Forty years of watching the same cowardice
I’ve been watching Westminster and the British establishment lie, dodge and cover their backs for nearly forty years.
You learn to spot patterns. You learn to spot the tells.
When the grooming gang scandals first broke, we were told this was a turning point. Lessons learned. Never again. Then Andy Burnham came along, watched the documentaries, commissioned reviews, spoke about victims. We were supposed to believe that, finally, someone in authority understood.
But look where we ended up: a country where “Andy Burnham grooming gangs” now means one thing to the victims and whistleblowers – you get a well‑publicised review for the cameras, and then a quiet police operation to deal with the people who refuse to shut up. Operation Hexagon is exactly that story: not a dragnet for child rapists, but a dragnet for the people shouting about child rapists.
This piece is about how that happened under Burnham’s watch, why it keeps happening in England, who is actually to blame, what a serious country would do instead, and what ordinary Englishmen can still do about it.
What happened: from grooming gangs to Operation Hexagon
Let’s start with what we’re dealing with.
For years, grooming gangs in towns like Oldham operated with near impunity. Councils knew. Police knew. Social workers knew. The victims were mostly working‑class English girls, written off as “troubled”, “promiscuous”, “not credible”. Officials hid behind jargon while real children were raped and trafficked.
Then came the documentaries – “Three Girls”, “The Betrayed Girls”. Andy Burnham watched them and, to his credit, he did something at the start. He commissioned reviews into historic child sexual exploitation, including the mess in Greater Manchester. You’ll see the phrase “Andy Burnham grooming gangs” pop up in those press releases as if he personally led some crusade for justice.
The reviews duly confirmed what many of us already knew: authorities failed catastrophically. Cases were dropped. Perpetrators weren’t prosecuted. Whistleblowers were sidelined. Lots of carefully worded reports. Lots of “regrettable shortcomings” and “systemic learning.”
And then comes the part they don’t put in the glossy summaries. Under the same political umbrella, Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council formed a joint operation – Operation Hexagon. Not marketed as a grooming gang crackdown. Not sold as a hunt for rapists. Instead, it turned into a framework to go after the people on social media who were naming names, sharing documents, calling out council leaders and senior cops.
So you have this grotesque contradiction: the very era of “Andy Burnham grooming gangs” reviews gives you, in practice, a system where victims still wait for justice while activists, bloggers and ordinary residents get visits, interviews and charges. The signal is clear: speak out too loudly and the state looks at you, not at the men who destroyed children’s lives.
Why it happened: the establishment’s survival reflex
Why does a country that knows girls were raped in plain sight end up policing tweets instead of arresting abusers? It isn’t an accident. It’s how the British establishment protects itself.
After nearly four decades of watching scandals come and go – from MPs’ expenses to Hillsborough to grooming gangs – you see the same reflex every time:
First, protect the institution. Councils, police forces, political parties, all run on reputation and funding. If the full truth comes out, careers end, budgets get slashed, and whole leadership teams can’t show their faces again. So the instinct is to turn down the volume, not turn up the pressure.
Second, protect the voting blocs. The modern British party machine treats some communities like fragile ornaments: they must never be offended, never criticised in public, because they’re viewed as guaranteed votes. So if a grooming gang happens to come from a particular demographic, the priority becomes “community cohesion” and “avoiding tensions”, not “jail for rapists.”
Third, control the narrative. Reviews are commissioned, “independent” panels are appointed, letters are written to victims. It looks serious. It sounds solemn. But look closely: the process is managed, the terms of reference are narrow, and anything that points to deep political failure gets lost in “lessons learned”.
Operation Hexagon sits right in the middle of that reflex. When you hear “Andy Burnham grooming gangs” from the official side, you’re supposed to picture a brave mayor taking on abuse. But the actual machinery underneath shows you the priorities: clean up the optics, police the criticism, keep a lid on the anger.
It isn’t hysteria to say that. It’s simply how this country has behaved, over and over again, when powerful people are implicated.
Who is to blame: names, roles, responsibility
We need to stop pretending that this is all just “system failure”. Systems don’t fail on their own. People design them. People run them. People choose what gets investigated and what gets buried.
Let’s start at the top. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham also wears the badge of Police and Crime Commissioner. That means Greater Manchester Police answers to his office on strategy, priorities and culture. Oldham is under his remit. He cannot wash his hands of what happens in his force area.
So when a joint operation like Hexagon is set up with the local council, pointed not at a list of grooming suspects but at people talking about grooming suspects, that happened under the umbrella of his authority. He may not have signed every document, but he owns the climate. He owns the message sent down the chain: this is how we deal with “troublemakers.”
But Burnham is not alone. Councillors who bent over backwards to avoid reputational damage are to blame. Senior police officers who looked at victims and saw paperwork are to blame. Civil servants who wrote bland risk assessments while girls were being ferried around are to blame.
And then there is the media. The same press that fills pages with sympathetic profiles of Burnham the “moderate”, Burnham the “future PM”, somehow finds it very difficult to spell out that under the era of “Andy Burnham grooming gangs,” we still ended up with an operation aimed squarely at whistleblowers. Funny that.
