A former MP has claimed that he was told by top Labour Party officials not to raise the issue of “ethnicity or religion” of grooming gang child rapists in his constituency over concerns of losing votes.
Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who represented the grooming hotspot city of Rochdale from 2010 until 2017, told GB News this week that he was “warned off by a couple of significant members of the Labour Party” not to mention the ethnic or religious backgrounds of the mostly Pakistani Muslim child rape gangs which operated in the northern English town after the scandal emerged in 2012.
“The most senior figure at the time was Tony Lloyd, who was chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and I wrote to the National Inquiry in 2017 saying that he’d warned me off it and he was concerned about votes,” Danczuk said.
“They thought it would upset the voting of Pakistani communities and they didn’t want to lose the vote, it was quite clear about that,” he added.
Sir Tony Lloyd was one of the longest serving Parliamentarians, representing three Manchester constituencies including Rochdale, the same seat Danczuk had held. He had also held other positions including being the Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester from 2012 to 2017 and at the time of his death in 2024 was memorialised as “Labour’s Conscience”.
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