The recent Casey Report laid bare decades of institutional failure to protect vulnerable children from organised sexual exploitation. Despite overwhelming evidence and numerous warnings from affected communities, authorities consistently downplayed the scale of abuse, often avoiding the ethnic backgrounds of perpetrators to maintain a fragile narrative of social cohesion. The report’s damning findings—which explored over a thousand cases, inadequate police responses, and a justice system that allowed perpetrators to escape proper charges—has now vindicated the working-class voices long dismissed as paranoid or racist. In an unexpected but necessary U-turn, the Labour government under Keir Starmer has committed to a full public inquiry and stronger enforcement measures, finally acknowledging the systemic nightmare that these communities endured in silence.
Most importantly, Baroness Casey’s recent report into the child sexual exploitation scandal reopened a wound that revealed far more than institutional failure – it exposed an evident tension of class, race, and political calculation in modern Britain. While the official narrative highlights bureaucratic negligence and racial sensitivities, the inquiry inadvertently exemplifies a deeper truth: the very communities long dismissed as reactionary or ‘left behind’ have borne the brunt of systemic betrayal. This scandal lays bare the consequences of a political establishment that, in prioritising social cohesion and identity politics, sacrificed vulnerable working-class children. The inquiry forces us to confront the uncomfortable reality that resistance to the status quo no longer resides in the traditional margins once celebrated by neo-Marxist theory, but within those same working-class communities now derided, ridiculed, and ignored. Traditionally, neo-Marxist theory posited that it was the groups outside the mainstream of society that would, because they had nothing to lose from the system, be the agents of radical change.
However, they were looking at the wrong people.
Now, such notions have been flipped on their head: the traditional blue collar working class had been, in the eyes of Marcuse & co, integrated into the capitalist system and the hope for change lay in the students, intellectuals, minorities, etc. But of course, now it is those same “marginalised groups”, NGOs, etc, who form the ideological prop to the system and the traditional working class, where you find the resistance.
For example, in 2011, a drunken northern man donning a tracksuit and a vernacular only encountered by some from the mouths of Vicky Pollard was beamed into the living rooms across the country – the buzzed hair, inebriated slurring and hailing from a community of pebble-dashed houses was enough to make him the poster boy of Guardian-reading sneers. When he appeared in front of a microphone, his barely legible slurring being misconstrued became emblematic of the way austerity-era media and satire dismissed anti-immigration sentiment, not through direct engagement, but by ridiculing its most inarticulate messengers. For example, “Muslamic Ray Guns” was the comedic cry at a class who, by virtue of their poor
education, were not as well-equipped to relay their message as the quick-witted Russell Group educated comedians who poked fun at them from a distance on national TV. The man, of course, was referring to “Islamic rape gangs”, – which, at that point, was verified, factual, public information and thus those that belly-laughed when his clumsy attempts at explaining his frustration can’t simply be vindicated by the benefit of hindsight or new information. And so, when Russell Howard paraded that clip on his show, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he was poking fun at a paranoid, nonsense conspiracy laced in bigotry. Far from it; every snatch of laughter from the audience was really a laughter at the messenger and his lack of cultural capital to defend himself. Perhaps it speaks to the ignorance—or insulation—of an audience largely drawn from middle England or metropolitan enclaves, untouched by the realities of high-density immigration in communities already buckling under austerity. As those comedians finished up and snuck back to their materially comfortable lives in Islington and Hammersmith, their Adidas tracksuit-wearing counterparts were often returning to a Rotherham or a Rochdale.
Prominent author Tom Holland wrote on Twitter in 2015 that “the true nightmare of Rotherham is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.” How do we expect the British public to reconcile with this? The notion that young white girls were expendable, a fine sacrificial goat for maintaining racial peace, within which there is undoubtedly a class element; that New Britain must sideline justice and institutional transparency in a bid to quell tensions. Perhaps, then, immigration has not only ensured flourishing cultural tensions in communities that have seen radical demographic shifts in recent decades, but also completely muddied liberal and traditionally radical politics as we know them. On one hand, it surfaced some stark tensions within mainstream liberal thought – classism took precedent over protecting working-class white girls as a more comfortable medium in the pursuit of being accommodating of their relatively new neighbours. On the other hand, it offers an interesting insight into just how off the mark people like Marcuse were when predicting who exactly would “break the chain”; where they were supposed to break the chain, they reinforced it. Those once tasked with challenging structural inequality – academics, NGOs, cultural elites – became its unwitting stewards. The working class, meanwhile, bore the brunt of a nightmare cocktail: classism, legitimised under the banner of progressive identity politics, and gaslighting on a national scale. To not only suffer from an institutional conspiracy, but to be mocked by the country’s most esteemed media figures when they tried—clumsily, inarticulately—to name it.
Ultimately, what we have learnt from the central government’s long-awaited head-on confrontation of this despicable element of modern history is plentiful. The Guardian columnists, believing that progressive language would redeem the institutions’ disgrace, were largely wrong and the ones who were shunned and tarred were right – that they harboured the greater radical potential to confront a system laced in injustice all along. And indeed, that perhaps this New Britain has many more problems brewing beneath the surface than most are prepared to meet.