The Good Samaritan at Rotherham

When the Wrong People care

An audio version of this essay — read by me — is available below the paywall.

“The Good Samaritan, After Delacroix” by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890

The wrong people cared about Rotherham.

This is the sad reality. Five years ago, when COVID began, people were reminded of the true meaning of the word "apocalypse". It means not an ending, but an unveiling. And in January 2025, we are experiencing an apocalypse of the British state which has unveiled its frightening lack of capacity, willpower, and care.

This has been brought about by the bizarre explosion of the years-old Pakistani nationwide rape gang scandal into the national consciousness (for which, as Louise Perry notes, the name of just one town, “Rotherham” has become shorthand), alongside the trial of child-murdering Islamic terrorist Axel Rudakubana. Both stories are an indictment of the British state, under both Labour and the Tories, over decades. Ed West has suggested that the rape gangs story is "Britain's Chernobyl", a scandal revealing the hard truth that an ideology cannot, in the end, bend the world to its will. At Chernobyl, the ideology behind both the causes and the cover-up was communism. In Rotherham, Southport, and beyond, it's been multiculturalism (a certain version of it at least, anyway. The predictable response has of course been that "true multiculturalism has never been tried!").

The comparison is apt. Another strikes me, perhaps all the more illuminating since it comes from our own British past: the Suez Canal. If in 1956 the Suez Crisis was the internationally humiliating death-knell of the Britain of the imperial era, then Rotherham in 2025 may be the same for the Britain that replaced it. Suez revealed that an imperial Britain lacked the capacity to uphold the material conditions necessary to maintain an already illusory idea of itself. So too Rotherham (though there is no sign of Keir Starmer doing an Anthony Eden).

The Suez-like nature of the scandal partly explains how it happened and why it is still being wilfully obfuscated by so many. Those who have wed themselves to a narrative in which post-WW2 Britain has been on a steady trajectory to harmonious multicultural bliss (with the main obstacle to this being the intransigent racism of the white British majority) have turned a blind eye to the rape gangs for twenty years or more, and are now continuing to do so. Adherents to this narrative, whether they are part of the state or the media or just your average citizen, frame themselves as the Heroes, those on the Right Side of History. They are the Ones Who Care.

Were they not, their world would unravel.

And that's why they're so rattled. Because the wrong people cared. And chief among them is Elon Musk.

The timeline of how Musk picked up on the rape gang story is slightly convoluted, but worth straightening out I think.