CIDS

ONE GIRL WAS THROWN FROM A MOVING CAR. ANOTHER WAS BURNED. SIX RETURNED WITH SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES. FOUR BECAME PREGNANT. Some were just 13 years old. These were children in the care of Birmingham City Council. Girls who should have been protected by the very authorities responsible for their safety. In 1991, Dr Jill Jesson exposed what was happening to them. She identified links to Asian private-hire drivers and subsequently revealed that she had been ordered to remove the ethnicity of the men from her findings. Copies of her report were ordered destroyed. Birmingham councillors later voted against an inquiry. Years later, the council investigated itself and declared there had been no cover-up. NOW LOOK AT THE POLITICIANS REPRESENTING BIRMINGHAM. Jess Phillips, MP for Birmingham Yardley, became the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. When demands for a government-led grooming gangs inquiry were made, she rejected Oldham's request and supported powerless locally led investigations instead. Are we to believe she did not know what was happening in her own backyard? And then there is Shabana Mahmood. Mahmood has represented Birmingham Ladywood since 2010. Her own website proudly documents years of campaigning for Palestine. But where is the equivalent record of her campaigning for the girls sexually exploited in her own city? Where was her campaign to uncover what happened to the Jill Jesson Report? Mahmood is now the Home Secretary, responsible for the national statutory grooming gangs inquiry. A FOR BIRMINGHAM TODAY 98 live child sexual exploitation investigations. Six suspected grooming gangs roaming the streets. Two private-hire drivers stripped of their licences following police intelligence about potential sexual offences against children. And the ethnicity of the men involved is still hidden. My latest article follows the evidence through successive Birmingham administrations. I identify the politicians, chief executives and senior officials who held power when the decisions were made, and set out who Baroness Longfield must now call to account. Read it here and get ready for my live transmission where I line by line analyse the Jesson Report. Raja Miah MBE https://t.co/yi2j72RHqx _________ Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of the road where I can continue working this way. The paid subscriptions have stalled. Worse, tens of thousands of people are now reading these articles without even joining the free mailing list. The audience is growing, but the number of people actually standing behind the work is not growing with it. This is becoming impossible to sustain. You know what we are up against. The mainstream media will not touch my work. Institutions I investigate do not volunteer their records. Politicians do not suddenly decide to hold themselves to account. And yet, despite all of that, we forced the national inquiry. We did that because enough ordinary people refused to go away. But getting the inquiry was never the end of this campaign. In many ways it was only the beginning. Now we have to watch where it goes, what it investigates, which places it avoids, which witnesses it calls, which records it obtains and whether the same institutions that failed these children are allowed to control the story again. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. And I cannot do it indefinitely working on my own. That is why I keep talking about 50,000 committed subscribers. It is not a vanity number. I did not pluck it out of the air. With fifty thousand people with me means when we uncover something important, it does not depend on a newspaper editor, a television producer or an algorithm deciding whether you are allowed to see it. It gives us reach they cannot easily shut down. But there is another reason. I need to build a proper backroom operation around this work. At the moment I am investigating, researching, writing, publishing, producing the videos, running the newsletter, dealing with the technology and then starting again. It is unsustainable. I need people behind me who can take care of the technical and production work so that I can spend my time doing the thing I do best. That is why we have been pushing so hard for new paid subscribers. 🔴 SIGN UP HERE 👉 https://t.co/mZBZnScays If you read my work and want it to continue, I need your help. Sign up for free. There are no paywalls to access any of my work. If you can afford the £3 a month or £30 for the year, please become a paid subscriber. We forced the inquiry. Now we need the numbers to make sure they cannot control what happens next. Raja Miah MBE