Is every individual in these institutions evil? No. Some are decent. Some tried. Some quit in despair. But the net effect is the same: the state turned its fire on critics to stop the scandal growing, and the man at the top of that state in Greater Manchester was Andy Burnham.
What a serious country would do instead
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that England was serious about protecting its own children. What would a serious country do in the face of grooming gangs and years of cover‑up?
For a start, no more “quiet words” instead of charges. Every officer, councillor or official who deliberately buried evidence, ignored victims or shut down investigations would face the same hard questions a criminal suspect faces. If it’s provable, they’d be in the dock. Careers over. Pensions gone. Some of them jailed.
Second, whistleblowers would be treated as allies, not enemies. You want a functioning criminal justice system? You reward the people who risk their jobs and reputations to speak out. You don’t send specialist operations to lean on them, raid them, or drag them through court over their choice of words online.
Third, political leaders would own the failure in plain language. A serious country doesn’t hide behind phrases like “regrettable historic shortcomings.” It says: we failed, we protected the wrong people, we are going to put that right – and here is the list of names of those being investigated and charged for their part in the cover‑up.
Fourth, you rebuild trust around a clear principle: English girls matter. That shouldn’t be controversial. Yet in modern England it clearly is. A serious country would say openly: no cultural excuse, no religious excuse, no political excuse will ever trump the safety of our daughters. End of.
That is not what we have. What we have instead is “Andy Burnham grooming gangs” as a press‑office phrase, and Operation Hexagon as the dirty truth underneath: polite concern in public, pressure on those who complain in private.
What ordinary people can actually do
So what do we do, out here, as ordinary Englishmen and women who are sick of watching this happen?
First, stop buying the spin. When you see another polished review, another solemn press conference, ask yourself one simple question: how many perpetrators have been jailed since the last scandal broke, and how many whistleblowers or critics have been targeted by the police? That ratio tells you everything.
Second, use the platforms we still control. Substack, YouTube, local newsletters, community meetings – that’s where we can say what the party machines and compliant media will not. Naming the pattern matters. Saying “Andy Burnham grooming gangs and Operation Hexagon” in the same breath matters, because it stops them separating the PR from the reality.
Third, support whistleblowers practically. When a former officer or council worker sticks their neck out, don’t just applaud. Help them: share their work, turn up at meetings, write to your local paper, lend them legal and financial support if they’re dragged into court. The establishment wants them isolated. Our job is to make sure they’re not.
Fourth, vote with your eyes open. If you live anywhere near Greater Manchester and you still see the same names on the ballot papers, ask yourself: have they ever clearly condemned the targeting of whistleblowers? Have they backed a proper investigation into operations like Hexagon? If not, they do not deserve your support.
Fifth, think nationally, act locally. English nationalism, properly understood, starts in your own town. If your council, your police force, or your MP is playing the same game – soft on grooming gangs, hard on critics – make that the issue they cannot escape. They hate sustained, focused pressure. Give it to them.
We are not powerless. We are just unused to acting like a people who cares enough to confront those who govern us.
Conclusion: if we won’t defend our own girls, what are we?
Here’s the brutal truth.
If a country will not defend its own daughters from gangs of rapists – and then turns its police powers on those who try to expose it – that country has lost something basic and vital. It has lost its moral right to call itself serious, decent, civilised.
The “Andy Burnham grooming gangs” era will be sold to you as a story of courage and compassion. The reality, visible in operations like Hexagon, is something far uglier: a British establishment that would rather protect its voting blocs and institutional reputations than protect its children, and a political class that sends the police to manage dissent instead of to smash criminal networks.
We can’t pretend we didn’t see it. We can’t pretend we weren’t warned. The question now is whether we, as English men and women, are prepared to do more than grumble about it online.
If we won’t defend our own girls, what exactly are we defending? And why should anyone respect a nation that won’t even protect its children from men who treat them as prey?
That’s the choice. Either England grows a spine – and starts holding people like Andy Burnham and his establishment friends to account – or the next scandal will look exactly the same, just with a different smiling face at the press conference.
FAQs
1. Who is Andy Burnham in relation to grooming gangs?
Andy Burnham is the Mayor of Greater Manchester and effectively the Police and Crime Commissioner, overseeing reviews and policing related to grooming gang scandals in that area.
2. What is Operation Hexagon?
Operation Hexagon is a joint operation between Greater Manchester Police and local authorities that, in practice, has been used to target whistleblowers and critics of the grooming gang cover‑ups.
3. Why do critics say whistleblowers were targeted?
Because activists, bloggers and ordinary residents who spoke out were investigated and in some cases prosecuted, while many grooming gang perpetrators and officials who covered for them avoided serious consequences.
4. How does this reflect on the British establishment?
It shows an establishment more interested in protecting institutions, voting blocs and reputations than in protecting vulnerable English girls or supporting those who expose abuse.
5. What can ordinary people do about grooming gang cover‑ups?
Use independent platforms, support whistleblowers, push local representatives for real accountability, and refuse to vote for parties and politicians who ignore or excuse this pattern.