.
And so on arguably overcautious police advice, but...
It's very difficult to disagree with the security agencies, law enforcement agencies.
We were cancelled and the event didn't go ahead on that particular night.
We rescheduled it for another day and it did go ahead.
But that's an example of what's happening on campus, that there are extremists.
Whether they're eco-extremists, pro-Palestinian extremists, left-wing extremists largely, who are militant such that they don't want to allow or entertain a respectful challenge or other people having a different point of view.
If students and academics are feeling silenced out of fear, then that is a very, very, very damaging place for our country to be in.
So you're here in the US.
As I understand it, you were invited to come.
Yeah.
So what are your next plans?
Well, it's been brilliant.
I'm incredibly honoured and grateful to have been invited to come to the inauguration, to attend the Victory Rally, the Liberty Ball yesterday.
Great atmosphere, great to be part of it all.
I'm very keen to build relationships with people in the US administration.
I have some colleagues and friends who are going in to work for President Trump and Vice President's team.
And I think there's huge potential for the UK-US relationship.
I think we need to work on a free trade agreement between the two nations.
We need to...
Look at what further security and military collaboration can be secured.
And I will keep flying the flag for common sense conservatism.
I very much believe in the virtue of the patriotic, law-abiding, common-sense majority.
And I think for too long they've been dismissed and they've been smeared in the United Kingdom.
And their voice needs to be heard.
And there's a lot of wisdom in the British people, in the hearts and the minds of the British people.
And we just need to listen to them a bit more.
And that's what I will keep doing.
Well, Suella Braverman, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
My pleasure, too.
All the best to the Epoch Times.
Thank you all for joining former Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, Suella Braverman, MP, on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
▲
Export Selection